It’s been apparent for some time that the spate of touch-screen smartphones now hitting the market will dent profit margins in the hottest part of the mobile business, but Wall Street seems only now to be digesting that fact.

The slumping share prices of Research in Motion and Palm over the past fortnight make this case eloquently. Two weeks ago, not coincidentally, was the weekend that Verizon began its guerrilla marketing campaign for Motorola’s Droid (see Chris Nuttall’s first impressions last week). Since then, Palm’s stock is off 35 per cent and RIM is down 20 per cent, while Motorola is up.

It’s clearly ridiculous to think that one handset can cause this much damage: what is sinking in are the implications of the much bigger wave of competition that is about to hit.

Continue reading "More smartphones, lower margins"

Sometimes it feels like every news story you read is about Apple. If it’s not the iPhone or the phantom tablet, then it’s Steve Jobs’ health.

So to make up for it, today’s headlines are being hogged by Google. There was the first appearance of the much-hyped Android 2.0 on the Droid handset, not to mention what Techcrunch called a “killer app” for the new mobile software platform: a navigation service (see item below).

But that’s not all. In other Google news: the launch of Music Search, and efforts to appease the FCC.

Continue reading "From today’s Daily Google…"

Two years ago, navigation devices of the kind that you find mounted on car dashboards were one of the hot gifts of the holiday season and the stocks of Garmin and TomTom were riding high.

Not any more. Wednesday brought a double-whammy that knocked 21 per cent off shares in TomTom and 16 per cent off Garmin. Of the two pieces of news, it was the second that sounded the more ominous.

First was a warning from TomTom that prices for these devices, which not so long ago commanded a hefty premium, are likely to continue to slide. They dropped 27 per cent in the company’s latest quarter to an average of under 100 euros, and that erosion shows no sign of slowing. Continue reading "Latest victims of Google: Garmin and TomTom?"

Finding that elusive open Wi-Fi connection just got easier this week with the launch of a new application that is building a world Wi-Fi map from its users connections.

Devicescape, a Silicon Valley startup, had previously offered a simple program called Easy Wifi that enabled automatic logons to Wi-Fi networks - walk into a Starbucks and the iPhone app would immediately connect you to the AT&T hotspot there. Continue reading "User-generated Wi-Fi hotspots"

With dozens of smartphones powered by Google’s Android operating system set to hit the market, a different challenger to the Apple iPhone was on display in Tokyo today: the Else, from London-listed Israeli technology company Emblaze, using software made by Access of Japan.

The two companies are making bold claims for the device, long in development under the codename of Monolith. “Imagine a device that is not a phone surrounded by gimmicks you will not use; where the camera literally replaces your digital camera; you get real-time push email wherever you are in the globe; almost every song and film in the the world is one click away; and any one of its multitude of features is reached with no more than one light gesture of your finger and not buried deep inside folders within folders,” said Amir Kupervas, the chief executive of Emblaze Mobile.

The credibility of that statement was impossible to judge while watching Access’s chief technology officer demonstrate the device. Continue reading "The latest iPhone challenger is something Else"

Google is expected to launch its own self-branded smartphone before the year is out, according to Ashok Kumar, Northeast Securities analyst

It will follow up with a series of phones running its Android operating system, as well as launching a branded netbook running its new Chrome operating system early next year, the analyst told me. Continue reading "Google to take on iPhone with own phone - analyst"

The Beatles: Rock Band outsold Guitar Hero 5 in September in the US, while Sony’s PS3 console beat its rivals’ sales figures for the first time, according to the latest figures from the NPD research firm.

The “Battle of the Bands” was a key focus as the two titles were released at the same time, but both were outsold by the latest release in the Halo franchise - Halo 3: ODST - and Madden NFL 10. Continue reading "Beatles beat Guitar Hero, PS3 finally hits No 1"

An ARM race is beginning to take shape in smartphones, as the latest models demand faster processors to deal with an expanding range of computing and multimedia activities on devices.

Marvell announced today it would overtake Qualcomm’s 1GHz  Snapdragon processor with a new family of Armada processors, based on ARM of the UK’s designs, capable of speeds up to 1.2Ghz.

That is twice the clock speed of the 600Mhz iPhone 3GS and the new Motorola Droid, reported to contain a 600Mhz Texas Instruments processor. Continue reading "Smartphones enter the gigahertz age"