Motorola Droid X ads make quiet digs at iPhone 4
Motorola’s phones may not draw overnight campers and lines outside stores that Apple still inspires four years after its first iPhone launch. However Motorola is getting to have a different kind of fun.
Taking advantage of widespread complaints about the iPhone 4 around antenna related reception problems, Motorola has been making some thinly veiled digs at Apple in its advertising for the new Droid X, which launches July 15.
While Apple has suggested that users avoid holding their phone in a certain way to help improve their phone reception, Motorola happily offered an alternative with Droid X. After listing the Droid X features Motorola had this to say in a full page ad in New York Times on June 30:
“And most importantly, it comes with a double antenna design. The kind that allows you to hold the phone any way you like and use it just about anywhere to make crystal clear calls.”
(Photo: Reuters from Droid X launch event)
The end of the story…
……is the cash cow for Chinese company Shanda Literature Ltd, a subsidiary of Shanda Interactive Entertainment.
The company’s business model is simple: read the first half of a book online for free, and if you want to know the rest (which usually is the case if you have read that far) you need to pay for it. Revenues are split with the stories’ authors.
In China, this proves to be successful. According to Shanda Literature CEO Hou Xiaoqing, the company now has cash reserves of $1.8 billion, with 800,000 authors creating up to 80,000 new pages of content per day, he said at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
On web portals such as www.qidian.com and www.hongxiu.com, customers can chose from a huge variety of stories, and the best even make it into print.
Xiaoqing said the company has also teamed up with China Mobile to distribute literature via mobile phones, a business model that he said was “very promising”.
He added it was now for Shanda to explore whether those business ideas also work in other parts of the world, including Europe.
Could this be a business model for other publishing companies as well?
Updated-Apple boasts 1.5 billion App downloads
(Updated to reflect that Apple was referring to application downloads, not application sales. Many iPhone apps are free.) Apple Inc impressed the tech world with the rapid take off of its applications store, announcing on April 24th that it had sold 1 billion apps downloads in just 9 months to users of its iPhone and its iPod Touch.
That was just for starters. Now it says it has sold seen another half a billion apps downloaded in around a third of that time, showing that its growth is speeding up despite the fact that its rivals have all opened their own apps stores.
App developers appear to be taking notice too as Apple says it now has 65,000 apps available in its store ready for download to the 40 million iPod Touch and iPhone devices it has sold.
How will its rivals — Android from Google, BlackBerry from Rim, Windows Marketplace from Microsoft and Ovi from Nokia – ever get a break with that kind of competition?
But could it really be just a coincidence that Apple revealed its numbers on the same day that Techcruch notes Microsoft is expected to kick off its Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans with an announcement of the opening of its mobile app developmer program?
Keep an eye on:
- NY Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman describes an analyst’s prediction — that Rupert Murdoch could buy the paper instead of New York Times — as “total fiction” (DailyFinance)
- FT Tweets that it has an iPhone App (Techcruch)
- Michael Jackson family says concert plans were too much for him (Reuters)
- Netbook shipments to double this year (PCWorld)
Whether or not the downloaded apps were purchased or not, it still represents a significant phenomenon. Mike’s comment that 99% are free is far from the truth. Only about 25% are free. It could still be, of course, that the 25% represents 90-odd percent of the downloads.
Also, while a lot of apps get downloaded and tossed, I now have a core set of apps that I use pretty regularly. If you just use the phone to call and text, you shouldn’t be wasting cash on an iPhone. For me, it replaces a laptop for a lot of purposes.
Google exec says Chrome isn’t the end of Android
Google’s vice president of engineering has dismissed the idea that plans to bring out a new computer operating system, Chrome OS, will mean the end of Google’s existing operating system for mobile phones, Android.
As soon as Chrome was announced earlier this week “all the press and speculation started, ‘Oh, the Android is doomed,’” said Andy Rubin at an event with T-Mobile in San Francisco to show off the latest Android iteration, the myTouch 3G phone, manufactured by Taiwan’s HTC.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in Sun Valley yesterday that Chrome OS is a separate product from Android, but the two products are closely related and could eventually “merge even closer.”
Earlier this week, Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at market research firm Interpret, said the introduction of a second operating system to work on netbooks could hurt Google winning hardware partners. “If you’re a vendor you don’t know what to do,” he said.
Rubin argues that there is room for both Chrome and Android, and it doesn’t mean that “one wins and one doesn’t.” Android is specialized and does things that you would not expect from an ordinary operating system, he said.
“In the cellphone space, operating systems may … manage battery life very carefully, they handshake with cell sites as you are in your car or traveling traveling at high speeds. So there’s different problems that you solve in different categories of consumer products,” he said.
Chrome will have its place outside of the phone. “I really look forward to seeing (Chrome) run on a lot of consumer products,” Rubin said.
Android or oblivion for Motorola
For the last two years, investors have been calling for Motorola to bring out some decent new phones. The calls turned to pleas on Tuesday after its bleak results and a weak outlook.
Analysts are calling Motorola’s promise to introduce advanced devices in time for the holiday season, based on Google’s Android operating system, as the company’s last chance. In a research report entitled “Last Hurrah” Nomura analyst Richard Windsor put it bluntly:
I think if Android fails to deliver the needed revenue and profit recovery, then the focus will be oriented on managing the business for oblivion.
Motorola Co-CEO Sanjay Jha said the company will make fewer devices this year and instead put efforts into getting multiple Android products to market by the end of the third quarter and the start of the fourth quarter.
In the meantime the company is planning for a toned-down display at Mobile World Congress, the annual wireless trade show held in Barcelona later this month. All units – mobile devices, home and networks and enterprise mobility – will have a presence. Spokeswoman Jennifer Erickson said “We do have a Motorola booth there. It may be a little different and more focussed on customer meetings.”
The company is also narrowing its focus to the Americas and China, and zoning in on mid-tier ($50 to $200) data-centric devices with an emphasis on data services and social networking as well as higher-end devices. This means that devices cheaper than $50, a big chunk of the market, will take a back seat. Jha’s rationale is that carriers, looking for a shot in the arm of their own, would be more ready to subsidize fancier cellphones that they see helping to boost data revenue.
Motorola’s market share has fallen to 6.4 percent in the fourth quarter from 18.4 percent in Q1 of 2007 and more than 20 percent at its peak when demand for Razr was strong. Goldman analyst Simona Jankowski said it makes sense to refocus even though it makes it very difficult for Motorola “to go back to where they were” in terms of market share. “They have to be good at something even though it’s small as opposed to being mediocre at a lot of things,” she said.
Matryona = the female name origin of Russian ‘nesting dolls’
Cell phones still No. 1 movie irritant for Regal CEO
People who talk and text on cell phones are still the number one source of movie theater complaints tracked by Regal Entertainment Group, Chairman and Chief Executive Mike Campbell told the Reuters Media Summit on Wednesday.
Campbell made news at a the 2006 Reuters summit by disclosing that Regal, the largest U.S. theater chain, had armed patrons in a few test theaters with gizmos that summon ushers to deal with problems ranging from rowdy audiences to a freezing auditoriums. Back then, Campbell reported that some patrons were “getting into physical battles in the theaters” over cell phones and that the chain had “had people assaulted with bats, knives and guns” over their electronic umbilical cords.
The program worked so well that Regal has now expanded it to 100 of its highest volume locations, and cell phone talkers and texters seem to be getting the message, Campbell said.
“We have noticed — at least our perception over the last couple of years is — we don’t seem to be having quite as many issues there,” Campbell said. “I think the message that we are trying to get out to customers, both subtle and not so subtle, is beginning to have some impact.”
Regal has used data from the expanded program to track whether a particular disturbance “is mostly a… one-off situation or is there a pattern across the country,” Campbell said.
Still, the most common problems are “cell phone related – texting…and cell phone usage,” Campbell said. “In general, the number one complaint… continues to be some kind of customer disruption.”
(Photo: Director/actor Woody Allen uses his phone, but not in the movie theater. Reuters)
I am happy that our local theater chain has banned infants in the theater after 6:00 pm. I have been shocked at how people bring very young children (2 to 3 yrs old) to “R” rated movies, even in the evening. While sitting behind us, a man’s young daughter began to cry while watching ‘The Others’ saying ‘Daddy, Im scared’. My husband and I stood up and asked him to please take her out. He tried to ignore us, but, people on our row stood up and joined in.
