Though Verizon’s new Droid ad campaign might seem to preclude one, Apple would be wise to ink an iPhone distribution deal with the carrier–if not to hasten iPhone adoption, then to slow rivals that would supplant it. That’s the argument put forth by Piper Jaffray analyst Chris Larsen in a research note to investors Monday.
Sometimes life’s irony smacks you in the face. Sometimes BoomTown smacks you with it instead.
Customer satisfaction with the iPhone continues to run high–among both casual and business users. Apple’s smart phone scored highest in the both consumer and business categories of JD Power’s Smartphone Satisfaction Study, besting rivals like Research in Motion and LG.
No wonder Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is so dismayed by the company’s Windows Mobile division: Most Windows Mobile users aren’t even aware their phones run it. In fact, according to the CFI Group, WinMo has such poor brand recognition that it was forced to group it in the “Other” category in its Smartphone Satisfaction Survey.
The iPhone is finally coming to the world’s most wired country. South Korean regulators on Wednesday cleared the iPhone for sale. Great news for Apple. The South Korean market is a robust one, and analysts say that with the right carrier partner, Cupertino could be looking at first-year sales ranging from 500,000 to two million.
Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein likes to say smart-phone makers “don’t have to beat each other to prosper,” but it’s beginning to look like they–or, rather, Palm–might have to. Because while the Pre may have put Palm back in the game, it’s not clear how long it can keep it there.
A quick update on the Samsung/SanDisk story I posted earlier this morning. Now that Samsung has officially called off its bid for Sandisk, shares of Rambus are trading higher on a rumor that it might soon be the target of Samsung’s attentions.
It was fun while it lasted, but Samsung has abandoned its bid to buy SanDisk. In a regulatory filing made nearly a year after its $5.85 billion offer for SanDisk was rejected as too low, Samsung officially called off the effort, which, had it been successful, would have combined two of the largest flash memory producers into a single NAND monstrosity.
With lousy financials, a weak platform strategy and just 4.7 percent of the global handset market, Sony Ericsson is on a long, slow march into irrelevance. Unless Bert Nordberg can turn it around. This morning the struggling handset maker tapped Nordberg, executive vice president of Ericsson, as its new president and CEO.
More bad news from Sony. This morning the electronics giant posted its second straight quarterly loss and reiterated its forecast for another year of red ink. Clearly, Sony must do more than just slash jobs and suppliers if it ever hopes to regain its position in the market.
“I don’t think that’s likely. We’re looking and talking to a lot of laboratories and big companies around the world, like Sony and Samsung. We’re all working on wireless readers for books or newspapers or for magazines. I think they’re a year or two away being marketed in a mass way, high quality ones, and we’ll be absolutely neutral. We’re happy to have our products distributed over any device provided it’s only going to subscribers paying for it.”
— Rupert Murdoch says News Corp. isn’t working on a Kindle of its own
About the best thing to be said for Sony’s grotesque financial results is that they came in smaller than expected. The company’s 98.9 billion yen ($1 billion) loss for the fiscal year ended March–its first net loss in 14 years–wasn’t nearly as bad as the 150.0 billion yen ($1.57 billion) figure it had predicted in January or even close to the 173.8 billion yen ($1.8 billion) analysts polled by Thomson Reuters had been forecasting.
2009 is going to be a banner year for Google’s Android mobile operating system. Strategy Analytics estimates shipments of handsets running the OS will grow 900 percent this year as more vendors adopt it. At that rate, it will far outpace the growth of Apple’s iPhone, whose shipments the company expects to increase 79 percent in 2009.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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