Summit Notebook
Exclusive outtakes from industry leaders
from MediaFile:
SanDisk on bullets and phone wars
Watch out for that smartphone! The iPhone, Android phones and the like are the weapons of the latest technology war, in the view of flash memory maker SanDisk, which supplies the memory chips that hold pictures, video and apps to the phone makers.
"We sell them ammunition. There is a war going on and we sell the bullets," Eli Harari told the Reuters Global Technology Summit.
And bullets are selling briskly, even in the developing world, where people without computers are buying $20 phones and then adding a gigabyte or two of memory to hold all their pictures, the CEO said.
Apple's iPhone is coming under more fire from Google's Android platform and world handset leader Nokia. "Android phones are exploding," he said.
"The Android operating system on various platforms is going to give the industry a fighting chance against Apple. It remains to be seen what Nokia is going to do. I would definitely not write them off, although they clearly have fallen behind," Harari said. (Picture by Reuters/Bob Galbraith)
Say what? I could have had me a download on my old Nokia?
Williams did credit Apple with one thing — a knack for design: ”They pioneered new ground by taking this beautiful display size and doing a display-only product. That was pioneering”. Symbian software is used in about two-thirds of all smartphones but of course not in the hugely popular Apple iPhone.
Apple introduces iPhone
3.0 OS software
development kit in
March 2009
The problem for Nokia has been the network operators. Nokia and the Operators fight to own consumer loyalty. Operators don’t typically want to allow phones on their networks to download apps from Nokia or other developers. Apple’s success has been in their ability to strike up agreements with the operators, but then again, it has limited them to only offering service through typically one operator.
Nokia: Messy geeks (like me) kill the environment!
Going green, in the literal sense, starts at home, Nokia CFO Rick Simonson tells us.
Asked during the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecom Summit what he’s doing at home about the environment, Simonson joked, “One of my daughters has just gone vegan. I haven’t figured out what’s the carbon footprint of that.”
As it turns out, three out of his five kids are vegetarians. His son, however, jokingly calls himself a “Meatatarian,” said Simonson. “Maybe it’s just to get out of eating vegetables he doesn’t like.”
On a more serious note, Simonson told Reuters that one of the biggest enemies to the environment is actually those who are also most likely to boost sales — consumers who have a hard time letting go of old devices. (I think he’s talking about me. I have separation issues when it comes to old tech.)
We’re a little bit frustrated … People tend to have their old devices sitting in the drawer, sitting in the closet, sitting on their desk, rather than recycling them. They’re not even throwing most of it away, which is the worse possibility. They’re just sitting there, building up on their desks, in the closet. And if you can get those back and get them recycled, then you can do a lot, both for sustainability and for the environment.
There you have it. Lazy geeks need to send their devices back or raid eBay to save our planet.
