Yeah Nah

It's here but do I care?

Windows Phone is readily available to anyone who wants one.  Nokia, former darling of the phone market but now struggling to keep up the pace, is staking much of its future on the Windows platform.

Windows Phone has certainly grabbed some market share in sales volumes.  It's overtaken Blackberry - another blast from the recent past.

Yes, it's sold some units, but when a whopping 92% of all smartphones sold are Android or iOS, are we really going to notice the Microsoft offering?

Nobody has yet tried to sell me a Windows phone but plenty of times I'm encouraged to buy a Droid.  No doubt if I stopped by the Apple counter, they would be keen to see me, too.

An also ran - IBM's doomed OS

With Windows Phone I feel like I'm watching IBM's OS/2 Warp all over again.  IBM tried hard to convince the market to give them a go, try something new - they virtually gave OS/2 away for a while but it was really a foregone conclusion.  It could never gain traction and sadly disappeared without a trace and everyone went back to what they knew best.

It's not that OS/2 wasn't a competent OS.  It was just that it was chasing a giant that was just too strong.   I don't know enough about the Windows Phone offering to even know if it's any good.  Sure, it has the might of Microsoft behind it but it's going up against Google and Apple at a time when they have already grabbed the lion's share of this market.

With Windows I think it may be the horse that was laid up for most of these season and missed the race of its life.  The smartphone race is now at full gallop and only the strongest will survive.  People may already have placed their bets and not be keen on a rank outsider.

You may be an Apple fan - no doubt then you'll go with that.  Or else you may be an Android adopter - so much to choose from, it's bewildering.  Who couldn't find a suitable option in this huge stable?

You could instead plump for the new kid on the block and take a chance on a Windows Phone.  It may be great.  Maybe you don't need the zillion apps that are available from the other platforms.  Maybe you are happy to buy effectively the first generation of a new Windows machine.   Are you game?

Yeah Nah.

Putting the pedal down on Windows Phone (Mashable)

Some Windows Phone offerings

Smartphone pricing

Cheaper topflight smartphones

HTC versus Samsung: what would you choose?

There are some wonderful smartphones on the market for people with deep pockets.  Samsung's Galaxy S4 has been launched this week for the bargain price of $NZ1,149 (Hmmm).  Samsung also has the Galaxy Note and the upcoming behemoth, Galaxy Mega is really a phablet (tablet-phone) rather than a pocket phone.

All very nice but a bit steep for my tastes.  As the IDC 2013 survey of the phone market demonstrated Samsung is far and away the world's biggest manufacturer of smartphones at 32.7%.  Apple clearly controls its own iOS market but no other Android manufacturer can manage even a 5% share, so crowded is the market.  So what do you do to persuade consumers to come over to you rather than opt for a Samsung?  It's unlikely that you are going to out-specify an equivalent Samsung model so probably the best advantage can be gained from offering a better bang for your buck.  Huawei does this very well with well specified but cheap as chips models.  If you don't buy into the consipiracy theories around chinese manufacturers they represent a sound budget option.

Originally a darling of the market but falling back in sales figures is HTC.  Their flagship HTC One  is well respected and a top choice but still lags well behind equivalent Samsung models in sales.  So what are they going to do about it?  Well, there are strong rumours that HTC are looking to introduce a new model with similar specs to the One but much cheaper.

Got to be good for the consumer as the price of these pocket wonders just keeps coming down.

HTC One review (TechRadar)

Is HTC releasing a cheaper high spec model?

Cheaper smaller variant ruomoured for HTC (IGN)

HTC still a favourite with the reviewers (TechRadar)

Unstoppable

Smartphone onslaught

It's official - smartphones are now selling in greater numbers than traditional mobiles.  The first 3 months of
2013 show worldwide sales of smartphones captured 51.6% of the marketplace - the first time that smartphones have outsold their more basic cousins.

In some countries the figures are more skewed.  In the US market it's around 2 smartphones for every standard phone.

The volumes are huge - 418.6 million phones (smart and otherwise) were sold in just the first three months of this year.

Smartphones have captured more than a 50% market share

Not all manufacturers faired equally.  Samsung is far and away the biggest manufacturer of smartphones with 70.7 million (or 32.7%) of the world smartphone Q1 2013 sales of 216 million.  Apple came second with 37.4 million units of their iPhone (17.3%).

No other single manufacturer managed to capture even 5% of the smartphone market.  Clearly there are a lot of players out there but they are trailing way behind the market leaders.

Smartphone sales outstrip mobiles for the first time (NBC)

Share of the mobile phone market in 2013 (BGR)

IDC 2013 survey of phone market

Smartphone convergence and diffusion

Smartphone ensemble

The smartphone. The moniker doesn't cover the half of it. Sure, it's a phone and it's very smart but what about all the many other things it can do?

The smartphone is a record breaker in many ways.  It's a shining example of rapid technology diffusion. The smartphone has gained widespread acceptance at a phenomenal rate, far outstripping that of original telephone or the television.

It's arguably the leader in the area of technology convergence.  My list is by no means exhaustive but I got to thinking about what my smartphone actually does.

Nokia 1280 cell phone

At the most basic level it's a mobile phone, usually capable of connecting to at least one mobile network in the local territory and via roaming agreements overseas.  But that's just a cellphone, not a smartphone.

Your modern smartphone runs Android, iOS, Windows Phone, or several other less well known operating systems (O/S).  The O/S gives the phone the opportunity to become a full blown computer and more besides.

Typically even a low end model gives you all this:

• It's able to make audio (voice) calls, send SMS (text and multimedia) messages
• It's GPS enabled, allowing it to replace a dedicated GPS navigation device.  GPS also provides smart capability for many phone apps, allowing the output to be best targeted for the user's current location.
• It sends and receives emails from multiple accounts
• It's an electronic calendar, appointment planner and diary
• It's a multi time-zone clock, alarm clock, countdown timer, alarm
• It can transmit and receive data via Bluetooth
• It connects to home, public and office wi-fi networks
• It's a fully functional web browser
• Through myriad custom applications your smartphone can access virtually any web resource using an interface tailored for a small display and touch screen input
• It's a digital still and video camera.
• It's an audio player
• It's a video player, capable of playing the shortest clips to full length movies, sometimes in high definition
• It's a games console.
• It's probably the only device you own that can provide all this functionality in one tidy package.

These modern wonders are now so ubiquitous that the novelty is gone and we simply accept that this stunning array of technology will happily fit in our pockets.  People aren't generally taught how to operate this device - the intuitive nature of (most) functions means that a savvy user soon works it out.

The speed of global acceptance (diffusion) is unprecedented, as is the short time that so many technologies have come together to create a new multi-function device (convergence).

Try to avoid blind acceptance and express a bit of wonder at this pint-sized workhorse of the modern age.  

Droid woes

Huawei G300

I love my smartphone.  I resisted buying one for a long time but last year I treated myself to a well specified but cheap chinese Android - the Huawei Ascend G300.

Huawei Ascend G300 (review)

Like many phones it doesn't have much on board memory but this one does have a MicroSD slot that allows you add up to 32GB.  This is great for storing music, photos plus I've moved all the applications that I can to run from the card, to free up the internal memory.  Recently I started getting an annoying 'Insufficient storage available' error whenever I tried to install a new app or when Google Play tried to automatically update an existing one.  First it was intermittent, now it happens all the time.

Aaaaaa-rrrrrr-gfffffg-hhffffhh

It turns out that this is an extremely common error, particularly with cheaper phones but by no means restricted to the cheap models (Galaxy S2 and S3 users were also reporting problems).

So what does the message mean?  Well it's a memory availability issue but it's really not very clear what part of the memory in the phone is 'insufficient'.  Certainly it's not my 32GB card, which is more or less empty - it's either the 'internal SD' or the 'internal memory'.

Considering how common the problem is and the number of impacted Android users out there the suggested resolutions are quite 'insufficient'.  The average Android phone owner is not a computer geek who wants to spend hours trawling through technical forums and tweaking settings just to keep the phone functioning.

This is a good example of mainstream technology letting down the mainstream user.  Most of us just want a phone, a laptop, a tablet to work.  Turn it on and away you go.

IMHO the manufacturers need to stop selling us short on phone memory and make sure that their phones will run the OS smoothly without user intervention.  Failing that, one of the top downloads on Google Play should be a free app that takes the guesswork out of memory management and automatically makes the best use of the phone's resources.  There are such things for rooted phones but again, this is not something your average Jo wants to do.