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Superphones turning point: segment satured with Tier 1 globals while the Chinese locals are at less than 40% of the Samsung price
OR Samsung is leapfrogging Apple while the Chinese local brands are coming close to Samsung but at less than 40% price. Meanwhile the superphone segment of the market becomes saturated.
This is even more important as coinciding with:
– Eight-core MT6592 for superphones and big.LITTLE MT8135 for tablets implemented in 28nm HKMG are coming from MediaTek to further disrupt the operations of Qualcomm and Samsung [‘Experiencing the cloud’, July 20-29, 2013]
– GiONEE (金立), the emerging global competitor on the smartphone market [‘Experiencing the cloud’, July 22, 2013]
– Xiaomi, OPPO and Meizu–top Chinese brands of smartphone innovation [‘Experiencing the cloud’, Aug 1, 2013]
– UPDATE Aug’13: Xiaomi $130 Hongmi superphone END MediaTek MT6589 quad-core Cortex-A7 SoC with HSPA+ and TD-SCDMA is available for Android smartphones and tablets of Q1 delivery [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Dec 12, 2012; Aug 1, 2013]
Now the following things are coming in addition to that:
- [Samsung is] Leapfrogging Apple while regaining only some high-end SoC supply to it
- Chinese local brands are coming close to Samsung but at less than 40% price
- The superphone segment of the market becomes saturated
- Previous (pre-saturation) milestones according to Samsung
This will be the organization of the ‘DETAILS for the assesment of upcoming changes’ part of this post.
To appreciate the real significance of the sudden change characterized above let’s first get acquainted with the current state of the lead market as described in China Report: Device and App Trends in the #1 Mobile Market [by Mary Ellen Gordon on Flurry Blog, July 23, 2013]
Smartphones and tablets have gone from being the latest gadgets for relatively affluent people in relatively affluent countries to ubiquitous devices in mainstream use in many countries around the world. In fact, as we reported in February of this year China surpassed the US to become the country with the largest installed base of connected devices as measured by Flurry Analytics. As we also reported, a second wave of countries around the world is now experiencing the type of growth mobile pioneer countries experienced previously. For example, the mobile markets in the BRIC countries are now all growing faster than the mobile markets in the U.S., U.K., and South Korea.
Knowing that the landscape is constantly shifting, we are beginning a series of blog posts reporting on the use of smartphones, tablets, and apps in particular countries and geographic regions around the world. Given China’s world-leading installed base and considering the China Joy conference (China’s largest digital conference) is this week we thought we would begin there.
In June of this year Flurry Analytics measured 261,333,271 active smartphones and tablets in China. That represented a whopping 24% of the entire worldwide connected device installed base measured by Flurry. The chart below documents the growth in the installed base. The left axis and blue line show China’s growth over the years. The right axis and red line show growth in the world as a whole (including China) a basis of comparison. As can be seen from the gap between the two lines growing through 2010 and much of 2011, growth in smartphones and tablets in China lagged the world as a whole through that period. But starting toward the end of 2011, the installed base in China began a period of exponential growth. During this period it surpassed the growth rate for the world as a whole, as shown by the blue line catching the red line in the graph. We expect China to maintain its leadership (in terms of active installed base) for the foreseeable future because device penetration rate is still relatively low and much opportunity remains, as we reported in a previous post.
Xiaomi Is A Local Manufacturer To Watch
Examining a random sample of 18,310 of the devices in our system in China that run iOS or Android apps revealed that Apple and Samsung are the top two device manufacturers, as they are most everywhere. China’s own Xiaomi was a strong third, with a 6% share of the market, ahead of HTC, Lenovo and a multitude of others. As we noted in a previous post, Xiaomi has been successful in accumulating a large number of active users for each device model it releases. Worldwide, only Apple, Amazon, and Samsung have more active users for each device model released.
It will be interesting to see if Xiaomi can continue to gain share in China – possibly by mopping up share from smaller manufacturers of Android devices – and also if they can begin making gains in other markets outside of China to become more of a global player. With rumors of a Xiaomi tablet circulating, we will also be watching to see if their entry into the tablet market will increase the use of Android tablets in China. Currently 21% of the iOS devices in our randomly drawn sample were tablets compared to only 4% of the Android devices.
Chinese Users Over Index in Reading, Utility, Productivity
In looking at how Chinese people use their connected devices we see similarities and differences compared to the rest of the world. As a general rule worldwide, games dominate time spent in apps measured by Flurry Analytics, and China is no exception. On average, Chinese owners of iOS devices spent 47% of their app in games. The percentage of app time devoted to games was even greater for Android at 56%.
Smartphones and tablets are not just about fun and games in China. Compared to iOS device owners elsewhere, the average time Chinese owners spend using Books, Newsstand, Utility, and Productivity apps is greater than the rest of the world (1.8x, 1.7x, 2.3x, and 2.1x respectively). On average Chinese owners of Android devices spend more than seven times as much time in Finance apps (7.4x) than Android owners elsewhere spend in Finance apps, but they also spend more time in Entertainment apps (1.7x).
Will China’s Exponential Growth Change The Device And App Markets?
It will be interesting to see how China now having leadership in terms of its installed base will impact the device and app markets elsewhere. Given Xiaomi’s success at building a large number of users for each model it releases, it might try to add further scale by expanding internationally – particularly to the other rapidly-growing BRIC markets where brand preferences are not already well-entrenched.
Within China itself, Chinese competitors may have an even greater advantage in the app market since cultural influences and differences are likely to be even more important in the app market than in the device market. There are already strong Chinese app companies such as Baidu and Tencent and clusters of app developers emerging in places like Chengdu. At first they are likely to concentrate on apps for the large local market, but that may eventually lead to growing app exports. For example, the fact that Chinese consumers over-index on some more work and educational-oriented apps may encourage Chinese developers to focus on those areas and innovate, and that could lead to creation of apps that end up being adopted elsewhere in the world. We’re looking forward to discovering what app is to China what Angry Birds was to Finland.
And it is also important to understand that as far as the current situation is concerned Samsung’s China magic upstages Apple [Reuters TV, July 25, 2013]
Insight: How Samsung is beating Apple in China [Reuters, July 26, 2013]
Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook believes that “over the arc of time” China is a huge opportunity for his pathbreaking company. But time looks to be on the side of rival Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, which has been around far longer and penetrated much deeper into the world’s most populous country.
Apple Inc this week said its revenue in Greater China, which also includes Hong Kong and Taiwan, slumped 43 percent to $4.65 billion from the previous quarter. That was also 14 percent lower from the year-ago quarter. Sales were weighed down by a sharp drop in revenues from Hong Kong. “It’s not totally clear why that occurred,” Cook said on a conference call with analysts.
Neither is it totally clear what Apple’s strategy is to deal with Samsung – not to mention a host of smaller, nimbler Chinese challengers.
Today, in the war for what both sides acknowledge is the 21st century’s most important market, Samsung is whipping its American rival. The South Korean giant now has a 19 percent share of the $80 billion smartphone market in China, a market expected to surge to $117 billion by 2017, according to International Data Corp (IDC). That’s 10 percentage points ahead of Apple, which has fallen to 5th in terms of China market share.
Cook said Apple planned to double the number of its retail stores over the next two years – it currently has 8 flagship stores in China and 3 in Hong Kong. But, he added, Apple will invest in distribution “very cautiously because we want to do it with great quality.”
Samsung, with a longer history in China, now has three times the number of retail stores as Apple, and has been more aggressive in courting consumers and creating partnerships with phone operators. It also appears to be in better position, over an arc of time, to fend off the growing assault of homegrown competitors such as Lenovo Group Ltd, Huawei Technologies Co Ltd and ZTE Corp, former company executives, analysts and industry sources say.
Apple declined requests for comment for this article.
VARIED MODELS
Samsung’s history and corporate culture could hardly be more different than Apple’s, the iconic Silicon Valley start-up founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976. Lee Byung-Chull started Samsung in 1938 as a noodle and sugar maker. It grew over the decades into an industrial powerhouse, or chaebol as Koreans call the family owned conglomerates that dominate the nation’s economy and are run with military-like discipline.
Apple, by contrast, became the epitome of Californian cool, an image the company revels in. That hip image translates in China – its stores are routinely packed – but hasn’t been enough to overcome the more entrenched Samsung.
A stuffy electronics bazaar in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen illustrates part of the reason why.
Samsung Galaxys and Apple iPhones of different generations sit side by side, glinting under bright display lights as vendors call out to get customers’ attention. With its varied models, Samsung smartphones outnumber iPhones at least four to one.
While Apple releases only one smartphone a year, priced at the premium end of the market, Samsung brings out multiple models annually with different specifications and at different price points in China.
And those models, analysts say, are loaded with features tailored specifically for the local market: apps such POCO.cn, the most popular photo sharing site in China, or the two slots for SIM cards (Apple offers one), which allows service from multiple cell carriers, either at home or abroad.
“The Chinese just love features. They want their phone to have 50 different things that they’re never going to use,” said Michael Clendenin, managing director of technology consultancy RedTech Advisors. “Apple just doesn’t play that game. Unfortunately, if you want to hit the mainstream market in China, and you want a lot of market share percentage points, you have to offer the Swiss army knife of cellphones.”
“SETTING THE PACE”
Analysts believe Samsung’s increasing strength in China is a critical reason behind its rival’s possible intention to introduce globally a new and cheaper iPhone model, as well as one with bigger screens – a staple of Samsung’s offerings.
Said a Samsung executive with experience in China: “We definitely think we’re setting the pace there. They are having to respond to us.”
Most audaciously, Samsung has gone after Apple not simply by offering lower priced smartphones, but by attacking its rival directly in the pricier end of the market. “We put a lot of emphasis on the high end market in China,” co-CEO J.K. Shin told Reuters in an interview.
Samsung launched a China-only luxury smartphone together with China Telecom marketed by actor Jackie Chan that retails for about 12,000 yuan ($2,000). The flip phone, named “heart to the world,” is encased in a slim black and rose gold metal body. The sleek look – called “da qi” (elegantly grand) – is coveted by Chinese when they shop for cars, sofas or phones.
“There are a lot of ‘VVIP’s’ in China, and for them we launched luxury phones promoted by Jackie Chan. This helps target niche customers and build brand equity,” said Lee Young-hee, executive vice president of Samsung’s mobile business.
While Samsung won’t sell millions of these smartphones, the creation of the phone in conjunction with a carrier reinforces Samsung’s willingness to go local – and tap into niche markets.
“The key point is that Samsung consistently adapts to the local market,” said TZ Wong, a Singapore-based technology analyst with IDC.
Apple’s latest mobile operating system offers links to popular Chinese applications like Sina’s microblogging platform Weibo, but the application itself must be downloaded onto the phone. On all of Samsung’s entries, it’s already there.
“People know intellectually that Samsung is from Korea, but when it comes to the messaging there is always a local face,” Wong said.
RETAIL PRESENCE
Samsung opened its first office in China in 1985 in Beijing – an era in which it was all but inconceivable that Apple and Samsung would end up in one of the world’s most intense corporate grudge matches. Like other South Korean chaebols, Samsung was a first mover in China, using the market primarily as a base to produce electronics for the world.
In contrast, Apple’s big push in China came only recently, with the advent of the smartphone age roughly five years ago.
The early entry gave Samsung an undeniable edge, and it adapted fast to a rapidly changing environment. By the mid-1990s, with the economy booming, Samsung made the strategic decision to treat the Chinese market not just as a production base, but to start marketing to China higher-priced electronics, said Nomura researcher Choi Chang-hee, who wrote a history of Samsung’s experience in China.
That shift has meant Samsung’s retail presence in China far outstrips Apple’s. Aside from selling via the distribution outlets of the three major telecom carriers, Samsung also has a strong retail presence through its partners Gome Electrical Appliances and Suning Commerce Group, as well as its own “Experience” stores and small retailers all over the country.
Apple works through the same channels, but its relatively late entry means it has a significantly smaller presence. Samsung, for example, has more than 200 official distributors and resellers in Guangzhou province, while Apple lists 95.
Over the last two decades, Samsung has also taken pains to build relationships with Chinese government officials and -perhaps more critically – the three major telecom carriers.
The notion of the importance of connections – or “guanxi” – in China is occasionally overrated in business. Not, according to Samsung’s Shin, in this case. “It’s our core policy to keep friendly relationships with the operators,” he said. In China, each carrier uses a different technology and that requires Samsung “to tweak our smartphones to their request.”
“It’s not easy,” Shin said, “but we do this to be more operator friendly.”
Contrast that with the ongoing negotiations Apple has had with China Mobile, the largest cellphone operator. For years the two sides have been unable to come to an agreement on revenue sharing, effectively precluding Apple from hundreds of millions of potential customers.
SCRUTINY FROM THE TOP
Samsung’s reach extends higher than just the CEOs of the top state-owned telecom companies. Top executives have met each of the last several Chinese leaders, most recently Xi Jinping, who spent time in April with vice chairman Jay Y. Lee, son of K.H. Lee, Samsung Electronics chairman.
“What surprised me most,” said Lee later, “was that they (Chinese leadership) know very well about Samsung. They even have a group studying us.”
The Chinese government has also made clear it’s well aware of Apple – though not always in a good way. In April, state media bashed Apple for its “arrogance,” protesting among other things that its current 1-year service warranty was insufficient. Apple initially dismissed those criticisms, but Cook later apologized to Chinese consumers.
Samsung’s success in China has its roots, one former executive said, in a previous obsession for the company: its desire not to replicate the mistakes made by Japanese rivals.
“Samsung spent a lot of time benchmarking Sony, Toshiba and Panasonic,” said Mark Newman, who spent six years in Samsung’s global strategy group and is now an industry analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein in Hong Kong.
“One of the things that came out of that is the realization that the insular approach has its drawbacks, and so Samsung has made an effort over the last 10 years to be much more global.”
This strategy of decentralization is plainly evident in China, he said, home now to more Samsung employees than any country outside South Korea.
FIGHTING HIGH AND LOW
Samsung now leads in both low-end and high-end segments in China, according to IDC, and its logic of going after both ends of the market is straightforward. In China, where the average wage is roughly $640 per month, many users looking to upgrade from feature phones to smartphones cannot afford Apple.
By bracketing the market with multiple models, Samsung can breed deep relationships with customers, many of whom, market research shows, trade up to more expensive models as they get older. Playing high and low also positions Samsung to fend off the intensifying competition from Chinese firms such as Lenovo and Huawei and literally hundreds of smaller local players.
“That’s where the next battle for Samsung will be fought,” said Newman. “We’ll have to see if Apple does introduce a new, cheaper model for China – and the world.”
DETAILS for the assesment of upcoming changes
1. Leapfrogging Apple while regaining only some high-end SoC supply to it:
Samsung sells 76 mln smartphones in Q2, boosting market share-report [Reuters, July 26, 2013]
Samsung Electronics Co Ltd sold 76 million smartphones in the second quarter, expanding its market share to 33.1 percent, Strategy Analytics said on Friday.
Overall, the global smartphone market grew 47 percent to a record 229.6 million, the research firm said.
Second-ranked Apple Inc saw its market share shrink to 13.6 percent after selling 31.2 million iPhones, as smaller rivals such as LG Electronics Inc, ZTE Corp and Huawei Technologies Co Ltd seized larger slices.
Strategy Analytics: Samsung Becomes World’s Most Profitable Handset Vendor in Q2 2013 [PRNewswire, July 26, 2013]
According to the latest research from Strategy Analytics, Samsung became the world’s most profitable handset vendor in Q2 2013. Apple slipped into second position, as margins have been hit by lackluster iPhone 5 volumes and tougher competition in China.
Neil Shah, Senior Analyst at Strategy Analytics, said, “We estimate Samsung’s operating profit for its handset division stood at US$5.2 billion [61% of the overall, see below] in the second quarter of 2013. Samsung overtook Apple for the first time, which recorded an estimated iPhone operating profit of US$4.6 billion. With strong volumes, high wholesale prices and tight cost controls, Samsung has finally succeeded in becoming the handset industry’s largest and most profitable vendor.”
Neil Mawston, Executive Director at Strategy Analytics, added, “Apple’s reign as the world’s most profitable handset vendor lasted almost four years, from Q3 2009 to Q1 2013. Apple’s profit margin for its handset division has been fading recently due to lackluster iPhone 5 volumes and tougher competition from rivals. Samsung is performing well in the US market, while Huawei, ZTE and other local brands are growing vigorously in China. Apple is now under intense pressure to launch more iPhone models at cheaper price-points or with larger screens to fend off the surging competition and recapture lost profits in the second half of 2013.”
Exhibit 1: Global Handset Operating Profits in Q2 2013 [1]
Global Handset Operating Profits (US$ Billions)
Q2 ’13
Samsung
$5.2
Apple
$4.6
Source: Strategy Analytics
The full report, Samsung Becomes World’s Most Profitable Handset Vendor in Q2 2013, is published by the Strategy Analytics Wireless Device Strategies (WDS) service, details of which can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/cr7fhmb.
But: while handset revenue was up by 9% the operating profit for handsets and network products together were down by 3%. Considering that 97.3% of the IM (IT & Mobile Communications) revenue is for handsets that essentially means a similar operating profit drop of ~3% for handsets alone. Note as well that while the margin was 17.7% a year ago (in 2Q ’12) now (in 2Q ‘13) it was the same 17.7%, so with that 3% drop there was no fundamental problem (yet).
From: Earnings Release Q2 2013, Samsung Electronics, July 2013 presentation [July 26, 2013]
Samsung explains that by “marginal profit decline due to increased costs of new product launches, R&D and retail channels investments, etc.” as you could see below:
Fundamental problem could well be with the market share outlook, as neither for 2Q ‘13, nor for the outlook market share was talked about at all.
Samsung Electronics Announces Earnings for Q2 in 2013 [press release, July 26, 2013]
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. today announced revenues of 57.46 trillion won [$51.6B] on a consolidated basis for the second quarter ended June 30, 2013, a 9-percent increase from the previous quarter. Consolidated operating profit for the quarter reached 9.53 trillion won [$8.53B, ~61% of which is estimated for its handset division, see above], representing a 9-percent increase on quarter, while consolidated net profit for the same quarter was 7.77 trillion won [$6.98B].
In its earnings guidance disclosed on July 5, Samsung estimated second quarter consolidated revenues would reach approximately 57 trillion won [$51.2B] with consolidated operating profit of approximately 9.5 trillion won [$8.53B].
Samsung Regains Its Biggest Client Apple [The Korea Economic Daily, July 15, 2013]
Samsung Electronics will supply mobile application processor (AP) to Apple Inc. from 2015. The mobile AP is a brain of Apple’s iPhone. Samsung Electronics will supply 14 nano A9 chips that will be used for Apple’s iPhone 7.
Samsung Electronics had supplied the AP to Apple since 2007 but lost the contract to supply 20 nano AP A8 chips [for iPhone6] to Apple to Taiwan’s TSMC last year when it was engaged in patent disputes with Apple. Samsung Electronics developed state-of-the-art 14 nano models ahead of its rival TSMC, regaining the order from Apple.
According to industry sources on July 14, Samsung Electronics signed an agreement with Apple to supply the next-generation AP that it will produce in 2015. The AP that will be produced using 14 nano FinFET technology is mounted on Apple’s iPhone 7 to be released in the second half of 2015.
Since its relations with Samsung Electronics worsened due to patent disputes, Apple has refrained from using Samsung parts since the second half of last year. Apple excluded Samsung memory chips, including mobile DRAMs, from iPhone 5 that it released in September 2012. Apple also decided to procure iPhone 6 APs from TSMC, the world’s No. 1 foundry company.
TSMC reaches deal with Apple to supply 20nm, 16nm and 10nm chips, sources claim [DIGITIMES, June 24, 2013]
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and its IC design service partner Global UniChip have secured a three-year agreement with Apple to supply foundry services for the next A-series chips built using 20nm, 16nm and 10nm process nodes, according to industry sources.
In response, both TSMC and Global Unichip said they do not comment on customer orders and statuses.
TSMC will start to manufacture Apple’s A8 chips in small volume in July 2013, and substantially ramp up its 20nm production capacity after December, the sources revealed. The foundry will complete installing a batch of new 20nm fab equipment, which is capable of processing 50,000 wafers, in the first quarter of 2014, the sources said.
A portion of the upcoming production capacity, estimated at 20,000 wafers, can later be upgraded to process wafers used to build 16nm chips, the sources continued. TSMC is scheduled to volume produce the Apple A9 and A9X processors starting the end of third-quarter 2014, the sources said.
The upcoming Apple A8 processor will be found in a new iPhone [iPhone 6] slated for release in early 2014, and the A9/A9X chips will be used in the newer-generation iPhone and iPad products, the sources claimed.
The sources did not identify whether TSMC will be the sole supplier of these Apple-designed chips.
TSMC’s phase-4, -5 and -6 facilities of Fab 14, its 12-inch fab located in southern Taiwan, will be dedicated to making Apple’s A-series processors, the sources further noted. The foundry will initially allocate a capacity of 6,000-10,000 12-inch wafers for the manufacture of those chips, and output will rise gradually starting 2014, the sources said.
TSMC chairman and CEO Morris Chang remarked previously that the foundry’s 16nm FinFET process would enter mass production in less than one year after ramping up production of 20nm chips. Risk production for its 20nm process kicked off in the first quarter of 2013.
Samsung Electronics is the Biggest Beneficiary of LTE-A [Korea IT News, July 15, 2013]
Samsung Electronics has emerged as the biggest beneficiary of the commercialization of LTE-A services by all of the three South Korean telecom operators. This is because the Samsung Galaxy S4 LTE-A is the only LTE-A smartphone put on the market at the moment. Thus, sales of the Galaxy S4 LTE-A has a good chance of making up for slower than expected domestic sales of the Galaxy S4. LG Electronics and Pantech plan to launch their LTE-A smartphones sometime next month.
150,000 Galaxy S4 LTE-A smartphones were activated in 14 days with SK Telecom alone. In other words, an average of 10,000 Galaxy S4 LTE-A smartphones went into service a day. Sales of the Galaxy S4 LTE-A is much faster than the Galaxy S4, propped up by Samsung-SK Telecom joint marketing campaigns and growing expectations of LTE-A’s twice faster speeds [LTE=75Mbps –> LTE-A=150Mbps] than LTE.
Sales of the Galaxy S4 LTE-A is projected to surge in the weeks to come since LG and Pantech’s LTE-A smartphones are scheduled to come out as early as next month.
The world’s first LTE-A [SK telecom YouTube channel, June 25, 2013]
More information:
– SK Telecom Launches World`s First LTE-Advanced Network [press release, June 26, 2013]
– World’s First Mobile Device with LTE Advanced Carrier Aggregation Powered by the Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 800 Processor [OnQ Blog, June 26, 2013]
– Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 Processors Power World’s First LTE-Advanced Smartphone [press release, June 26, 2013]
– Samsung LTE Leadership and Future-Focused Innovation Produces World’s First LTE-Advanced Smartphone [press release, June 26, 2013]
From: 25 things my new Android phone does that makes my iPhone feel like it comes from the 1990s [ZDNet, July 11, 2013]
A few weeks ago, I told you about my plans to ditch my old iPhone 4S and get a brand-new Samsung S4 Android phone. Well, a few days later, I did just that.
- You can replace the battery
- You can add an memory card to your phone
- You can replace the back cover
- It supports wireless inductive charging without a bulky sled
- Wonder-of-wonders: you can actually plug a USB cable into it and drag and drop files from your computer
- It’s got a full 1080p HD display
- You don’t have to use iTunes
- You can completely replace your launcher
- Your home screen can be alive
- You can replace your unlock screen with a customized version
- It’s a frickin’ tricorder
- It supports near field communications (NFC)
- It has an IR emitter
- You can turn your phone into a stealthy TV-B-Gone
- The thing senses hand gestures above it
- It watches your eyes
- It has a 13 megapixel camera
- Its camera can remove objects that don’t belong in the image
- Its camera can take multiple images and composite them together automatically
- You can install apps from a browser on your PC
- It can show two apps on-screen at once
- You can automate almost everything
- When you buy something on the Google Play store, you get an email receipt within minutes, not weeks
- It integrates (mostly) nicely with Google Voice
- You can have a new hobby (whether you want it or not)
- Samsung Galaxy S4 GT-I9500 [16GB] Factory Unlocked: $618 on Amazon ($700 list)
– Exynos 5 Octa 5410 SoC with 2GB RAM
– Quad-core 1.6 GHz Cortex-A15 & quad-core 1.2 GHz Cortex-A7 CPU with tri-core 533MHz PowerVR SGX544 GPU - Samsung Galaxy S4 GT-I9505 16GB 4G/LTE Factory Unlocked: $611 on Amazon($999 list)
– Snapdragon 600 SoC with 2GB RAM
– Quad-core 1.9GHz Krait 300 CPU with 450MHz Adreno 320 GPU
2. Chinese local brands are coming close to Samsung but at less than 40% price
Let’s take Jiayu* quad-core smartphone offerings as of July 15, 2013 in China (as they are the price leaders among the MT6589/MT6589T-based devices in China):
– Jiayu G3 Quad Edition (G3s) is from $110 in retail shops throughout the country
(Note that this price is even lower than the spec-wise similar Xiaomi $130 Hongmi superphone.)
– Jiayu G4 Standard (on sale for $155 (thin) and $163 (thick) list price since April 10) now with summer offer is from $130 in retail shops throughout the country
– 1.5GHz Jiayu G4 Advanced (G4s) is $216 since July 6 with 7 working days delivery
– 1.5GHz Jiayu G4 thin version is $160 since July 13 with not later than July 24 delivery
* About Jiayu (佳域)
Baoji Jiayuyutong Electronic Co., Ltd was established in April 2009, is one of the high-tech enterprises, committed to the mobile communication product, research and development, manufacturing, sales and service. The company has more than 800 employees, including more than 30 R & D personnel and 60 engineering and technical people. At present, the company has 10 complete product lines, 2 laboratory rooms, a variety of advanced testing equipment.
Brand interpretation: “good domain”, the Chinese word for pioneering domestic smart phone “Best of the Realm”; “JIAYU” to “good domain” Chinese spelling.
Jiayu G3S quick review [nikchris69 YouTube channel, July 13, 2013]
Jiayu Store links: Jiayu S1, Jiayu G4 and Jiayu G3s (other link: Mobile Dad, July 13)
Update: JiaYu S1 CNC machining process [Gizchina YouTube channel, Aug 6, 2013]
Yiayu S1 (see above) at 1.7GHz is on par with Samsung Galaxy S4 in performance:
according to the Antutu benchmark results at http://www.jiayu-store.com/blog/
Update: JiaYu S1 wireless charging demo Video [Gizchina YouTube channel, Aug 6, 2013]
JiaYu G4 Hands On [Gizchina YouTube channel, May 13, 2013]
3. The superphone segment of the market becomes saturated:
Smartphone slowdown could spell trouble in Taiwan [Reuters TV YouTube channel, July 9, 2013]
Samsung’s smartphone champ braves a tough crowd [Reuters TV YouTube channel, July 4, 2013]
Samsung Confronts Saturated Smartphone Market [Bloomberg YouTube channel, July 5, 2013]
Has Apple lost its cool factor? [CNNInternational YouTube channel, June 10, 2013]
China smartphone aims to rival Apple [Financial Times YouTube channel, Jun 25, 2013]
China’s Huawei launches world’s slimmest smartphone [AFP YouTube channel, June 18, 2013]
Huawei Ascend P6 — 2-Minute Encounter [HuaweiDeviceCo YouTube, June 18, 2013]
The rise of Chinese smartphones [CNN YouTube channel, May 30, 2013]
Google and Motorola’s Moto X (hands-on) [The Verge YouTube channel, Aug 1, 2013]
More information:
– Moto X. All Yours. [The Official Motorola Blog, Aug 1, 2013]
– Motorola Moto X vs. Samsung Galaxy S4 [Gizmag, Aug 2, 2013]
– 16GB Motorola Moto X to cost $575 SIM-free [GSMarena.com, Aug 2, 2013]
Motorola Moto X was unveiled yesterday and the smartphone will soon be available from the top 5 carriers in the USA. The 16 GB variant of the Moto X is priced at $200 and the 32 GB unit costs you $250 with a two-year contract.
At the announcement event Motorola did not announce the pricing details of the SIM-free editions, but they are no longer a mystery as AT&T has confirmed the pricing of the device without a contract. At launch, the 16 GB model of the Moto X will cost you $575, while the 32 GB is priced at $629.
Moto X – Motomaker [motorola YouTube channel, Aug 1, 2013]
BBC News – Can Moto X revive Motorola’s fortunes? [BBCWorldNewsWatch YouTube channel, May 30, 2013]
Moto X Phone release date, news and rumours [TechRadar YouTube channel, July 2, 2013] “could be landing in installs in October”, and “to undercut the big players of the market such as the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the HTC One –meaning we might see some very competitive pricing”
From: Samsung Electronics 2Q13 review: Fading growth momentum vs improving valuations [The Korea Economic Daily, July 8, 2013]
Samsung Electronics (Samsung) announced 2Q13 preliminary sales of W57trn [$51B] and OP of W9.5trn [$8.5B], a record quarterly high. However, OP fell short of the consensus (W10.2trn) by 6.5% and our estimate (W10trn) by 5%. Despite strong memory prices due to supply shortages and higher OLED sales and margins, OP disappointed on lower smartphone ASP and IM margins due to increased marketing costs.
As the growth of the smartphone market slows due to commoditization, concerns are mounting over eroding ASP and margins. In fact, we estimate OP at the IM division eroded from W6.51trn with an OPM of 19.8% in 1Q13 to W6.23trn [$5.6B] with an OPM of 18.4%. Considering Apple lawsuit provisions were booked in 1Q13, the effective decline in OPM is over 3% as sales of the Galaxy S3 and Note 2 deteriorated.
We revise down our earnings forecasts to reflect lower handset OPM. Specifically, we estimate 3Q13 OP at W10.1trn [$9B] (previously W11.0trn) and full-year 2013 OP at W38.1trn [$34.2B] (previously W40.3trn). We cut Galaxy S4 3Q13 sales to 20mn units (previously 23mn) to reflect the poor sales; however, we maintain OP and OPM at 2Q13 levels given the global launch of the Galaxy S4 Mini and Note 3.
*Source: Korea Investment & Securities Co.
From: Galaxy S4, 20 million sales in just two months … 40 days faster than the previous [ChosunBiz, July 3, 2013] as traslated from Korean by Google and Bing with manual edits
Samsung Electronics (005930) launched the Galaxy S4 20 million sales in two months (on the carrier supply basis) of the fastest selling Samsung smartphones ever, according to industry.
The Galaxy S4 was released only two months ago by the end of June, and the carrier supply sales exceeded 20 million.
When this morning president JK Shin of Samsung Mobile met with reporters in Samsung Electronics Seocho building in response to a question whether the amount of Galaxy S4 sales would be 20 million he told “You know, there are”, and this is a 20 million breakthrough.
Since the official launch of the Galaxy S4 on the 26th of April in 60 countries 4 million were sold in just five days, then went on to sell 10 million units in a month.
… On the other hand a Samsung official said, “as regards the Galaxy S4 sales numbers there is no answer”.
From: Analyst: Samsung Galaxy S4 Sales vs. Apple iPhone 5 Sales [Wall St. Cheat Sheet, July 7, 2013]
Although the Galaxy S4 has sold faster than any other Samsung device, it appears that it still couldn’t surpass the sales rate for the iPhone 5. Citing the slowing demand for the Galaxy S4, a mid-June report from J.P. Morgan lowered the 2013 earnings estimate for Samsung by 9 percent. After the report was released, Samsung lost $12.4 billion in market capitalization, falling to $187.8 billion.
Samsung analysts ask hard questions as S4 marketing charm wears off [Reuters, June 16, 2013]
(Reuters) – Analysts fell under Samsung Electronics Co Ltd’s marketing spell when they made what they now admit were hopelessly optimistic forecasts for its smartphone sales.
Samsung’s huge share of the high-end smartphone market also persuaded some analysts to downplay industry data pointing to a fast-saturating segment, a reality that is already eating into sales of Apple Inc’s iPhone 5.
Woori Investment & Securities, one of South Korea’s largest securities firms, cut its outlook for Samsung’s earnings and target share price on June 5. It was the first to adjust its view.
A massive wave of downgrades has since followed, with forecasters including JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs taking a harder look at their assumptions of how well the S4, Samsung’s latest Galaxy smartphone, would actually do.
Sales estimates for the S4 were slashed by as much as 30 percent, stirring investor concerns over Samsung’s mobile devices division – the company’s biggest profit generator.
Investors in the South Korean IT giant have paid dearly. Samsung lost nearly $20 billion in market value in a week as shares plunged following the downgrades.
“I’d say most forecasters including myself had this conviction that they’ll outperform again – because it’s Samsung,” said Byun Hanjoon, an analyst at KB Investment & Securities. “They had beaten expectations before, which led many to believe they are bound to excel again with the S4.”
The S4 sold 10 million sets in just one month of its debut in late April, outperforming its predecessor, the S3.
Yet analysts now say the high-end smartphone segment is slowing, citing lacklustre prospects in Europe and South Korea in particular.
The S4, in reality, also lacks any real wow factor, they say.
“The Street, including Goldman Sachs, admittedly extrapolated the first-quarter earnings momentum through the year,” Goldman Sachs analyst Michael Bang said in a report. “This resulted in very optimistic earnings expectations.”
Most analysts have reduced their estimates for S4 shipments to around 7 million units a month from their previous average expectation of 10 million.
Bank of America Merrill Lynch has lowered its S4 sales estimate for this year by 5 million to 65 million units.
Some analysts say a loss in potential sales of 5 million S4 units would cut around $1 billion of Samsung’s operating profit.
“S4 sales are solid. It’s just that some analysts had higher expectations and then they lowered them,” J.K. Shin, head of Samsung’s mobile devices division, told reporters last week.
Over the past month, 17 out of 43 analysts have downgraded their earnings estimates for Samsung, leading to a 0.6 percent drop in their average forecast for the company’s April-to-June earnings to 10.4 trillion won ($9 billion), according to Thomson Reuters StarMine.
The lowered forecast, however, would still be a quarterly record.
Many analysts say weaker-than-expected S4 sales will not necessarily stop Samsung from posting record quarterly profits. The company has diversified into many segments of the smartphone market, Merrill Lynch says.
MID-TIER PHONES
Still, the scale of the downgrades has cast a shadow on Samsung’s dominance in the $250 billion smartphone market.
Doing it no favour, Chinese rivals are aggressively growing their market share, aided by strong sales of mid-tier models – a segment in which Samsung has relatively weak positioning, according to analysts.
The mid-tier segment accounted for less than 15 percent of Samsung’s total shipments last year.
Analysts say Samsung has to focus on this lower tier in the medium term.
The high-end segment is losing momentum, with manufacturers struggling to differentiate themselves and consumers calling for a leap in innovation, they say.
To be sure, Samsung has not sat idle.
It has gradually expanded its offerings. Among four varieties of the S4 introduced in recent weeks, there was one stripped-down version called the Galaxy Mini.
By comparison, Apple has had no new offerings since the iPhone 5 hit the market in September last year.
Samsung bulls are also pinning their hopes on product launches later this year including the Galaxy Note 3, a phone-tablet hybrid.
Some analysts say conservative forecasts will prevail.
“Expectations for innovation have been lowered, and I don’t think there’ll be as much buzz surrounding new product launches as it used to be,” said Byun at KB.
Samsung’s stock, which slumped to a six-month low on Thursday, inched up 0.9 percent on Friday.
($1 = 1134.4000 Korean won)
(Reporting by Miyoung Kim; Editing by Ryan Woo)
Samsung GALAXY S4 Hits 10 Million Milestone in First Month [Samsung Mobile Press, May 23, 2013]
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. today announced that global channel sales of its GALAXY S4, a life companion for a richer, fuller, simpler life, has surpassed 10 million units sold in less than one month after its commercial debut. Launched globally on April 27, the phone is estimated to be selling at a rate of four units per second.
The GALAXY S4 sets a new record for Samsung, generating sales quicker than any of its predecessors. Sales of the GALAXY S III reached the 10-million mark 50 days after its launch in 2012, while the GALAXY S II took five months and the GALAXY S seven months to reach the same milestone.
“On behalf of Samsung, I would like to thank the millions of customers around the world who have chosen the Samsung GALAXY S4. At Samsung we’ll continue to pursue innovation inspired by and for people,” said JK Shin, CEO and President of the IT & Mobile Communications Division at Samsung Electronics.
The GALAXY S4 was developed to enhance the meaningful moments in our lives through its innovative features and superior hardware. It has the world’s first Full HD Super AMOLED display that showcases images at their very best on a 5-inch screen with 441ppi. Equipped with a powerful rear 13MP camera, the GALAXY S4 also boasts a Dual Camera function that allows simultaneous use of both front and rear cameras. The GALAXY S4’s new and innovative software features include Air View and Air Gesture for effortless tasks, while it also keeps users up-to-date with information about their health and wellbeing using S Health.
Samsung GALAXY S4 is available in more than 110 countries and will gradually be rolled out to a total of 155 countries in cooperation with 327 partners.
Samsung is planning to introduce more color variations to meet various consumer tastes and preferences. In addition to the currently available Black Mist and White Forest, new color iterations will be added this summer, including Blue Arctic and Red Aurora, followed by Purple Mirage and Brown Autumn.
＊ All functionality, features, specifications and other product information provided in this document including, but not limited to, the benefits, design, pricing, components, performance, availability and capabilities of the product are subject to change without notice or obligation.
＊＊ Availability of colors will vary depending on the country and carrier/retailer.
Is Samsung’s Growth at the Expense of Apple? [Bloomberg YouTube channel, April 26, 2013]
4. Previous (pre-saturation) milestones according to
Samsung Mobile Press (with relevant video inserts from other sources):
See: Samsung GALAXY S II reaches 3 Million global sales [July 3, 2011]
From: Samsung GALAXY S II reaches new heights with 5 million global sales [July 28, 2011]
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd, a global leader in digital media and digital convergence technologies, today announced that the Samsung GALAXY S II (Model: GT-I9100) has passed the 5 million global sales milestone.
The GALAXY S II is Samsung’s flagship smartphone device; a beautifully thin, (8.49mm) and lightweight dual-core smartphone that combines an unmatched Super AMOLED Plus viewing experience with incredible performance, all on Android – the world’s fastest-growing mobile operating system. The next generation smartphone also includes exclusive access to Samsung’s four new content and entertainment hubs, seamlessly integrated to provide instant access to music, games, e-reading and social networking services.
The 5 million mark has been reached in just 85 days, a rate which is 40 days faster than the original GALAXY S took to reach the same sales mark. This rate is set to accelerate as Samsung has just launched GALAXY S II in China, the world’s largest market.
…
From: Samsung GALAXY S II continues success reaching 10 Million in global sales [Sept 26, 2011]
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd, a global leader in digital media and digital convergence technologies, today announced that the Samsung GALAXY S II (Model: GT-I9100) has achieved 10 million global channel sales, doubling from five million in just eight weeks.
The GALAXY S II is Samsung’s flagship smartphone device – a beautifully thin (8.49mm) and lightweight dual-core smartphone that combines an unmatched SuperAMOLED Plus viewing experience with powerful performance, all on Android, the world’s fastest-growing mobile operating system. The next generation smartphone also includes Samsung’s four content and entertainment hubs, seamlessly integrated to provide instant access to music, games, e-reading and social networking services.
Samsung celebrates 30 million global sales of GALAXY S and GALAXY S II [Oct 17, 2011]
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd, a leading mobile handset provider, today announced that its Samsung GALAXY S and GALAXY SII smartphones have achieved a combined total of 30 million global sales.
GALAXY SII has set a new record for Samsung, generating more than 10 million sales – quicker than any device in Samsung’s history. The device also recently received five out of the total ten Mobile Choice Consumer Awards 2011 in the UK as well as 2011 Gadget Award for being chosen as the best smartphone of the year by T3, confirming it as a run-away favorite smartphone with consumers this year. It continues to gain traction as Samsung’s flagship smartphone – a stylishly designed, slim and ultra-portable device combining an unrivalled viewing experience with powerful dual-core processor performance.
Launched in 2010, Samsung GALAXY S reached almost 20 million unit sales, making it the highest-selling mobile device in Samsung’s portfolio to date, and another record-breaker for the company and the mobile market.
Since launching to high critical acclaim two years ago, the GALAXY S range has continued to gain popularity among consumers and propelled the GALAXY brand to one of the most recognized mobile brands in the world, with Samsung now the largest Android smartphone vendor and the second largest phone vendor overall worldwide (IDC).
“Since its launch only five months ago, GALAXY SII has seen tremendous sales success and garnered enthusiastic reviews from consumers and mobile industry watchers across the globe. This is in addition to the continued sales momentum behind GALAXY S, which we launched at Mobile World Congress 2010 as continues to be a run-away success with consumers,” said JK Shin, President and Head of Samsung’s Mobile Communications Business.
“The phenomenal success of these smartphones once again demonstrates how the GALAXY S smartphones is setting the standard for smart mobile technology around the world.”
From: Samsung GALAXY S II awarded “Best Smartphone” by GSMA at Mobile World Congress 2012 [Feb 29, 2012]
This honor comes in recognition of the device’s powerful performance and overwhelming response from consumers. GALAXY S II, Samsung’s flagship smartphone, achieved worldwide sales of over 10 million units in only 5 months, quicker than any device in Samsung’s history and surpassed over 20 million sales in 10 months.
With SIII, Samsung makes smartphone duopoly official – Tech Tonic [Reuters TV YouTube channel, June 21, 2012]
From: Samsung GALAXY S III Reaches 20 Million Sales Milestone in Record Time [Sept 6, 2012]
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd, a global leader in digital media and digital convergence technologies, today announced that the GALAXY S III smartphone has achieved 20 million unit sales in just 100 days since its debut in May 2012. As Samsung’s most successful smartphone to date, the GALAXY S III has set a new record, generating sales quicker than any of its predecessors.
From: The Samsung GALAXY S III achieves 30 million sales in five months [Nov 4, 2012]
Putting this number into perspective, during a similar selling period (150 days), the acclaimed GALAXY S II, launched in 2011, globally sold 10 million devices.
Now upgradable to Android™ 4.1 (Jelly Bean)＊, the nature-inspired GALAXY S III is a revolutionary smartphone packed with intelligent features that make everyday life easier. Its expansive 4.8-inch HD Super AMOLED display lets users view multimedia and web content in brilliant color and clarity; and its camera understands human gestures to make using the phone incredibly natural and intuitive. A powerful hardware ensures blazing-fast performance and seamless multi-tasking.
…
＊ Availability and timing of the Jelly Bean upgrade will vary depending on the country and mobile carrier.
Samsung GALAXY S Series Surpasses 100 Million Unit Sales [Jan 14, 2013]
- Samsung has announced that global channel sales of the company’s flagship smartphone, GALAXY S III and its two predecessors GALAXY S and GALAXY S II have surpassed 100 million units sales as of January 13, 2013.
- Samsung GALAXY smartphones are intuitive and easy to use, display photos and videos on dazzling screens, and deliver a premium user experience with a design that is elegant and feels natural.
- The GALAXY S, has reached over 24 million global channel shipments, achieving 10 million of these during the first seven months after its launch in June 2010.
- Building on this success Samsung launched the GALAXY S II in April 2011. This smartphone reached around 40 million shipments, achieving 10 million global channel sales in just five months.
- In May 2012, Samsung unveiled the GALAXY S III – a smartphone designed for humans and inspired by nature. It revolutionized the user experience, and was critically acclaimed, achieving 20 million global channel sales in just 100 days – which made it Samsung’s fastest selling smartphone yet.
- GALAXY S III has now passed the mark of 40 million unit channel sales.
How Did Samsung Come to Rule Smartphones? [Bloomberg YouTube channel, March 14, 2013]
March 14 (Bloomberg) — Bloomberg West Editor-at-Large Cory Johnson examines how Samsung came to build its smartphone business as it takes aim at Apple’s iPhone with today’s launch of the Galaxy S4. He speaks on Bloomberg Television’s “In The Loop.” — Related Story: http://bloom.bg/ZNshKu — For more “In the Loop” videos: http://bloom.bg/LbOTQk
Xiaomi, OPPO and Meizu–top Chinese brands of smartphone innovation
The branded superphone business is skyrocketing in China with news such as:
– GiONEE (金立), the emerging global competitor on the smartphone market [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, July 22, 2013]
– MIUI ROM 3.8.2 Update Highlights [MrMiui YouTube channel, Aug 1, 2013]
– UPDATE Aug’13: Xiaomi $130 Hongmi superphone END MediaTek MT6589 quad-core Cortex-A7 SoC with HSPA+ and TD-SCDMA is available for Android smartphones and tablets of Q1 delivery [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Dec 12, 2012; Aug 1, 2013]
– XiaoMi Mi3 No Longer Feature Tegra 4, Launch Delays To September [GSMinsider, July 28, 2013]: “NVIDIA unable to fulfil the terms from XiaoMi and the Chinese firm had decided to end the discussion. The Chinese source mentioned that XiaoMi turns to Qualcomm after the partnership with NVIDIA failed.”
– New funding round values Xiaomi at $10bn [Shanghaiist, July 28, 2013]
– Tencent Holdings to invest US$2 billion in Xiaomi, says paper [DIGITIMES, July 25, 2013]
China-based Tencent Holdings, which runs one of the largest web portals in China, QQ.com, reportedly plans to commit an investment of US$2 billion into China-based smartphone vendor Xiaomi Technology, according to a Chinese-language Economic Daily News (EDN) report.
Tencent is likely to complete the planned investment in Xiaomi through one of its investment arms in Russia, Digital Sky Technologies, said the paper, quoting media reports in Hong Kong and China.
Neither Tencent nor Xiaomi has confirmed the reports.
Xiaomi shipped 7.03 million smartphones, valued at US$1.32 billion, in the first half of 2013, the paper quoted Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun as saying.
– Xiaomi sells over 7 million smartphones in 1H13 [DIGITIMES, July 16, 2013]
Xiaomi Technology sold 7.03 million own-brand smartphones in the first half of 2013, close to the 7.19 million units sold in 2012, according to the company.
Xiaomi recorded revenues of CNY13.27 billion (US$2.14 billion) for the first half of 2013, more than the CNY12.65 billion posted for 2012, the company indicated.
Xiaomi launched smartphones initially in the China market in August 2011, and in Taiwan and Hong Kong in the first half of 2013. As sales of existing Xiaomi smartphones will continue and new-generation models will be launched in August, Xiaomi said it is confident of reaching its target shipments of 15 million smartphones for 2013.
In addition to smartphones, Xiaomi has launched Xiaomi connected set-top boxes (STBs) and is likely to launch large-size LCD TVs and tablets for own-brand sale in the second half of 2013, the company indicated. Xiaomi smartphones are produced by Taiwan-based ODMs Inventec Appliances and Foxconn International Holdings (FIH), while Inventec Appliances additionally undertakes ODM production of Xiaomi STBs. Xiaomi may have Taiwan-based ODM Wistron produce TVs, and FIH tablets.
Two and a half months ago we had even the news that Meitu Kiss Released. Will It Be Another Xiaomi? (built specifically for ladies) [TechNode blog in China, May 16, 2013] having the following lead:
We once introduced how the photography-focused Meitu Kiss phone came into being and it is backed by Cai Wensheng, a legendary figure in China’s tech industry. Today it is officially released, together with MeituAir, the cross-platform photo management software.
With Android 4.2, quad-core MT6589 processor and 4.5-inch 1280 x 720 display and 8 mega-pixel front & rear camera, it’s priced at 2199 yuan (US$357)
and conclusion:
The strategy sounds the same with Xiaomi’s — to gain users with comparatively good-value-for-money smartphones, build ecosystem with software and make profits from consumer-facing paid services and business-facing offerings. As Xiaomi is backed by Lei Jun, another classic figure in China’ s tech sector, it is speculated the two companies would be direct competitor in near future. Also the same with Lei Jun, Mr. Cai has invested a variety of tech companies, from gaming to Weibo content marketing agencies, that would help provide Meitu Kiss with content and services.
So it is quite actual to have a look at the domestic premium brand situation in China:
The 10 most talked about products in the domestic mobile phone market of China in April 2013 and their main parameters (source: http://www.tqun.com/article-16949-2.html):
For the top 3 most innovative brands I’ve extended the table of main parameters coming next as follows (the source is the same: http://www.tqun.com/article-16949-2.html): 
and prepared a table showing similar parameters about the market leading models:
Then here is and appraisal of the strengths of the most innovative Chinese domestic brands as of May 15, 2013 :
- 小米 Xiaomi
- 魅族 Meizu
- OPPO
- Chinese domestic brand expansion into the global market: the AndroidGuruz initiative from India
1. 小米 Xiaomi
Lei Jun: Xiaomi is Here to Stay [mobiSights, May 7, 2013, image insert from the same day MIUI News]
Lei Jun, founder and CEO of Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi said he is determined to continue creating world-class phones, capable of competing with the global heavyweights at a fraction of the price.
“I admire giant companies like Huawei, Tencent, Sina and Alibaba, but I don’t want to create another Huawei, Tencent, Sina or Alibaba. My dream is to maintain my current company as a small one. (like a) small restaurant that people line up outside of to buy my products, and my friend will call me to reserve seats for them.” Jun said during a keynote address to the 2013 GMIC [Global Mobile Internet Conference] Beijing.
In late April, Xiaomi’s new smartphone, the Mi-2S 32GB sold out (200,000 units) in less than a minute after it went up for sale.
Lei went on to explain he bases Xiaomi’s business strategy on the examples set by two Chinese companies – Tong Ren Tang traditional medicine chain, which has a history of more than 300 years in China, and Hai Di Lao Hot Pot, which is famous for fast and friendly customer service.
Two of Tong Ren Tang’s business principles appeal to Lei Jun – its adherence to strict moral and quality baselines and its fair and reliable treatment of its employees.
Hai Di Lao’s exceptional customer service inspires Lei Jun, who said he wants his staff to communicate with their clients and customers as much as possible so that his company can pinpoint problems and get feedback from the users.
Despite criticism from many outside sources, Lei Jun said he will continue working towards perfecting Xiaomi’s business model and will keep striving towards the “perfect” smartphone.
The 3 years anniversary event:
[HD] 2013 Xiaomi Fans Carnival Full Official Presentation (Chinese & English Subtitles) [Xiaomi China YouTube channel, published April 19, recorded April 9, 2013]
See also: Xiaomi’s Third Founding Anniversary in Numbers [TechNode blog in China, April 9, 2013] from which some worthwhile excerpts are:
Lei Jun, co-founder and CEO, revealed that the company made 12.65 billion yuan [$2B] in pre-tax sales in 2012 with a total of 7.19 million Xiaomi phones sold (1.37 million were sold through China Unicom while the rest sold online). Mr. Lei said earlier that the net profit could be about USD 200 million and their sales goal for 2013 was 15 million Xiaomi phones. ( the presentation in Chinese)
MIUI, a custom Android ROM built in Xiaomi phones and available for download, announced earlier that its users surpassed 15 million. According to today’s release, the app store within MIUI has 20 thousand apps, with daily downloads reaching 3.5 million and the total exceeding 500 million; the game center, launched in last September, has 10 thousand games, with a total of 60 million downloads and one million each day; the MIUI theme designs have been downloaded for a total of 600 times and 3.5 million daily. All the mentioned categories have become MIUI’s revenue sources and we heard that the monthly income had become considerable [¥ 10M = $1.6M] earlier this year.
The cloud storage service, released about half a year ago, now is holding 300 million photos, two billion text messages. 6 million photos and 13 million are uploaded onto it daily. As for the number of users, Mr. Lei said “one to two million”.
…
It’s no secret that Lei Jun and his team want to make an iPhone-style business to have as many users as possible buy Xiaomi phones and accessories, and consume software and digital content there. The difference must be they don’t plan to make high profits from selling hardware — it helps gain users — but count on the MIUI platform as source of long-tail income. As for the future, you can’t see a lack of investments or talent happen to the company. How far can it go? Behold.
Xiaomi Phone 2S and 2A announced with MIUI v5, the former entering Hong Kong and Taiwan [engadget, April 9, 2013]
After selling 7.19 million phones in China last year, Xiaomi is now one step closer to world domination with a new device that’ll take it to new territories: the Xiaomi Phone 2S (or Mi-2S). As the name and look suggest, this is pretty much the same device as the 4.3-inch Xiaomi Phone 2, except it comes with Qualcomm’s newer Snapdragon 600 quad-core chip clocked at 1.7GHz, plus a beefed up camera of 13-megapixel resolution (with F2.2 aperture) on the 32GB model. The 16GB 2S, on the other hand, gets the same old 8-megapixel F2.0 imager. The rest of the hardware is the same old: 2GB RAM, 2,000mAH removable battery, 720p IPS display, dual-mic noise cancellation, 2-megapixel front-facing camera and WCDMA 850/1900/2100MHz radio (there’s also a CDMA version for China Telecom).
Unlike the previous launch, the 16GB flavor of this phone is already in stock on the day of announcement and is ready for purchase in China today for ¥1,999 or about $320 unsubsidized. Actually, strike that — apparently the first lot of 200,000 units promptly sold out (likely thanks to scalpers). Luckily, Xiaomi is finally tapping into the Hong Kong market via its xiaomi.hk website starting April 23rd, so chances are genuine buyers in Hong Kong won’t have to compete against the machines from mainland China; and Taiwan customers will also be able to buy a 2S from either local carrier Far Eastone towards the end of this month, or from xiaomi.tw starting next month. No word on the availability of the 32GB model just yet, but it’s already priced at ¥2,299 or about $370 unsubsidized.
The familiar-looking phone on the right is the Xiaomi Phone 2A. Much like how the original Xiaomi Phone got a “Youth Edition” fork, the 2A serves as a budget variant of the Xiaomi Phone 2, which is why the CPU’s been “downgraded” from the quad-core APQ8064 to the dual-core MSM8260A (with just 1GB RAM). On the other hand, this particular version of MSM8260A does utilize Qualcomm’s newer Krait 300 architecture instead of Krait 200, and it’s clocked at 1.7GHz instead of 1.5GHz. The same old 16GB storage space, 2,000mAh removable battery, 8-megapixel main camera, 2-megapixel front-facing camera and the powerful Adreno 320 graphics chip are here to stay.
That said, the rest of the 2A is rather peculiar considering this model is meant to be a cheaper offering: the 720p IPS screen has been bumped up from 4.3 inches to 4.5 inches, and the phone also comes with NFC, 5GHz WiFi plus a new audio engine co-developed with Sweden-based Dirac (instead of using Dolby’s). It’s no wonder that this phone is a “2A” instead of yet another “Youth Edition,” but it is also baffling that Xiaomi has avoided throwing in NFC for the 2S as well. Anyway, the 2A will be available in China three weeks from now. The price? ¥1,499 or about $240 unsubsidized.
Of course, let’s not forget the software. Both phones are graced with the presence of the new MIUI v5, which benefits from not only a leaner look (with a new system font, general visual tweaks and also less distracting stock wallpapers) but also from live icons. Here are a handful of new software features added to the already rather intuitive Android fork from Xiaomi:
- Pre-identification of unknown incoming caller ID (based on Chinese crowd-sourced phone number database, so China only), so you’d know if it’s a spam call or just the delivery man calling
- Phone book is able to look up the most common service hotline numbers in China, including banking services and restaurants
- Toggle automatic call-recording for specific incoming callers (CEO Lei Jun said this was his idea)
- Voice recorder supports 168 hours of continuous recording, saved on the fly, wouldn’t be interrupted by incoming calls or notifications (which are muted automatically); and the recorded MP3 files won’t show up in the native music player
- System lets you monitor and control data traffic from each app
- Unified background sync of apps for longer standby time — up to twice as long compared to vanilla Android 4.1
- MiChat (which is also available outside MIUI) now supports walkie-talkie-style video messages instead of just audio
Lei also used his stage time at today’s packed “Xiaomi Fans Carnival” to bolster Xiaomi’s position in the mobile content world. According to the CEO, his company’s app store MiStore today offers 20,000 apps and has seen a total of 500 million downloads so far, while its Doukan store now has 3,000 legit e-books, and Xiaomi’s game center comes with 10,000 games — including PopCap’s official China debut of its classic titleBejeweled today — with a total of 60 million downloads. As for video content, the Xiaomi Box has yet to take off properly after its botched launch due to demands from a provincial regulator, but 50,000 of them have already been sold in the three launch cities so far. We’ve been told to expect a full China roll-out in May, so stay tuned.
The question now is whether Xiaomi can extend this aspect of the company to around the world. Sure, Hong Kong and Taiwan make a good first step towards the international market, but it’s also a relatively easy step given the similar cultural backgrounds. Xiaomi’s real success will only be proven when it does eventually enter, say, Europe as we had once heard; and it wouldn’t hurt to see some improved hardware design instead of just software. We shall take another pulse check in about a year’s time.
[Exclusive] Xiaomi Co-founder Hong Feng on MIUI [TechNode blog in China, April 17, 2013]
We heard that the monthly revenue from MIUI reached 10 million yuan. Hong Feng, co-founder and lead of MIUI, confirmed the number in an interview at our ChinaBang 2013. He added that that’s just the beginning of monetization.
Hong Feng used to work at Google China as senior product manager leading local services such as music search and input method. Three years ago he was invited by Lei Jun, CEO of Xiaomi, to become one of the seven founders. The first version of MIUI was launched four months after the inception of Xiaomi company.
MIUI announced 15 million installs and officially release the latest version, MIUI V5, not long ago. Approaching 10 million were in Xiaomi phones shipped and the rest were installed in non-Xiaomi Android phones. Xiaomi claims MIUI is the best customized Android ROM on the market.
Hong Feng is proud that MIUI has a group of core, loyal users who are active on its platform. MIUI is well-known for its online forum that engineers would answer questions from users and collect user needs there. His team also visit users in different cities regularly. He’s also proud that fans around the world did 22 language versions, apart from three official language versions, for MIUI.
Apart from gaming, other revenues generated from MIUI are mainly derived from the built-in browser with paid placements on the start-page, paid search, and the app center, according to Mr. Hong. Also, the company has been selling paid theme designs that the sales must be minor compared with gaming.
ARPU of gaming, in general, is relatively high. It’s no wonder more and more Chinese mobile service providers, such as UCWeb and 91, set up gaming platforms to monetize their big user pools. The users, 3-4 mn, of the games center within MIUI are very active, Hong said. Xiaomi also partners with game companies to custom editions of popular games tailored to MIUI users.
Duokan, the mobile reading platform acquired by Xiaomi last year, is exclusive of the sources that make up the 10 million monthly revenue. Duokan has been selling digital books and now has 30 thousand paying users. It hopes to make profits in 2014 that needs one million paying users, according to Hu Xiaodong, VP at Duokan.
When asked about the monetization plans in the near future, Hong said that they’d just try to produce the best possible products at the lowest possible prices — which means they’d try to gain as many users as possible and profit from them later and gradually.
It’s no secret that companies with considerable user bases, Qihoo, Sogou, UCWeb, 91 and the like, are trying to profit from every possible source, gaming, CPM/CPC-based advertising, CPC/CPS-based e-commerce transactions, paid digital content, etc. When it comes to a customized Android ROM? It works the same.
Xiaomi Mi2S vs HTC One / Samsung Galaxy S4 / LG Nexus 4 [News – MIUI Official English Site, April 26, 2013], note that the first bechmark is Antutu
Xiaomi Mi2S vs [new] HTC One [having also Snapdragon 600 SoC]
Xiaomi Mi2S vs Samsung Galaxy S4
Xiaomi Mi2S vs LG Nexus 4
[3.5.10][ROM Download] Unofficial MIUI V5 for 41 devices released for public! [Beta Team – MIUI Official English Site, May 10, 2013]
New devices this week (10, May, 2013):
OPPO Finder
Samsung E120L (Galaxy S II HD LTE)Hey MIUIers,
After a week’s testing by MIUI Beta Team, MIUI V5 for the following devices developed by MIUI unofficial devs are released for public today!Guys please report bugs in respecting bugs sections to keep developers posted about bugs and to avoid unnecessary confusion.
Note:
1. OTA update of unofficial MIUI V5 released once a week.
2. Download links of full rom updated every Monday.
– Google Nexus S
– Google Galaxy Nexus
– Samsung Galaxy S II I9100g
– Samsung Galaxy S II I9100
– Samsung Galaxy Note I9220
– Samsung Galaxy S I9000
– Samsung E120L (Galaxy S II HD LTE)
– ZTE U970
– ZTE U930
– ZTE N880E
– ZTE N909
– Sony Ericsson Lt18i– MOTO Defy
– MOTO Defy+
– MOTO Atrix 4G Me860
– Lenovo K860i
– Lenovo K860
– Huawei C8812
– Huawei C8812E
– Huawei Honor U8860
– Huawei U8818
– Huawei Honor2 U9508
– Huawei Ascend D1 XL U9510E
– Huawei C8860E
– OPPO Finder– LG LU6200
– LG SU640
– LG P990
– LG P970
– SKY A820
– HTC Desire Z
– HTC Desire HD
– HTC OneS S4
– HTC OneS S3
– HTC Incredible S
– HTC Sensation (G14/G18)
– HTC HD2
– HTC Desire S
– HTC Mytouch 4G
– HTC EVO 3D(CDMA)
– HTC EVO 3D(GSM)
MIUI: 999 days! [News – MIUI Official English Site, May 10, 2013]
MIUI was officially launched on August 16th, 2010. Today, May 10, 2013, means that MIUI ROM has been inexistence for 999 days! Tomorrow will be our 1000th day!
In these 999 days, we have accumulated over 15 million fans worldwide and the ROM can now be flashed across 33 Android devices.
Of course, we can only have achieved this milestone with the help of our dedicated fans. They have made unofficial versions of the ROM and in various languages so even more users can enjoy MIUI worldwide.
Although, this milestone is something we are proud of, we also realize there are many areas of improvement and problems to be solved. In essence, this means that MIUI is still growing and there will be challenges along the way. But with the help of our dedicated fans and hardworking MIUI team we hope to celebrate the next milestone and continue to see MIUI thrive!
Xiaomi MI-Two – [ENG SUBS] Full Official Presentation 2012 [XiaomiUnofficial YouTube channel, published on Sept 7, 2012, recorded on Aug 16, 2012]
Official promotional video of Xiaomi MIUI V4 (English Subtitles) [MrMiui YouTube channel, Aug 10, 2012]
Introducing Xiaomi MIUI V5 (HD) [MrMiui YouTube channel, April 10, 2013]
As Xiaomi Sells Out of New Flagship Phone, Bin Lin Talks About the Disruptive Chinese Start-Up’s Approach (Video) [AllThingsD, Oct 30, 2012]
Xiaomi co-founder Bin Lin was in many ways the perfect speaker for our Dive Into Mobile conference. Xiaomi is one of the most interesting corporate stories from the transformative global spread of smartphones, but its quick ascent is not widely known about outside of China.
The company, which is just two-and-a-half-years old but already has sold more than five million phones and employs 1,700 people, has disrupted the Chinese home handset market by making and selling top-of-the-line smartphones direct to consumers for a fraction of the expected price.
Today, Xiaomi launched its second major phone, known as the Xiaomi Phone 2, or the Mi-2. A run of 50,000 units sold out in two minutes and 51 seconds.
While companies might shy away from literally naming one of their phones a “me too,” the new Xiaomi phone has much in common with Apple’s iPhone 5, including the size and shape of the handset, the way application icons tile on the screen in Xiaomi’s modified version of the Android Jelly Bean OS, and the look and feel of the built-in camera application.
But Lin was quick to pull his iPhone 5 out and show that the (slightly larger) Mi-2 has a better display — 720 by 1280 with a pixel density of 342 pixels per inch.
Sitting on a red couch (instead of our signature D conference red chairs) at the hotel to which we had evacuated for Hurricane Sandy, Lin told me about his company’s plans for the Mi-2 launch as well as its long-term strategy.
As we spoke on Monday, Lin seemed remarkably unstressed on the eve of his company’s big launch. That’s because Xiaomi phones are offered only online and typically sell out in a matter of minutes to fans who apparently follow the company’s progress like they would a rock band.
In fact, last week, a block of 300,000 of the older Mi-1s model — that is, a phone that everyone knew was a week away from being outdated — sold out in only four minutes and 15 seconds.
Xiaomi released just 50,000 phones for order today and said it would have 250,000 more available in mid-November.
To date, Xiaomi has sold 3.5 million Mi-1 units and 1.8 million of the between-upgrades Mi-1s. That’s only a single-digit percentage of the Chinese smartphone market, where as many as 200 million smartphones are expected to be sold this year.
The base model for the Mi-2 costs just $230. Lin said Xiaomi spends “almost that price” to manufacture the phone, but that the company doesn’t mind its low margins because it is pursuing a strategy similar to Amazon’s Kindle Fire.
Xiaomi doesn’t spend any money on retail and barely any on marketing. Instead, the company corresponds with fans on Weibo and in forums, asking for their product feedback and sometimes incorporating it.
Xiaomi creates its own hardware and its own modified-Android software, and expects revenue to flow in from e-commerce in the future.
“As we see huge adoption of smartphones, we see e-commerce getting more mature, with logistics and payment systems,” Lin said. “As we get more adoption of software, the money will come after.”
E-commerce is the specialty of Xiaomi co-founder Lei Jun, who founded Joyo.com, which is now Amazon.cn. Meanwhile, Lin is the software guy, having most recently led Android development in China as an engineering director of Google. Others from the seven-member Xiaomi founding team include a Motorola hardware expert and a Microsoft development director.
That unified approach has a familiar precedent in Apple, though Lin noted that Xiaomi is not yet at the point where it custom-designs its own chips.
As for what Xiaomi will do next, Lin said that the company is working to expand internationally and sees Taiwan and Hong Kong as its most likely targets, given their similarity to China. He also acknowledged rumors about Xiaomi building a set-top box, saying that kind of personal computing device might be a natural extension.
But for now, Xiaomi’s approach is really quite simple, Lin said. “The strategy is to build top-end handsets. That’s what we’re good at.”
More information: Bin Lin tag on AllTingsD
CO-FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT
XIAOMI CORPORATION
Bin Lin co-founded Xiaomi Corporation with angel investor Lei Jun in April 2010. He is now president of Xiaomi Corporation, and is in charge of Xiaomi’s day-to-day operation, business and product strategy, carrier relationships, and business development with strategic suppliers and business partners.
Lin worked at Google Inc. as engineering director from 2006 to 2010. He founded and led Google China’s engineering effort for Mobile, Android apps, and Google Music. Under his leadership, his team successfully launched many Google products for the China market, including Google Mobile Maps, Mandarin voice search, mobile verticals such as video, dictionary, finance, and local, Android Pinyin IME, Android Dictionary, Android News and Weather widget, Google Music (free streaming and download of legal music online), Google Pinyin IME, and various OneBoxes.
Prior to joining Google, he worked at Microsoft from 1995 to 2006, and held various senior positions, including software design engineer and development lead at Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters. Lin admits that he is older than he looks, but says, “It’s never too late to start your own business if you have a young heart.” His first cellphone was a Motorola StarTAC.
POSTS WITH BIN LIN
…
And how that innovation started: Xiaomi Tech Unveils Its Own Smartphone: RMB 1999 with Dual-Core 1.5G CPU, Fastest Ever [TechNode blog in China, Aug 16, 2011]
Xiaomi Tech, a mobile apps vendor, has just unveiled its long-rumored smartphone today. The phone is equipped with dual-core 1.5G CPU which makes it the fastest smartphone in terms of CPU clock speed in the whole world
Some of its technical specifications:
*Qualcomm MSM8260 Dual-Core 1.5G CPU, 1G RAM,
– 4 GB capacity,
– can expand to 32G.*Sharp 4 inch display, resolution: 854-by-480-pixel resolution.
*Battery: 1930mAh.
– Standby time:up to 450 hrs.
– Talk time: up to 15 hrs.
– Audio playback: up to 45 hrs.
– Video playback: up to 12 hrs.
– Play game: up to 6 hrs.*Cellular and wireless
– GSM+WCDMA
– GPS, GLONASS, A-GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth*Size and weight
– 125×63×11.9mm
– 149 gramsXiaomi Mobile is built on on MIUI OS (based on Android 2.3.5). As we wrote before, MIUI has strong user base around the world, with several global fans clubs in US, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain,Australia, Russia and more.
Honestly, the sheer specification of Xiaomi Mobile is already stunning, while its price is something even more surprising and unexpected. With only RMB 1999 (US$ 312), you can get the fastest mobile in the world and a bunch of powerful hardware. The Android phone market is expected to see mounting competitions in the near future.
Xiaomi Mi2A VS Meizu MX2 [phonezilla2013 YouTube channel, May 10, 2013]
小米 Xiaomi vs. 魅族 Meizu
2. 魅族
Meizu
Meizu MX2 Flyme 2.0 OS Official Introduction [androidsales YouTube channel, May 7, 2013]
Flyme 2.0
[Meizu microsite in English, the original Chinese version came on-line on Dec 22, 2012]
New system: Flyme 2.0
Based on the latest Android kernel, Flyme 2.0 is specificall designed as the soul of MX. The brand-new system, coming with a full suite of apps and powerful cloud services, is sure to surprise you.
Dedicated Design
3452 improvements of interaction and 417 new features are added to Flyme 2.0, which means greater visual elegance and ease in operation. We care about your experience in using our product and hence dedicate ourselves to optimize every detail in concern and recover them to original simplicity.
The most frequently used icons are moved to the top of the screen and automatically hidden in full-screen display. The buttons like Back and More will appear on the innovative Smart Bar. The beautiful breathing light is designed to wake the phone is a stylish manner.
Unparalleled Built-in Service
Flyme 2.0 does not only meet what you want, but also helps you find out more you want. The unparalleled built-in services we developed for you are going to surprise youl like never before.
GPU acceleration, HTML5 streaming, and smart interaction better the browser performance. Enjoy surfacing with the Flyme Web Browser.
When you can’t pick up the phone, Flyme Voicemail will record the message for you. No carrier involvement, no fees.
Add filters, rotate, crop, and enhance the image on photos – you can easily edit photos on MX and share them.
Tree-structure file arrangement app allows you quickly browse, access, copy and move files on the go.
Doodle, insert photos, and add text – the new Notes app brings note-taking to the next level.
Closer Networking
We are dedicated to integrated the most valuable network resources and connect you with the world close at hand.
Music
Online Music is the fruit of year’s concentrated R&D endeavor and the best music app at present. Plenty of copyrighted lossless music is available and its payment is simplified. All you need is connect to the network and indulge your ears in your favorite tune.
Video
Online Video marks a new level of video services. With greater network expansion, you can search and watch online video as you like. The most resourceful video app is at your service.
App Center
We encourage third-party apps to fertilize the soil for virus-free software development, tapping boundless potential for more applications. You can quickly browse, search for and install the apps you want, with the ease of mind that they have all gone through our strict audit system.
Powerful Flyme Cloud Services
A free Flyme account is all you need to get full cloud services to manage over MX. The latest Flyme Web helps you browse and manage data on your MX at ease. It get everything for you smartly.
Flyme can automatically sync your contacts, text messages, phone settings, and call logs; bringing you concenience like never before.
Featuring voice messages, Flyme messages lets you communicate more efficiently. Now you can insert voice messages in SMS and send to friends who have Flyme accounts. You are going to love this new way of messaging!
Flyme Blacklist is intelligent enough to acurately filter unwanted calls and block spam messages to free you of the annoyance.
Flyme reminds you at once when new versions of Flyme OR are released. OTA (Over The Air) download and upgrade with nothing more than a few swipes and taps.
Flyme Sharing enables you to share files of any format any size with your friends at ease.
Phone Finder helps you locate your lost phone, with remore lock and alerts.
MEIZU MX2 MX5S A9 Quad Core with Flyme 2.0 4.4 Inch 1280*800 RAM 2GB 1.6GHz 16G Version [blogmerimobiles YouTube channel, April 1, 2013]
Flyme X for Meizu MX2 coming soon [phonezilla2013 YouTube channel, May 10, 2013]
How that innovation has started:
For The First Time, People Queue for a Chinese Phone, Meizu M9 [TechNode blog in China, Jan 3, 2011]
If you see people are queuing for a new product from Apple, you would not be surprised; if you see Chinese buyers queue for something from a Chinese brand, you may think it is weired and would not take it serious. We have tens of local mobile phone brands in China, some are Shanzhai and some are not, some are really in bad quality and some are not only relatively cheaper but also quite handy and powerful. But, never ever, we’ve seen people are so thirsty for a new phone model and even queueing for it.
M9, produced by Meizu and regarded as the best iPhone 4 replacement from a local manufacturers, is out at 2st, Jan 2011. And in Huaqiangbei, the cradleland for China Shanzhai phone, over a thousand Meizu-fans were queued for their dream-phone, M9 made by Meizu which they have been waiting for 2 years since the release of M8.
We thumb up to Meizu M9. Although you might see a different story when M9 comes to Beijing, Shanghai etc where people are more addicted to iPhone, I appreciate the courage and ambition Meizu has to compete with iPhone. As some people said, Chinese see the hope beyond Shanzhai.
[image via qq.com]
Here is a video report about that product: Meizu M9, $380 Android phone with Retina Display [Charbax YouTube channel, April 7, 2011]
See also: Meizu, Chinese Best iPhone-Liker Is Testing Its App Store [TechNode blog in China, Nov 11, 2009]
Meizu Technology Co. Ltd, the maker of the best Chinese iPhone-liker, Meizu M8 officially entered the hype of Chinese mobile App Store. Its application store, aka Meizu Developer Network is now available on http://developer.meizu.com/.
According to this official announcement, application is required to become a Meizu developer. Once the application is accepted, the developer can develop and submit his application which will be verified and tested by Meizu operation team. Meizu user will be able to download the tested applications via a client (mobile version of the app store?) running on Meizu mobile phone.
It’s at very early stage. Roughly counting, there are only 23 applications listed on the site right now. But the comments posted by J. Wong, CEO of Meizu on its official BBS are quite interesting:
Meizu developers will be given 70% of the revenue share;
A voucher worthy of RMB 15 yuan will be given to Meizu VIP users (I am not sure how to become a VIP) to stimulate the market;
The mobile version of application store will come with the new UI (screenshots) of Meizu M8 by this year.
See also: Chinese firm clones Apple’s mystique [The Los Angeles Times, Sept 7, 2010]
After M9 they had Meizu MX, Exynos4412 quad-core 4″ retina Android phone [Charbax YouTube channel, Oct 28, 2012]
See also:
– MEIZU outs its MX Quad-core Android smartphone, Galaxy S III unveiling rumored for May 3 [Yahoo! News, April 16, 2012]
– “Meizu’s third-ever smartphone is its best product yet” [Engadget, Dec 15, 2011]
– “…here in China a home-grown brand is inspiring its own platoon of highly-motivated buyers” [Reuters TV, Jan 4, 2012]
– “Samsung’s TouchWiz and Motorola’s MotoBlur skins could learn a thing or two from Meizu” [CNET Reviews, Jan 25, 2012]
The good: Meizu’s MX runs a unique and capable Android skin made to look like iOS. This compact smartphone is fast, fun to use, and boasts penta-band GSM compatibility.
The bad: The Meizu MX’s camera isn’t quite up to the superphone camera caliber of the iPhone 4 or Android, and its China-only availability puts it out of reach for most smartphone shoppers.
The bottom line: If you think you have no use for a Chinese iPhone clone running Android, the Meizu MX could drastically change your worldview. Despite a few quirks, the MX is a slick Android- and iOS- inspired hybrid that also flaunts a few tricks of its own.
Then came $400 Meizu MX2, 4.4″ 1280×800 Exynos4412 [Charbax YouTube channel, March 11, 2013], actually in December 2012
But in fact the whole smartphone business development started with M8 first shown by Meizu at CeBIT 2007 [Charbax YouTube channel, March 26, 2007], as traditionally they were an MP3 player manufacturer
3. OPPO
Updates:
OPPO to Attend XDA DevCon in Miami [press release, June 21, 2013]
SHENZHEN – June 21, 2013 – OPPO today announced they will be attending XDA DevCon as an Elite Sponsor. The conference, hosted by the popular XDA Developers site in honor of their tenth anniversary, will take place in Miami, FL from August 9-11. The conference will feature the developing community’s top speakers and developers and feature the leading names in mobile technology in an effort to nurture and enable greater innovation.
Sponsor to Support Development Community
A core part of OPPO’s company culture lies in its commitment to working with its fans to develop and deliver the best products possible. For that reason, OPPO is a strong proponent and supporter of the developer community. In fact, OPPO recently worked closely with XDA to bring CyanogenMod to Find 5 for Android enthusiasts around the world.
DevCon provides a setting for the best and brightest in the developer community to meet, engage and collaborate face-to-face. OPPO is proud to sponsor an event which encourages this kind of innovation and will further immerse OPPO into a community which can help OPPO create the best smartphones on the market.
“We have been working with XDA Developers for a few months” said Pete Lau, Vice President of OPPO, “At first, we were a bit skeptical. Then gradually, as we opened up more, we saw the developer community become really passionate about OPPO.” …
OPPO & CyanogenMod at XDA:DevCon 2013 [OppoOfficial YouTube channel, July 30, 2013]
Nemesis [Steve Kondik CyanogenMod Founder, till 2013 with Samsung, July 26, 2013]
My goal for CM has always been to break open these mostly proprietary mobile devices so we can turn them into the product we really want. I think over the last few years, we have largely accomplished this goal- CM is available in some for almost every device imaginable. What’s most important to me is that anyone can get the code, hack on it and change whatever you want, build it, and flash it to your device.
It’s a huge amount of work, and has left us little time to work on other things. This is good and bad though. Just as Google made it easy for so many people to get into mobile with Android, we’ve made it easy for anyone to get into making their own aftermarket ROMs. It’s awesome. There’s so much crazy stuff that people are building that nobody has thought of before.
Nemesis is our plan to improve the user experience in the right places. The new camera app, Focal [created by Guillaume Lesniak, see interview], is just the start. Without giving too much away, invoking teaser videos, or giving ETAs, I can confidently say that awesome things are going to keep coming. Watch out 🙂
Read also: CyanogenMod Team Introduces Nemesis Stage 1: Focal [xda developers, July 29, 2013]
Coinciding with the release of Android 4.3 and and an updated stock camera, stage one of the CyanogenMod team’s top secret “Project Nemesis” was finally unveiled on July 26. According to the development group’s weekly wrap-up on www.cyanogenmod.org, the goal of this project is to bring users the best custom operating experience possible. As such, Focal, a feature-packed camera application, was announced as the first component geared towards reaching that goal. CyanogenMod developer Guillaume Lesniak (XDA Recognized Developer XpLoDWilD) posted details about the new camera on Google +, explaining almost a dozen new and improved features that were integrated into the Open Source app. …
End of Updates
Oppo Find 5 Full Review – Everything You Need to Know – Cursed4Eva.com [Cursed4Eva TV YouTube channel, April 1, 2013]
Oppo, the Apple of China to Enter India With Find 5! [Trak.in, May 15, 2013]
Oppo is that to China what Apple is to USA and Oppo has decided to enter the Indian smartphone arena and it has chosen its flagship device, the Find 5 for doing so.
The Oppo Find 5 will be made available in India courtesy of AndroidGuruz and the smartphone provides a pretty good alternative to the flagship devices like the Samsung Galaxy S4, Sony Xperia Z and the HTC One.
And it will come at a price around Rs.10,000 [$182.5] less than those flagship devices.
The Oppo Find 5 will retail for Rs. 27,445 [$501] for the 16GB variant whereas the 32GB variant will set you back by Rs.31,259 [$571].
Oppo will be selling Find 5 on their own website hosted on AndroidGuruz domain. I am surprised that will not be listed on e-commerce sites that may really shoot up the numbers of units sold.
Having said that, Oppo cannot be compared to other Chinese brand, due to the kind of specs and quality it provides.
…
Quality Meets Style with the OPPO Find 5 – The Fifth Element Unfolds [press release, Dec 12, 2012]
OPPO Find 5 Unveiled With 5” 1080P Screen, 13 Megapixel HDR Camera and More
BEIJING －December 12, 2012 －At the OPPO Find 5 “The Fifth Element” Launch Event held in 798 Art District today, OPPO introduced one of this year’s most mysterious and anticipated mobile products, the OPPO Find 5. The all new, industry leading OPPO Find 5 was announced to an audience of over 500 members of the international press, OPPO fans, developers, and partners, in what marks a spectacular end of year for the mobile industry.
See – like you’ve been blind all along
The OPPO Find 5 features a 5.0” 1080p IPS screen with a staggering 441 PPI pixel density, allowing you to experience a world of crystal clarity and the most realistic colors. With OGS technology that combines touch sensors with display, colors are more vivid and lifelike, and you’ll feel as if the screen contents are floating on its surface.
Despite its large screen, the OPPO Find 5 is easy to hold thanks to its super slim 3.25mm bezel. When the screen is off, the front becomes a borderless sheet of pure black, mysteriously calming yet satisfying to the eye.
Touch – and your fingers won’t stop
Industrial design has always been one of OPPO’s core strengths. An example is the Find 5 front frame. Although it only weighs a mere 6.3 grams, the front frame alone takes four hours to craft. Starting with a 210 gram piece of stainless steel, it undergoes 12 manufacturing processes, after which it is given a black chrome plating in a 1470 °F (800 °C) vacuum environment. The result from this demanding process not only protects the screen from impact, it also contributes to the Find 5’s amazing look and feel.
The overall design of the Find 5 is minimalist, relying on straight lines and simple shapes that removes distractions, while at the same time being built using the best materials and techniques available, giving OPPO Find 5 a simple and understated, yet refined and premium look and feel.
Cherish and share, the beauty from every journey
On the backside, OPPO Find 5 comes with the most advanced 1/3.06-type 13-megapixel camera sensor available on the market, adept at taking great photos in low light conditions. With market-leading Stacked CMOS technology, it features an f/2.2 aperture, 4-layer coating and blue glass filters. On the front, Find 5 it is fitted with a 1.9-megapixel camera.
OPPO Find 5 is the world’s first smartphone with hardware supported HDR photography and video recording. It redefines smartphone video recording, with its capability of recording video in 120 FPS, five times the speed that the human eye can perceive. Apart from videos being silky smooth in normal playback, they will also be smooth during slow-motion playback and clear during freeze-frames. In addition, the camera on the Find 5 is capable of taking 100 photos at 5 per second with Burst Mode.
OPPO Find 5 will bring you into a new era of wireless sharing. With NFC functionality, gently touching two phones will pair them in less than a tenth of a second, 50 times faster than Bluetooth pairing. OPPO’s NFC SmartTags with preset actions will add simplicity and convenience to your life. Find 5 also supports Wi-Fi Display and DLNA, two technologies that allow you to wirelessly project screen contents onto your television in HD.
Listen, and rhythm will touch your heart
Find 5 comes with the powerful Dolby 3D surround sound technology and the exciting Dirac HD technology, combination of hardware and software usually only found in high-end audio and cinema sound systems. With Dirac, you will clearly hear a difference, and become immersed in music the way the artist originally wanted to express it.
Love, for it is the Fifth Element
OPPO never set out to create the most powerful phone. Internally, we have always said that we create products in the intersection of romance and technology, and Find 5 is a product that OPPO employees worked passionately and relentlessly on. Just like Plato was convinced of quintessence, an element beyond thematerial world, there is more to the Find 5 than the mere sum of its parts. There is an element beyond the purely rational, and that element is love. OPPO Find 5 is infused with of our love, a love we wish to explore with the world.
OPPO Find 5 is set to launch in early 2013 across selected markets.
OPPO Find 5 Specifications
Network: UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA/HSPA+/HSPA+42 (850, 1700, 1900, 2100MHz), GSM/EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900MHz)
Processor: Qualcomm APQ8064 Quad-Core 1.5GHz
Display: 5.0” 1080P 441PPI IPS (1,080×1920)
Memory: 16GB ROM, 2GB RAM
Camera: Main: 13 megapixel Stacked CMOS sensor with HDR, Front: 1.9 megapixel, 120 FPS video recording, f/2.2 aperture, blue glass filters
Connectivity: 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi (802.11n 2.4GHz and 5GHz), Wi-Fi Direct, Bluetooth, NFC
Features: Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean), GPS, Wi-Fi Display, DLNA, Gyroscope, Digital compass, Microphone, Sensors (light, proximity, magnetic and gravity)
Battery: 2500 mAh built-in lithium-ion battery
Included Accessories: Power adapter, USB Cable, Headphones
OPPO Find 5 – When Technology Meets Affection [OppoOfficial YouTube channel, May 13, 2013]
OPPO Find 5 – Features [OppoOfficial YouTube channel, March 17, 2013]
OPPO Find 5 – OGS One Glass Solution Technology [OppoOfficial YouTube channel, Feb 28, 2013]
OPPO Find 5 – Camera [OppoOfficial YouTube channel, Feb 20, 2013]
The Journey of OPPO [OppoOfficial YouTube channel, Nov 30, 2012]
OPPO Finder – Ultra-slim Smartphone [OppoOfficial YouTube channel, Nov 28, 2012]
OPPO is a globally registered technology brand, with a long history of serving customers in North America, Europe and Asia, delivering products that receive high ratings from experts around the world.
Since entering the mobile market in 2008, we have been restless in our pursuit of the latest technology, the highest quality and the most user friendly products.
Leaders in Technology
We are passionate about exploring the latest that technology has to offer. Since the start, our products have pushed the boundaries of technology. An example is the 6.65mm OPPO Finder we released in mid-2012, then the world’s thinnest smartphone. Towards the end of 2012, we announced one of the world’s most anticipated smartphones, the OPPO Find 5, featuring a 5″ 1080p display and a 13 megapixel stacked CMOS sensor, it was the world’s first smartphone with hardware supported HDR.
The Highest Quality Standards
OPPO uses only highest quality components available on the market. Alliances with the leading international partners ensure that we have the latest and best hardware available. With an uniquely independent R&D capacity, we design, develop, manufacture, market, and sell our products ourselves.
We have full control over the entire supply chain, from our factories to the hands of our customers. This way, we can design for the end product in mind and ensure that only the best quality products reach our customers.
Customers First
Our customers are the core of our business, and satisfying them is the precondition to our existence. OPPO products are co-developed with our customers, with customer feedback playing a big role in both hardware and software development. For our smartphones, we have adopted rapid release cycles, releasing firmware updates every other week based on customer feedback.
4. Chinese domestic brand expansion into the global market: the AndroidGuruz initiative from India
Our overview of the most innovative Chinese brands is even more actual as with question Will AndroidGuruz change the way we perceive Chinese smartphones? [Trak.in, April 24, 2013] it is stated first time that the current “below standard” perception about Chinese phones could seriously change outside their domestic market:
We Indians perceive Chinese phones as something below our standard but we’ll gladly go in for a smartphone from an Indian vendor like Micromax and Karbonn.
But Chinese are all set to change that as the inherent flaws that the Chinese phones have had of warranty and reparability are going to be taken care of in near future when Androidguruz [website], a consortium of about 50 Chinese smartphone brands set up shop in India.
What is AndroidGuruz?
AndroidGuruz [Facebook site] is a retail smartphone chain that has been floated by Zopo Mobiles and the brand will set up 200 retail shops in India soon and they will be responsible for the warranty and servicing of the Chinese smartphones in India.
Why it would change the game?
Indian smartphone vendors such as Micromax, Karbonn and Lava get their smartphones made from China and these are then imported into India. These are nothing but rebranded Chinese handsets and these can be found in different markets under different names.
For instance, the most popular smartphone from an Indian manufacturer today is the Micromax Canvas A116 HD which is made by a Chinese company, Beidou Chi and it can be bought in Pakistan under the name of Qmobile A16 HD.
So companies which manufacture smartphones for Indian companies have tied up and will be entering the Indian markets with their products on their own. Why I think these would make for better devices is because the middlemen, in this case the Indian manufacturers would be eliminated from the scenario and we could have the smartphones directly from the manufacturers, thus resulting in money saving.
Servicing Issues
Chinese manufacturers have a servicing issue but AndroidGuruz would take care of that issue. They’ll offer a 3 month replacement warranty for each handset and the standard one year warranty. The company will take care of the servicing issues as well through these centres.
What you should look forward to?
Companies such as Umi, Zopo, Jiayu and Gionee have already made their way into Indian markets but due to the lack of service centres have not been able to get a strong footing despite having some real great products in their portfolio.
So what AndroidGuruz will do is that it will take those great products to the masses and since the service centres would be in place, the after sales issues would be taken care of.
The Only Hiccup
The only reason why I think this great venture might fail is the perception of the Indians. For instance, Fiat’s 1.3 litre Multijet engine is the reason cars such as Swift, Dzire, Manza and the likes are famous but the company’s own offering, Punto has literally bombed at the sales charts.
As Indians, we trust Micromax more than Zopo or UMI and that is the reason why the Indian manufacturers will continue to have a dominance despite the fact that Chinese smartphones will offer similar products at a lower price point.
Verdict
I’ll say go in for the Chinese smartphones as they are relatively new in the market so they’ll ensure you get the best service to build a loyal customer base as happy customers account for free advertisement. The middlemen will be eliminated and you’ll get a product that is absolutely value for money.
Chinese mobile firms use start-up to enter India [The Hindu, April 9, 2013]
The Shenzen-based consortium wants a franchisee network in the country
A consortium of Chinese mobile makers are planning a quiet entry into India with the help of a start-up, which would set up over 200 sales and service centres for nearly 50 different manufacturers.
The start-up, a company called AndroidGuruz, plans to set up sales and experience zones, giving the Chinese companies a foothold into the Indian market.
“The Government has already given FDI clearance or is in the process of granting clearance to these 40-45 brands which are in the mobile phone business. We are looking to give the consortium, which is made up of these brands, a support network,” said Vivek Despande, Asia Support Manager of AndroidGuruz.
The Shenzen-based consortium wants a franchisee network in the country, which will comprise brands such as Zopo, UMI, JiaYu and Mogu.
The first such store will open in New Delhi over the next three months [opened on July 8, 2013] with more in Bangalore and Mumbai to follow by the end of the year.
According to Mr. Despande, while the companies would initially sell Android-based phones, it could serve as a prelude to offering tablets and other such devices.
India battleground
The smartphone battleground in India has received tough Chinese competition over the last one year, with established brands such as Huawei and Lenovo managing to make slow inroads into the market. Huawei, in fact, plans to set up nearly 250 experience centres by the end of 2013.
Three months ago, Chinese firm Konka announced its entry into India with an investment of $30 million.
As of May 2013 only OPPO Find 5, one of the Top 3 most innovative domestic brands in China, was “available” on the AndroidGuruz as shown by the screenshots (see the below image on the left) but pages for six other brands were prepared as well (see the below image on the right):
Here is how the already available Oppo Find 5 Review! [Marques Brownlee YouTube channel, Feb 9, 2013] included in the Find 5 Description page is presenting this top of the class product:
More information:
– Oppo Now in India !! [on Androidguruz FB timeline, May 11, 2013] which had the following reply
Androidguruz Our arrangement is official approved for online sales in India, will start retail sales in 1 month, tech support and service warranty will be given, please note the prices of oppo are internationally same !!!!
Yesterday [May 15] at 4:54pm
– however there is a recent information from China that Oppo Not Launching In India, Androidguruz Fake?!! [GizChai, May 15, 2013] containing the following reply from OPPO
Update as of Aug 1, 2013:
Two and a half months later the sitemap shows the following changes:
Note that Caesar brand has gone and THL Mobiles appeared. Looking at the menu row there is the BLU brand as well. But the reality is:
– Umi: both XII QUADCORE and X1S QUAD CORE are out of stock
– Zopo: both ZP 900S (LITE) and ZP900 LEADER are out of stock
– Jiayu: from June 24
G2 1 GB RAM, Rs9,999 ($165)
G2 512 MB RAM, Rs8,900 ($147)
G2S 1 + 4 GB ROM, Rs11,500 ($190)
G3 (Quad-core + 1 GB + 4 GB ROM), Rs12,500 ($206)
G4 (Quadcore + 1 GB + 4 GB ROM), Rs14,500 ($239)
G4 ( Quadcore 1.5 GHz + 32 GB ROM), Out of stock
– Xiaomi: none
– THL Mobiles: none
– Iocean:
X7 Youth Plus, Rs15,999 ($264)
X7 Youth Turbo, Rs12,500 ($206)
|
July 9: Blu Mobiles Coming to India in August !!! July 9: Blu Nex Technology July 9: Blu Product Roadmap (36 photos) July 9: Blu Feature Phones (23 photos) July 10: AndroidGuruz Store in New Delhi July 17: AndroidGuruz Franchise Campaign July 19: Blu Dash coming next week to India |
So it seems to be that the originaly Indian initiative is starting to move with Jiayu, Iocean and soon with Blu brands.
GiONEE (金立), the emerging global competitor on the smartphone market
In the Top 10 on the Q1 CY13 Chinese smartphone market Lenovo (w/13.1%), Huawei (w/10.1%) and ZTE (w/6.9%) are well-known brands globally. The #3 Coolpad (w/10.3%) is not, neither the #7 K-Touch/Tianyu (w/4.1%), nor the #8 GiONEE (w/3.8%), nor the #10 OPPO (w/2.9%).
When I looked into these companies I got interested only in GiONEE (金立), as the one with the best chance currently to succeed in the broad global market as well. Not least there is a very strong determination by GiONEE Group President Lu Wei Bing (卢伟冰) / William Lu (see the below picture that was taken on the July 10 launch) to succeed overseas as evidenced by his latest interview with Tencent Digital.
He is absolutely convinced that after doing 10 million unit ODM sales abroad the company is ready to expand under its own brand as well. Moreover he was in 2009 with K-Touch/Tianyu as responsible for mobile GSM and overseas business unit there, so has pretty much experience in overseas efforts from China.
Update:
Elife E7 Product Video [Gionee India YouTube channel, published on Dec 30, 2013]
The New Gionee E7 [Gionee India YouTube channel, published on Jan 2, 2014]
We’re now in the new smartphone era. Meet the New Gionee.
With 100 million users and presence in 40 countries. Wherever you are, Gionee is always easily approachable!
Our motto, “Innovations and advance with the times.” The integration of hardware and software in creating the perfectly balanced ecosystem.
Gionee has the largest Intelligent Manufacturing base in Asia. Over 10 years of experience accumulation. Today, Gionee has 4 R&D Centers and over 1,500 engineers worldwide and an annual investment of USD83 Million in R&D. Over 100 patents of mobile technology.
More than 8000 employees based in the Gionee Industrial Park, built with an investment of USD 125 Million with production capacity of 40 million units/ year which can be upgraded to 80 million units / year. China’s 1st lab developed specifically for supporting product design.
We cooperate with the World’s Top Developors including Google, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sharp who have now become Gionee’s strategic partners.
Technology will continue to change and shape our future. With our world class partners, Gionee will continue to bring innovations into your work and life. We will continue to expand and provide the best user experience in a Smartphone to more users worldwide.
Connect with us:
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gionee.india
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/gioneeindia
- Instagram: http://instagram.com/gioneeindia
- Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/gioneeindia
How the handset newbie Gionee is on the route to take on Apple, Samsung [The Economic Times of India, Jan 17, 2014] “Lu Weibing …the 38-year old … President of the $2.5 billion Gionee” about “the Gionee disruption model”:
Weibing wants the 8,000-people-strong Gionee to be among the top five global brands in the smartphone business and claims that three Chinese brands will be in that bracket in the next five years. By then, he wants to lead the pack in India taking on the likes of Samsung and Apple.
Annually, Gionee sells about 25 million handsets compared to Samsung’s 396.5 million and Apple’s 135.8 million. It may be a long road, but his role model is Apple founder Steve Jobs—”because he was a product manager and back home in China, I’m a product manager involved in every step of the product”.
- Exclusivity with distributors
…- Own manufacturing
…- Ability to work with multiple partners
…- Exit ODM, enter brand
…- Own the OS
In the future, for any brand to succeed, it must have its own operating system (OS). We started work on our OS, Amigo, two years back, and it is up and running today with its cloud service, book centre, shopping, app store, browser. The OS is obviously being customized for different geographies.
- Innovate before others
…- Straddle all price points
…
Gionee Elife E7 – specifications, features and review [Gionee India YouTube channel, published on Jan 2, 2014]
Gionee announces the launch of its flagship ELIFE E7 smartphone in India. [Gionee India YouTube channel, published on Dec 29, 2013]
ELIFE E7 powered by the Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 800 processor is an incredible Camera Smartphone.
New Delhi – December 24, 2013: Gionee Smartphones, a global leader in mobile manufacturing, design and R&D, today announced the launch of its new flagship Smartphone ELIFE E7 in India. ELIFE E7 is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor and android based operating system AMIGO 2.0. Qualcomm Snapdragon processors are a product of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated. Gionee ELIFE E7 is designed specifically to bring the technology of professional digital cameras to smartphones with a best-in-class lens and a breakthrough image sensor.
ELIFE E7 runs on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor featuring a 2.2GHz quad Krait CPU, designed for 3D gaming, faster processing and a professional photo shooting experience. The ELIFE E7 comes in two variants that support 3G and 4G respectively. The ELIFE E7 4G will be powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor featuring a 2.5 GHz quad Krait CPU.
The Gionee ELIFE E7 possesses a 16 MP rear camera and a stunning 8 MP front camera. Beside its powerful sensor and stunning resolution, the ELIFE E7 has been developed and customized with a large lens based on professional Largan M8 lens solution. ELIFE E7 features a 13.9 cm (5.5 Inch) FHD (JDI) Display with 1920 x 1080 and 401 PPI for spectacular viewing quality. ELIFE E7 is equipped with the latest 3rd Generation Gorilla Glass which is 20 times more scratch resistance than regular classes and twice as durable as the second generation of Gorilla Glass. The sensitive ELIFE E7 touch screen is also responsive to gloves, wet hands, and keys to ensure photographers can take pictures in any weather and any situation.
ELIFE E7 comes with built in 12 Levels of Auto Beauty feature to ensure that the user will always look flawless in every picture. An innovative SR Auto — Intelligent Scene Recognition Function also eliminates the hassle of changing the settings every time as it automatically changes the settings to automatic, portrait, Micro, night, night portrait, backlight, backlight portrait. ELIFE E7 has a new way for wakeup screen which can be performed by a simple Double Tap. Another interesting feature is the Black Screen Gesture that simply draws the gestures on the black screen and goes directly into the customized corresponding procedures.
“Since its launch in India, Gionee’s ELIFE series has been extremely well received by consumers. ELIFE E7 is sure to create buzz and recreate benchmarks in the industry. Gionee has crafted its unique space in the Indian market in a very short time supported with unmatched quality, distribution and service. ELIFE E7 is sure to set the Indian smartphone market ablaze with its never seen before features and great hardware.” added Mr. Arvind.R.Vohra, Director Syntech Technology Pvt. Ltd.
“We designed ELIFE E7 with the best in class hardware and software that will make it stand out on any parameter. While creating the most powerful camera for ELIFE E7, the idea was to come up with a way to create the perfect combination and balance of image resolution and picture quality. A joint development with OmniVison has enabled the Elife E7 to sport a 16 megapixel sensor with 1.34 μm pixels which enables users with the ability to shoot razor sharp images without compromising the photo’s resolution or image quality”, says Mr. Lu Weibing, President of Gionee Smartphones.
Additional Features of ELIFE E7
· NFC — Share your work anywhere
Share photos, MP3, videos, and anything you want in the blink of an eye, users can define different modes.
· OTG
Interconnection and freedom to share, connecting a usb to smartphone to instantly view or save documents.
· Sound
ELIFE E7 sports three-mic noise cancellation for reduced noise and clearer conversation in every situation.
The GIONEE ELIFE E7 will be available in black, white, blue, pink, green, yellow and orange colour and will be available in India starting January 2014.
The Price of Elife E7 32 GB and 16 GB is Rs. 29,999 [US$487] and Rs. 26,999 [US$438] respectively.
Qualcomm and Snapdragon are trademarks of Qualcomm Incorporated, registered in the US and other countries. Other product and brand names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
End of Update
Then GiONEE has the largest manufacturing facility of its own among those additional players, with 40 million units capacity per year, and with an expansion capability already prepared in its industrial park for another 40 million when the market opportunity will arise. Finally the company was quickly exploiting MediaTek advances towards the high-end in H1 with prompt introductions even on the Indian market (where it is directly represented only since February), and this would bring even better, “Samsung and Apple beating” offerings in H2, especially with the eight-core MT6592:
MediaTek quad-core Cortex A7 CPU (MT6589 @1.2GHz, MT6589T @1.5GHz)
+ PowerVR Series5XT GPU + Dual SIM, Dual Standby + Android OS Jelly Bean:
| March 2013 |
July 23: $268+ (Rs. 15,999+) |
 DREAM D1 |
1.2 GHz 1GB/4GB 4.65″ HD Super AMOLED Plus 316ppi 8MP/1MP v4.1 Android |
| May 2013 |
July 23: $214+ (Rs.12,757+) |  Gpad G2 |
1.2 GHz 1GB/4GB 5.3″ qHD IPS, 960*540 8MP/1MP v4.1 Android |
| May 2013 |
July 23: $251+ (Rs. 14,999+) |
Elife E3 |
1.2 GHz 1GB/16GB 4.7″ IPS HD, 1280*720 8MP/2MP v4.2 Android |
| July 2013 |
July 23: $335 (Rs. 19,999 list) |
Elife E5 |
1.5 GHz 1GB/16GB 4.8″ AMOLED, 1280*720 8MP/5MP v4.2 Android |
This report will be organised into the following sections:
- Current situation in China:
Consolidation among Chinese mobile phone brands and manufacturers would escalate in the following months - Considering the well known Lenovo, Huawei, ZTE and HTC situation the most interesting Chinese brand for me quickly became GiONEE. Why?
- Earlier information about GiONEE
– From the company itself
– From my trend-tracking blog, ‘Experiencing the Cloud’
– From current media reports
Sidenote #1: K-Touch/Tianyu (天语) is only trying to regain its lost fame (when sold 17 million K-Touch phones in 2007, emerging as #2 cell-phone maker in the China market, second only to Nokia). Moreover it had also a U-turn in overseas expansion last year, and now concentrating on the domestic market only. In addition it is quite picky in SoC vendor selection: with Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 MSM8225Q for a $163 4.5”-er quad-core from April, then with Broadcom for a $98 4”-er dual-core from May, finally with Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 MSM8930 for a $163 TD-LTE dual-core from August, as the latest ones. This is all independently from its original, February, 2012 Qualcomm commitment. With this it looks like that it is also trying to avoid MediaTek which made its original success possible, while for others MediaTek has become an even more important partner than Qualcomm.
Sidenote #2: OPPO has a visibly lesser effort to expand abroad, and Coolpad (as a wholly owned subsidiary of China Wireless Technologies Limited), although “has established strong and close strategic cooperation relationships with certain global telecommunications operators” according to its parent, “in the year of 2011, most of the Coolpad smartphones were shipped to the domestic telecommunications operators” according to the chairman of the parent company. For 2012 the parent stated in the Market Share of Coolpad Smartphones Ranks No. 4 in China only these facts: “the Group has started to launch 4G FDD-LTE smartphones in the United States in 2012, a further expansion into overseas markets. … Except for the existing market in India and Taiwan, the Group successfully rolled out its proprietary 4G FDD-LTE smartphone in the American market. The affordable Coolpad smartphones not only enabled more and more American users to enjoy the 4G high-speed network, but also enhanced the brand awareness of Coolpad in the United States. … Meanwhile, the Group continued to partner with the tier-one chipset suppliers to successfully roll out the 4G FDD-LTE smartphone in the United States.” With that Coolpad has a very focused geographical, and even more focused technology segment strategy abroad than GiONEE.
Complementary posts reminder:
Eight-core MT6592 for superphones and big.LITTLE MT8135 for tablets implemented in 28nm HKMG are coming from MediaTek to further disrupt the operations of Qualcomm and Samsung[‘Experiencing the Cloud’, July 20, 2013] from which the following excerpts I will include here as the ones directly related to the content given here as well:
… according to Zhu Shangzu (朱尚祖), MediaTek Global Smartphone General Manager in the [Part 2] MediaTek to push 8 small cores, the mystery [ESM 国际电子商情 (International Electronic Business), July 18, 2013] exclusive interview … I think the future of high-end smartphones innovation will focus on the expansion of big screen multimedia applications, and this is our direction. …
Judging from the current situation, customers of high-end flagship phones are still using the products of the competitors, but there is flagship in our quad-core case as well, and OPPO, Vivo and GiONEE and other quad-core phones are also very popular. Our next goal is to get the customers of flagship machines using our platform via helping customers to achieve stronger performance on the big screen multimedia.
Evolution of Indian Handset OEMs – History, Current State and Future Outlook [Convergence Catalyst blog, March 27, 2012]
Many Indian handset brands were started by former national and regional distributors of global OEMs (such as Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, etc). These companies partnered with Mediatek (MTK), a fabless System-on-Chip (SoC) provider and ODMs based in Taiwan and China to source white-labeled devices (with basic Indian market hygiene requirements like long battery life and high audibility)
…
The Chinese handset market has undergone a similar influx of local vendors in partnership with MTK in 2007. Tianyu (market facing brand of Chinese telecom player K-Touch) was the first Chinese vendor to launch mobile handsets based on MTK’s turnkey solution in early 2007. Tianyu’s key success factors include products with feature set that address local market needs, faster turn-around time, wide spread distribution and high channel margins to distributors. By end of 2008, a number of local vendors such as Bird, Amoi, ChangHong, Gionee, etc had entered the Chinese market using Tianyu’s business model. Increased competition among numerous vendors resulted in ASP (Average Selling Price) reduction, in turn affecting handset margins adversely.
End of complementary posts reminder
Current situation in China:
Consolidation among Chinese mobile phone brands and manufacturers would escalate in the following months
The recent message from China was blunt: Xiaomi (小米), Lenovo (联想), ZTE (中兴) and GiONEE (金立) are pushing new products – Mobile phone industry, welcome to the final competitive play (小米联想中兴金立争推新品 手机业迎来淘汰赛) [IT Business News Network (IT商业新闻网), July 13, 2013]:
From Xiaomi mobile phone, Lenovo K900, HTC devices having depth customization with operators, and then to ZTE Geek phones in recent days, in addition to Meitu Kiss [rooted in a highly popular “picture beautifying software” made in China], the GiONEE mobile phone and a number of domestic brands, there were a number of new product launches in the first half. In the second half the smart phone will probably usher in a decisive knockout.
Then the message continues with an earlier information which I would take here in a little more detail from China’s mobile phone shipment up 36.4% in June [China Knowledge, June 12, 2013]
China saw its shipment of mobile phones in the domestic market surge 36.4% year on year to 42.29 million units in June this year, according to a report released by China Academy of Telecommunication Research of MIIT.
The figure last month was 29.1% lower than the 59.08 million it realized in May 2013.
China’s shipment of domestic brand mobile phones in the country hit 34.31 million units in June, accounting for 81.1% of the total.
A detailed media report is in the 6月份全国手机出货4248.8万部下降近三成，国产机处于“小学生”阶段 [China Industry Inside Network, July 12, 2013] which contains the explanation for the May market contraction as well. I will again include an already available explanation in English: China’s mobile phone shipment dips [ZDNet, July 12, 2013]
Some smaller cellphone manufacturers in China have been cutting production on inventory and funding issues, according to a Sina news report, which cited a report by First Financial Daily. iiMedia CEO Zhang Yi told the Chinese newspaper many Chinese brands also were adjusting their pace to reduce the frequency of new product launches as they aimed for higher profit.
Zhang believed consolidation among Chinese mobile phone brands and manufacturers would escalate in the following months.
Many domestic market players are struggling to stay afloat. Faced with falling margins and profits, smaller handset makers have been forced to close and these have included veteran market players in the market who had been in business for over two decades. OEM cellphone manufacturers are competing for orders, some agreeing to lower their profit to just 1 percent in order to secure the big orders.
A cellphone manufacturer told First Financial Daily that major local telcos, including China Mobile and China Telecom, were promoting mobile handsets priced between 299 and 499 yuan (US$48.7 to US$81.3), which basically cut off sales of other lower-end cellphone brands. The market was now a “playground for [well-known] foreign and domestic cellphone brands”, he added.
As far as the market share split between the leading brands the latest information was China market: Smartphone sales over 75 million units in 1Q13, says Analysys [DIGITIMES, May 22, 2013] and 78% of the market is shared by Top 10 vendors, with Samsung and Apple joint share just 24.1% while the domestic top brands held not less than 53.9%, according to the table below:
There were 90.54 million handsets sold in the China market during first-quarter 2013, growing 23.5% sequentially and 34.8% on year, and 75.28 million units of them were smartphones, increasing 32.2% sequentially and 141.5% on year, according to Analysys International.
Analysys: Main smartphone vendors in China by sales volume, 1Q13
Samsung: 17.3% Lenovo: 13.1% Coolpad: 10.3% Huawei: 10.1% ZTE: 6.9% Apple: 6.4% K-Touch: 4.1% GiONEE: 3.8% HTC: 3.1% OPPO: 2.9%
Considering the well known Lenovo, Huawei, ZTE and HTC situation the most interesting Chinese brand for me quickly became GiONEE. Why?
With the Facebook message on September 5, 2012 of the GiONEE FB site:
If you are waiting something new, something that does not only fancy your eye but also touch your heart, wait just with patience and GiONEE is coming…
GiONEE came to the international scene. On September 27, 2012 we were told:
… here unveils the mystic 4.65 inch Android device from GiONEE: Super AMOLED Plus display with QHD resolution (960*540 pixels), 8.0 Mega pixels autofocus camera, 1.0 Mega pixels front-facing camera, dual core 1.2GHz CPU, Android OS v4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. …
referring definitely to a previous September 25, 2012 message and related image:
… see more about the Super AMOLED Plus screen. The color contrast ratio and brightness is the best, and it is most power saving. Do you like this?
I won’t detail further steps taken by the company on the international market, as documented on its Facebook site, but jump to the latest one of July 10:
Finally we unveil the latest flagship product of Elife series– Elife E6. We hope our fans and curious folks will like it.
the 2699 yuan price equals to not less than $440. Isn’t it too steep? GiONEE’s next message of July 10 seems to target that question with:
Full spec for E6
On July 13 we further learned that:
GIONEE E6 manufactured with CNC technology and handcraft [GioneeMobile YouTube channel, July 12, 2013]
and on July 14:
ELIFE E6’s delicate hand-polished sides allow it to standup by itself in order to take handsfree photos. Never again would someone be left out of a group shot!
on July 16:
This is Gionee Elife E6 – the revolutionary smartphone with more than just a smartphone.
GIONEE ELIFE E6 Smartphone [GioneeMobile YouTube channel, July 14, 2013]
the next July 17:
ELIFE E6’s 5-inch LCD includes the latest LTPS Technology with 1080 pixels and ultra Retina Standards of 441 pixels; allowing you to view the the details of every moment
finally on July 18:
ELIFE E6’s Content Adaptive Backlight Control automatically adjusts screen brightness according to display, maximizing power consumption reduction, and allows power saving up to 30%
Next day we got reminded that:
With all the excitement surrounding Elife E6, don’t forget its 7.9mm curvy, colorful, and stylish little brother Elife E3!
Aha, that “little” device which was reported as Gionee’s Slim New Droid Totally Stole Samsung’s Thunder! [Gizmodo India, May 21, 2013]
… Just a day after Samsung flexed its muscles with a mid-range quad core dual-SIM offering – the Galaxy Grand Quattro, they’ve pretty much been left in the dust by, of all people – Gionee. The ELife E3, from the relatively unknown Chinese ODM (which entered India with its own brand earlier this year) seems to have whipped the Quattro in every department – at least on paper. Here’s the score-line of the tech-spec showdown:
ELife E3 vs Galaxy Grand Quattro: A 6-1 whipping!
1-0: 1.2GHz Quad Core A7 (Mediatek) vs 1.2GHz Quad Core A5 (Snapdragon)
2:0 16GB internal memory vs 8 GB
3:0 8MP/2MP rear/front cameras vs 5MP/VGA
4:0 Android Jelly Bean 4.2.1 vs 4.1.2
5:0 4.7″ IPS 1280×720 display vs 4.7″ 800×480
6:0 Priced at Rs. 15,000 [$252] vs Rs. 17,000 [$286]
6:1 1800 mAh battery vs 2000 mAh
Relative to all that above the original press release for E6 appeared as Gionee Launch ELIFE E6 smartphone – Simply Smart For all, the world’s first White OGS phone [Core Sector Communique, July 11, 2013] from which I will include here only those excerpts which provide additional information:
As the world’s first White OGS phone [OGS = One Glass Solution, touchscreen technology, see also the review within this], its 2.54mm narrow edge and 6.18mm thin miniature size allows it to slide comfortably into your pockets. … weighing only 128g …
Unibody Design
ELIFE E6’s innovative design features an unibody exterior in Pearl White and Stunning Black. …
The Best Display Technology across the Globe
Powered with a full HD Reality Display Resolution, 441PPI high pixel density and super bright AMOLED, ELIFE E6 automatically reduces 80% of sunlight reflection and increases the brightness of images by 20%, bringing you crispier and clearer razor sharp images. Full Lamination Technology allows 20% reduction in overall thickness and Light Transmittance increased by 10%.
Capturing Pictures Have Never Been Easier
ELIFE E6’s innovative camera technology redefines how photos are meant to be captured. Forget about dragging a camera around for high quality photos and videos. With the goal to make life better through technology, ELIFE E6’s camera sports the second generation of Backside Illumination Technology, antireflection coatings, anti-fingerprint film and finishes off with 5 layers of blue glasses, giving it its powerful 13MP rear-end camera for ease of picture taking and 1080P full HD video recording. Its 5MP front-facing camera comes with 12 levels of auto beauty effects, object tracing focus, instant facial beauty support and more; providing its user with Photoshop-polished photos with just a smile.
The GIONEE ELIFE E6 is available in black, white with matching color cases. ELIFE E6 will be available in China from Mid July 2013 with suggested retail price at CNY2699 and will be available in India, Nigeria, and Vietnam after August 2013.
About Gionee
Established in 2002, Gionee Communication Equipment Co. Ltd is a hi-tech company engaging in mobile device designing, R&D, manufacturing, sales in international markets, and mobile internet application services. Today, Gionee sells over 23 million handsets per year in China mainland alone. With innovation at the core of its R&D, in November 2011, Gionee ranked in as the No.3 brand in the 2G market and in August 2012, Gionee ranked in as the No. 2 in the GSM market. Gionee adheres to the motto “integrity, teamwork, innovation”.
Therefore I had two questions for GiONEE (I will add their answers as I get them):
GiONEE In the global press release – see it e.g. here: http://corecommunique.com/gionee-launch-elife-e6-smartphone-simply-smart-for-all-the-worlds-first-white-ogs-phone/– “White OGS” is indicated without any explanation. Even around the web I found only one explanation, as “OGS in white color”. If that is a right wording than it is still not understood. Could you explain?
Gionee India Is IPS Panel and 7.7 thickness is right for your country? As you published it with this picture: https://twitter.com/GioneeIndia/status/355217623287472128/photo/16.18mm
My problem is that in the global press release – see it e.g. here: http://corecommunique.com/gionee-launch-elife-e6-smartphone-simply-smart-for-all-the-worlds-first-white-ogs-phone/– 6.18mm thickness with OGS, super bright AMOLED and Full Lamination Technology has been stated, which is indeed possible with such things (vs. IPS).
Twitter / GioneeIndia: Gionee Elife E6 Specs compared …
…
Earlier information about GiONEE
From the company itself:
Gionee Brand Introduction Video– Who we are and what we do? [Gionee India YouTube channel, Feb 2, 2013]
From the content it becomes obvious that this company video was produced well back in 2012, presumably around August 2012 when the ‘About’ was first published as given here: Brand_GiONEE Communication Equipment Co., Ltd ShenZhen [with first content in Aug 15, 2012]
“An international fast growing brand”
Established in 2002, Gionee is a hi-tech company engaged in mobile device designing, R&D, manufacturing, and sales in international markets, and offering mobile internet application service.Gionee started the international branding firstly in China mainland in 2005 which was the gold mine for global investors and enterprises. Now Gionee sells over 23 million handsets per year in China mainland, ranking as No.3 brand in 2G market share after Samsung and Nokia in Nov 2011, and No. 2 in GSM market after Samsung in Aug 2012.
As a brand to be recognized as durable, long standby and easy to use, Gionee now is featured with new tags like fashionable, stylish, and premium user experience. Many Asian super stars have high praise for Gionee products and they are willing to tell people how nice the products are.
Asian super star Mr. Andy Lau, Korean TV play star, all young men’s dream princess, Miss. Yun Enh Huy, Taiwan movie prince Eric Ruan, the most popular music band Phoenix Legend in China mainland, etc, all have acted in Gionee product movies and the beautiful mobile phone stories once moved thousands of people.
Since 2011, Gionee moved rapidly for branding in Nigeria, Vietnam, Taiwan, Myanmar, India, Thailand,
Phillips[Philippines], and so on. And once launched one product, it soon became a best seller in the market, even in some cities and countries customers need to wait for new deliveries. Gionee is a hot word as everyone is talking about where to buy one.Gionee is working for the No.1 brand which is most welcomed by customers. The praises from Gionee customers is the only precious crown for Gionee.
Gionee Industrial Park Manufacturing Facility Video [Gionee India YouTube channel, March 4, 2013]
described in Manufacture_GiONEE Communication Equipment Co., Ltd ShenZhen [with first content in Aug 3, 2012]
With a total investment of more than 1 billion RMB and an area of 330,000 square meters, Phase 1 of Gionee Industrial Park was completed and went into production in 2006, with an annual production capacity of 40 million units. After the project is completed, the park’s annual production capacity will hit 80 million units as China’s largest and best professional mobile phone manufacturing base.
Gionee products are now selling to India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia, Russia, Middle East and Africa. The export already increased to 1 Million phones per month to the overseas market.
A tight partnership with MediaTek and Qualcomm allows Gionee to offer a wide product portfolio covering both low end feature phone and high end smartphone. As all products are designed and manufactured by Gionee and as the company is only working with tier-1 suppliers, Gionee is awarded the Best Quality Mobile Phone Manufacturer in China.
Welcome to visit our industrial park!
Finally RD_GiONEE Communication Equipment Co., Ltd ShenZhen [with first content in Aug 3, 2012]
The company has over 10,000 employees, out of which 1000 belong to R&D and 8000 belong to the factory.
Technology reflects the strength of an enterprise; R&D is the key to sharpen the competitive edge of mobile phone industry chain roundly, and Gionee always insists on the strategy of independent R&D and innovation. At present, Gionee’s R&D system mainly comprises six professional R&D organs: Application R&D Institute, Smartphone R&D Institute, Overseas BU R&D Institute, CDMA R&D Institute, GOSO R&D Institute and AORA R&D Institute.
Persistence in quality is the impetus for Gionee’s sustained development. With deep R & D as core, lean manufacturing as foundation, outstanding after-sale service as guarantee and high-tech products as core competitiveness, Gionee has kept developing practical and handy products. Gionee has persisted in independent R & D by establishing professional R & D institutions in cities like Shenzhen, Shanghai and Hangzhou, thus ensuring its outstanding R & D performance.
And I will include here the following 3d party information as a very relevant one:
Gionee UX Design Training – PEOPEO [Peopeo UX Training information, Aug 9, 2012]
Introduction:
Peopeo was contracted by Gionee to give their headquarter team in Shenzhen a series of training program around user centered product design and development. Different level of teams, from management, product manager, designer, and engineers, had participated in this training course, to form a consistent acknowledgement.
Content:
Nowadays China is at a period of changing from Made in China to Designed by China, all companies have to facing such a challenge. Only through a professional user experience centered product design and development process, through in-depth research and understating on the users, the companies can save tremendous cost, can develop better product which meet users’ demands, fir users’ habits, bring users with great experience, hence win the market.
For companies like Gionee, while they compete with other big phone companies and other big companies in the internet industry, they have to establish a different competitive strategies and form a localized strategic advantage. So they have to have a clear understanding of user experience, to make UCD as the core in the product development process, which need to be implemented in the future work and to be reflected in all aspects of the company operation; they have to have a coherent, consistent user-centric and unified understanding, and put them into specific implementation, to ensure that users’ needs are met, to ensure that the users have expected user experience, and to further help the company to establish the core DNA.
Peopeo senior consultants Tingbin Tang, Sean Wee and Kelly Shi provided Gionee team this training. Courses combined with a large number of classical and forward-looking cases; together with presentations and discussions to improve every training participants’ knowledge and skills for user-centric design and development process. Including: lecture; case studies; interactive games; video playback; Q&A discussion; interactive workshops, etc.
From my trend-tracking blog, ‘Experiencing the Cloud’:
Be aware of ZTE et al. and white-box (Shanzhai) vendors: Wake up call now for Nokia, soon for Microsoft, Intel, RIM and even Apple! [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Feb 21, 2011]
While the mainstream business model for manufacturing and distributing mobile handsets remains leveraging the OBM/ODM/OEM/EMS model, a whole new paradigm has developed within China’s domestic market, according to a new report from Digitimes Research.
The local China-based industry called “Shanzhai,” but translated as “white box,” is based on small-scale or underground factories whose products are seldom sold through regular sales channels, but the scale of the market now rivals that of global top-10 brands or major Chinese brands in the domestic China market, Digitimes Research pointed out. The “white-box” industry currently accounts for more than 100 million handset shipments, and some players in the market, such as K-Touch (Beijing Tianyu Communication Equipment) and Gionee have made the leap to become recognized brands.
…
According to MediaTek, the upcoming handset solution, codenamed as MT6252, supports serial flash memory and is cost efficient for handset makers as it uses lesser passive devices and smaller printed circuit board than existing solutions. Also, the MediaTek solution supports four-SIM, four-standby mobile phones, convincing the mainland`s home-grown handset makers including Gionee Communications Equipment, Ragentek Communication Technology Co., Ltd. and Leatek Technologies International Co., Ltd. to support it.
Boosting the MediaTek MT6575 success story with the MT6577 announcement – UPDATED with MT6588/83 coming early 2013 in Q42012 and 8-core MT6599 in 2013 [June 27, July 27, Sept 11-13, Sept 26, Oct 2, 2012]
Digitimes Research believes that market share rankings for the China smartphone market will change significantly during 2012. Samsung and Apple will take the top two places, while the big four China-based brands –Huawei, ZTE, Lenovo and Coolpad – will take third to sixth places, whileNokia will drop to seventh; these seven firms will collectively account for 85% of shipments.
In other words, the many other brands hoping to seize a share of the market will essentially be confined to competing for a potential market of just 15% of overall shipments or around 21 million handsets. Given such a situation, Digitimes Research projects that many of China’s best known smaller brandssuch as Xiaomi, TCL, Gionee, Tianyu, Oppo and BBK will see shipments of no more than a few million handsets.
…
Industry sources claim that China’s smartphone prices could drop to RMB 600 in H2 2012 due to increasing availability of low-priced smartphone chips. Smartphones featuring Taiwanese fabless semiconductor company MediaTek’s (MTK) MT6573 processor are available on B2C e-commerce sites such as Taobao and Paipai for RMB 800 and below. MediaTek’s MT6575 chipset, released in March, has already appeared in handsets from domestic handset vendors such as Lenovo (0992.HK), Gionee, ZTE (0763.HK; 000063.SZ), and Yulong (Coolpad), as well as foreign brands such as Motorola. The MT6575 is currently available for between RMB 1,000 to RMB 1,500. Taiwanese chipmaker MStar Semiconductor plans to release its first dual-core chipset solution for RMB 1,000 smartphones next week.
The low priced, Android based smartphones of China will change the global market [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Sept 10, 2012]
Stellar growth sees China take 27% of global smart phone shipments, powered by domestic vendors [Canalys press release, Aug 2, 2012] – Android is the clear platform of choice, accounting for 81% of Chinese shipments … Local tier-one vendors have worked hard in recent quarters to greatly improve their brand resonance among consumers and to expand and enhance their relationships and influence within operators,’ said Canalys Research Director for China, Nicole Peng. ‘But the tier-two vendors — the likes of Oppo, K-Touch and Gionee — have also stamped their mark, boosting smart phone shipments into tier-three and tier-four cities, predominantly through the open channels. As feature phone vendors, they already have established partnerships and strong brand awareness. These domestic vendors are making significant progress transitioning their portfolios and customer bases to be more focused on smart phones.’
Apple Should Take The $199 Chinese Smartphone Seriously [Seeking Alpha, Sept 6, 2012] At a time when China is set to overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest smartphone market, little-known Chinese firms are prepared to battle it out for market dominance with the maker of the game-changing iPhone, Apple (AAPL). … There are a number of Chinese brands offering similar capabilities, nominally, as the iPhone at half the price, most of them using a forked version of Google’s (GOOG) Android. The names include ZTE Corp., Lenovo Group, and other small private firms like Xiaomi, Gionee, and Meizu Technology. Even cheaper smartphones are offered by Alibaba Group, Shanda Interactive, and Baidu (BIDU) for fewer than ¥1,000 (~$150 U.S.).
MediaTek MT6589 quad-core Cortex-A7 SoC with HSPA+ and TD-SCDMA is available for Android smartphones and tablets of Q1 delivery [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, Dec 12, 2012]
Currently Oppo, ZTE, Huawei, Lenovo, Gionee and even Sony have confirmed to be working on phones using the new quad-core CPU, with prices from some smaller brands expected to start at around $200.
Eight-core MT6592 for superphones and big.LITTLE MT8135 for tablets implemented in 28nm HKMG are coming from MediaTek to further disrupt the operations of Qualcomm and Samsung [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, July 20, 2013]
[Part 2] MediaTek to push 8 small cores, the mystery [ESM 国际电子商情 (International Electronic Business), July 18, 2013] exclusive interview … [with] Zhu Shangzu (朱尚祖), MediaTek Global Smartphone General Manager … Judging from the current situation, customers of high-end flagship phones are still using the products of the competitors, but there is flagship in our quad-core case as well, and OPPO, Vivo and GiONEE and other quad-core phones are also very popular. Our next goal is to get the customers of flagship machines using our platform via helping customers to achieve stronger performance on the big screen multimedia.
From current media reports:
Gionee and Opera get more people connected [Opera press release, Jan 24, 2013]
Opera Software and Gionee, one of the TOP 3 mobile phone brand in China and famous global smartphone solution supplier, are working together to get more people connected with the Opera Mini mobile phone browser.
Opera Mini will be pre-installed in Gionee’s Android-based smartphones to give Gionee users quick access to the internet. These handsets are already available in Vietnam and Nigeria.
Gionee always highlights innovation and makes continuous efforts to bring new features to its users, and is known as a leading provider of mobile phone solutions, products and services to global market.
“The trend that smartphones are replacing feature phones requires more of our inputs in high-end mobile platforms such as Android,” said William Lu, vice president, Gionee. “With a better browser for Android, Opera Mini, in the mix, we can bring better user experience to our customers.”
Opera is one of the most used mobile browsers with 229 million users worldwide. Opera Mini is designed for fast browsing on both 2G and 3G networks.
“The best possible user experience on any device and any network is what Opera works toward,” said Lars Boilesen, CEO, Opera Software. “With Opera Mini, Gionee will provide its users with all the advantages that Opera Mini users benefit from, including its speed and ease of use.”
Gionee has also launched Opera Mini in its Java and MRE based feature phones.
Lenovo, Huawei, Coolpad, Gionee, Xiaomi: 5 Chinese ‘Underdog’ Smartphone Brands Taking Your Sales [International Business Times, Feb 25, 2013]
Apple has been at the top of the smartphone industry since it came out with the iPhone. Five iterations later, it still holds a pretty big share of the industry. But lately, Chinese brands are making a name for themselves, starting in their own country.
…
Gionee
The good
Gionee’s flagship phone, Dream D1 features a 4.65-inch display with super AMOLED, a 1.2GHz Cortex A7 Processor, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean OS, 1 GB RAM, 4 GB of Rom with microSD card, an 8-megapixel rear camera, and a 1-megapixel front camera, reports GoTechMax.
The bad
Aside from the lower-than-normal pixel count of the camera, Gionee’s Dream D1 also has an HD 720p display, so you can’t expect full HD. Otherwise, it gives a pretty solid run for a phone that’s rumored to be sold at Rs 10,000 in India (approximately $185 USD), reports Droidify.
…
Cornucopia of Choices Spurs Smartphone Market to Double by End of 2017 [IHS iSuppli press release, July 17, 2013]
…
Apple’s iPhone franchise appears to be stalling as first-quarter shipments of 37.4 million fell below expectations. With the next iPhone model not expected until the second half of the year, there is a real possibility that the full-year 2013 sales volume of the iPhone may be essentially flat at around 150 million units, compared to 134 million units in 2012.
“The possible slowing growth of the iPhone and the rapid pace of competitive smartphones releases speak to the ferocious nature of the handset business, especially now as the market continues to pivot from a market dominated by lower-end handsets known as feature phones to one that is increasingly smartphone-centric,” Lam said.
Outshipped
The trend of deeper smartphone penetration continued in the fourth quarter of 2012 and the first quarter this year, as smartphones outshipped feature phones in the overall branded cellphone market.
After a seasonally high fourth quarter, which saw total mobile handset shipments topping 400 million units for the first time, handset shipments in the first quarter of 2013 contracted by nearly 50 million units quarter-over-quarter, keeping with seasonal sales trends.
Samsung continued its strong growth in the first quarter with a sequential increase of 9 million units, while brands such as Coolpad and Gionee outshipping the likes of HTC and Motorola in the first quarter.
Chinese smartphone OEMs were able to accomplish such growth on the back of a catalog of largely affordable smartphones, while Samsung rolled out a number of low-cost variants to its high-end flagship products.
These competitive forces, as well as changing consumer demand, will place pressures not only on Apple but also on other OEMs, IHS believes, forcing players to innovate and diversify smartphone offerings in order to continue growing.
…
Gionee To Launch Series Of Smart Phones In India [EFYTimes.com portal, Feb 19, 2013]
Established in 2002, Gionee is a specialized mobile device design company from China. Gionee over the years has believed in keeping Innovation as its Core Value Proposition which has helped the company’s growth over the last decade. Research & Development is an institution with over 2000 employees. A state of the art In house Manufacturing Unit ensures Gionee products deliver more than the best to its customers, creating new benchmarks of quality each time.
Gionee currently sells over 23 million handsets per year in China mainland and has been ranked No. 2 brand in the GSM market. With an investment of over 160 Million Dollars and 8000 employees, Gionee has a current annual production capacity of 40 million units. The company is already in the process of expansion with an area of 330,000 square meters, the Gionee Industrial Park is China’s largest and best managed mobile phone manufacturing facility unit on completion will have an annual production to hit 80 million units. Gionee’s export is in access of a million units monthly catering to well established brands overseas as an ODM.
Gionee will be launching its entire range of mobile devices in India, from feature phones to smart phones with a special focus on the smart phones. Gionee promises to offer its Indian customers the best in class experience, every time and would be available with its entire range of products for Indian customers by the end of Feb 2013. Gionee has also tied up 4 leading import and distribution and import partners including based out of Chandigarh, Jaipur, Kolkata & Bangaluru.
To support the India Operations Gionee has already set up an office in New Delhi and is in the process of building the core team. The India Office will help strengthen its brand presence by providing Marketing / Sales Support / Service Support to its Indian Partners & Consumers. The office will be playing a key role in product testing / validation and customization for the India Market. The India Office has already appointed Goosebumps as their Advertising agency and Intellect Digest as its Digital Media Partner.
Gionee has always believed in an integrated business approach and has therefore based its biz on its 3 pillars of strength being Own Design/ Own Manufacturing/ Own R&D. A close association with MediaTek and Qualcomm allows Gionee to offer a wide product portfolio covering both feature and smart phones. Living up to its name Gionee Meaning “Golden Quality” the brand has always kept quality and experience at the top. Tight partnerships with key Tier 1 suppliers and an innovative Sales & Marketing Approach have developed Brand Gionee.
Gionee started international branding in 2005 from mainland China and is now in the process of setting up its Brand business globally and having a strong presence in the Middle East, Northern Africa, Vietnam, Taiwan, Myanmar, Thailand and NOW India.
Gionee Dream D1 launched in India for Rs 17,999, features a 4.65-inch screen, quad-core processor and runs on Android Jelly Bean [BGR India, March 12, 2013]
Following UMI which recently launched the X2, Gionee, another Chinese mobile maker, has launched the Dream D1 in India. This 4.65-inch smartphone will be available by the end of this month at retail stores across the country for Rs 17,999 [$302].
The Dual-SIM Dream D1 sports a 4.65-inch Super AMOLED Plus HD (1280×720 pixels) display and is powered by a 1.2GHz quad-core Cortex A7 processor, PowerVR Series5XT GPU and 1GB RAM. The phone also includes features like 8-megapixel rear camera with LED flash and support for 720p video recording, VGA front camera, 4GB of internal memory which can be expanded up to 32GB and a 2,100mAH battery. On the software side of things the Dream D1 has a built-in Digital Theatre System (DTS) Sound for enhanced audio and runs on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.
The phone is priced at a slightly higher price than the UMI X2, LAVA Q800 and the Micromax Canvas HD that offer similar features.
Gionee Elife E6 with 5-inch 1080p display announced, coming soon to India [Fone Arena, July 10, 2013]
Gionee has finally announced the most expected Elife E6 at an event in China just now. The Elife E6 packs a 5-inch (1920 x 1080 pixels) display based on one-glass solution (OGS+) technology, powered by a 1.5 GHz quad-core Mediatek MT6589T processor and runs on Amigo ROM Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean). It packs a 13-megapixel rear camera with f2.2 wide angle lens, BSI sensor, LED flash and a 5-megapixel front-facing camera with f2.4 wide angle lens. The phone is 7.9mm thick and has just 2.54mm thin bezel around the display. It weighs just 128 grams. It has DTS surround sound technology and has dedicated Yamaha audio chip for enhanced audio experience.
The phone has CABC screen brightness regulation technology that automatically reduces screen brightness automatically and the synchronization heartbeat technology that reduces application wake up time) to save power. The phone packs a 2000 mAh battery with intelligent power meter that minimizes charging and discharging errors.
At the launch Gionee listed India in the global launch countries among several countries. So we can expect the phone to launch in India soon. Gionee launched the Elife E5 in India recently.
…
Eight-core MT6592 for superphones and big.LITTLE MT8135 for tablets implemented in 28nm HKMG are coming from MediaTek to further disrupt the operations of Qualcomm and Samsung
Updates
Update: The Power of 8: MediaTek True Octa-Core [mediateklab YouTube channel, July 29, 2013]
Update: MT6592—The world’s first true octa-core SOC with scalable eight-core processing [product page, March 13, 2014]
Overview
MediaTek MT6592 is the world’s first heterogeneous computing SOC with scalable eight-core processing for superior multi-tasking, industry-leading multimedia features and excellent performance-per-watt. Based on 28nm HPM (High-Performance Mobile) process technology, MT6592 has eight CPU cores, each capable of clock speeds up to 2GHz.
Features
- ARM® Cortex®-A7 processor (1.7GHz or 2GHz)
- 28nm HPM process technology
- MAGE 3D graphics engine
- UMTS / HSPA+ R8 / TD-SCDMA / EDGE / LTE
- 801.11a/b/g/n, Bluetooth, GPS, FM tuner
- 16MP camera image signal processor
- Full HD H.265 / VP9 and Ultra HD H.264 video playback
- ARM Mali™ GPU (700MHz)
- MediaTek ClearMotion™ video enhancement
Update: [€147.18] Cubot X6 OctaCore MT6592 Phone Ultimate Slim Design 5″ OGS HD Retina [arif rachman YouTube channel, March 1, 2014]
Cubot X6 OctaCore MT6592 Ultimate Slim Design
Please follow the link below to see the full specification
http://bit.ly/CubotX6This is the latest phone from Cubot. Well.. the phone has the latest MT6592 1.7GHz processor. 28nm process, with quad core mali 450 GPU. Frequency is up to 700MHz. It supports full HD video with wide screen decoding format.
The true eight core processor can run simultaneously through advanced scheduling algorithm, dynamic temperature control and power management technology to optimize workload distribution to each core. When handling multiple tasks and heavy duty needs, achieve the peak performance of full eight core. At light load, you can turn off the core, the ultimate energy saving idle. It means substantial increase in cell phone battery life.
The Mali 450 graphics processor, overall performance is up to twice of the previous Mali 400. It supports full-HD 60fps. The triangles per second and render is 152M 2.8G pixels. Should be easy to run 3D games, smooth playback of 1080 HD videos. It also has a built in powerful MAGE 3D engine.
The front camera is 5 mega pixels while the back camera is 8 mega pixels. The camera is equipped with five pieces of high precision glass structure, which can effectively filter infrared blue glass. This is to achieve the level of professional SLR camera. Far better than ordinary lenses. The phone uses Sony sensor with latest 13Mega-Pixel CMOS Image Sensor.
In a week, the phone will be available at banggood for only $184.99 with free shipping worldwide! That’s an octa core phone below 200$ price tag! Not cheap enough?
Leave your email to get referred and get 10$ discount! Cheapest price out there!
Please follow the link below to see the full specification
http://bit.ly/CubotX6
IllusionMage [Wikipedia, excerpted on March 15, 2014]
IllusionMage is a paid for 3D modeling, animation, and rendering software packages comprising the core engine of Blender, an open-source, 3D software suite, and bundled with materials related to Blender.
Other names this bundle has gone under are IllusionMage3D, 3DMagix, and 3DMagixPro.[1]
All materials and software included are freely available from other sources. The marketing of this program includes images that were stolen from other sources, often created with competing 3D applications. The image of the alleged creator of the software, Seth Avery, is a random stock photo.[2]
Criticism
IllusionMage has come under fire by many prominent Blender news sites and figures, including Ton Roosendaal, the founder of the Blender Foundation[3][4]
Related
“Illusion Mage & 3D Magix Pro (affiliate) domain names” Topic: Illusion Mage & 3D Magix Pro *is* a scam. KatsBits Forum. Retrieved 2 October 2011.
“Handsome young man isolated over white”. Laflor Photography via iStockPhoto. Retrieved 8 May 2012.
January 2011 Blender Foundation Press Release
“3DMagix and IllusionMage, scam or open source leeches?”. BlenderNation. Retrieved 30 September 2011.
Update: 联发科平板四核心MT8135 官方成绩曝光 (MediaTek MT8135 quad-core tablet exposure Official Results) [ 驱动之家 (MyDrivers.com), July 29, 2013]
Update: MediaTek’s Quad-core Tablet SoC MT8135 : Performance Benchmark [mediateklab YouTube channel, July 19, 2013]
Update: MediaTek Introduces Industry Leading Tablet SoC, MT8135 [press release, July 29, 2013]
TAIWAN, Hsinchu – July 29, 2013 – MediaTek Inc., (2454: TT), a leading fabless semiconductor company for wireless communications and digital multimedia solutions, today announced its breakthrough MT8135 system-on-chip (SoC) for high-end tablets. The quad-core solution incorporates two high-performance ARM Cortex™-A15 and two ultra-efficient ARM Cortex™-A7 processors, and the latest GPU from Imagination Technologies, the PowerVR™ Series6. Complemented by a highly optimized ARM® big.LITTLE™ processing subsystem that allows for heterogeneous multi-processing, the resulting solution is primed to deliver premium user experiences. This includes the ability to seamlessly engage in a range of processor-intensive applications, including heavy web-downloading, hardcore gaming, high-quality video viewing and rigorous multitasking – all while maintaining the utmost power efficiency.
In line with its reputation for creating innovative, market-leading platform solutions, MediaTek has deployed an advanced scheduler algorithm, combined with adaptive thermal and interactive power management to maximize the performance and energy efficiency benefits of the ARM big.LITTLE™ architecture. This technology enables application software to access all of the processors in the big.LITTLE cluster simultaneously for a true heterogeneous experience. As the first company to enable heterogeneous multi-processing on a mobile SoC, MediaTek has uniquely positioned the MT8135 to support the next generation of tablet and mobile device designs.
“ARM big.LITTLE™ technology reduces processor energy consumption by up to 70 percent on common workloads, which is critical in the drive towards all-day battery life for mobile platforms,” said Noel Hurley, vice president, Strategy and Marketing, Processor Division, ARM. “We are pleased to see MediaTek’s MT8135 seizing on the opportunity offered by the big.LITTLE architecture to enable new services on a heterogeneous processing platform.”
“The move towards multi-tasking devices requires increased performance while creating greater power efficiency that can only be achieved through an optimized multi-core system approach. This means that multi-core processing capability is fast becoming a vital feature of mobile SoC solutions. The MT8135 is the first implementation of ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture to offer simultaneous heterogeneous multi-processing. As such, MediaTek is taking the lead to improve battery life in next-generation tablet and mobile device designs by providing more flexibility to match tasks with the right-size core for better computational, graphical and multimedia performance,” said Mike Demler, Senior Analyst with The Linley Group.
The MT8135 features a MediaTek-developed four-in-one connectivity combination that includes Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS and FM, designed to bring highly integrated wireless technologies and expanded functionality to market-leading multimedia tablets. The MT8135 also supports Wi-Fi certified Miracast™ which makes multimedia content sharing between devices remarkably easier.
In addition, the tablet SoC boasts unprecedented graphics performance enabled by its PowerVR™ Series6 GPU from Imagination Technologies. “We are proud to have partnered with MediaTek on their latest generation of tablet SoCs” says Tony King-Smith, EVP of marketing, Imagination. “PowerVR™ Series6 GPUs build on Imagination’s success in mobile and embedded markets to deliver the industry’s highest performance and efficient solutions for graphics-and-compute GPUs. MediaTek is a key lead partner for Imagination and its PowerVR™ Series6 GPU cores, so we expect the MT8135 to set an important benchmark for high-end gaming, smooth UIs and advanced browser-based graphics-rich applications in smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. Thanks to our PowerVR™ Series6 GPU, we believe the MT8135 will deliver five-times or more the GPU-compute-performance of the previous generation of tablet processors.”
“At MediaTek, our goal is to enable each user to take maximum advantage of his or her mobile device. The implementation and availability of the MT8135 brings an enjoyable multitasking experience to life without requiring users to sacrifice on quality or energy. As the leader in multi-core processing solutions, we are constantly optimizing these capabilities to bring them into the mainstream, so as to make them accessible to every user around the world,” said Joe Chen, GM of the Home Entertainment Business Unit at MediaTek.
The MT8135 is the latest SoC in MediaTek’s highly successful line of quad-core processors, which since its launch last December has given rise to more than 350 projects and over 150 mobile device models across the world. This latest solution, along with its comprehensive accompanying Reference Design, will like their predecessors fast become industry standards, particularly in the high-end tablet space.
Update: Optimized big. LITTLE – MediaTek [MediaTek, July 29, 2013]
Multi-core system-on-chip (SoC) design has brought tremendous benefits to mobile device users by offering seamless engagement in rigorous multitasking. To overcome the issue with high energy consumption and thermal readings, MediaTek is deploying an advanced scheduler algorithm, combined with adaptive thermal and interactive power management to maximize the performance and energy efficiency benefits of the ARM big.LITTLE™ architecture. The technology will allow applications software to simultaneously access all the processors in the big.LITTLE™ cluster for a true heterogeneous experience, activating both of its CPU clusters concurrently for extreme performance.
Optimized big. LITTLE™
ARM big.LITTLE™ processing is designed to address the energy and thermal issues associated with multi-core system-on-chip (SoC) solutions. It allows for the creation of dual-cluster SoCs, with one more powerful (big) cluster for processing intensive tasks and a less powerful (LITTLE) cluster for executing routine functions. MediaTek is among the first SoC designers to have adopted this ground-breaking technology. Unlike its counterparts, however, the company has done so in a manner that affords device users the utmost energy and thermal efficiency rates.
Enabling Heterogeneous Multi-Processing
Of the three big.LITTLE™ software models that can be integrated, for example, MediaTek chose the Heterogeneous Multi-Processing [developed and named by ARM as Global Task Scheduling (GTS), also known earlier as big.LITTLE MP, see in the last section of this post in detail] approach, which unlike the other two methods – Cluster- [as was implemented in Galaxy S4 by Samsung with Exynos 5 SoC having 4xA7+4xA15 configuration] and CPU-Migration [IKS (In Kernel Switcher) developed by Linaro, see in the last section of this post in detail] – allows for individual cores to be activated as and when needed for maximum efficiency.
However, use of the most versatile model isn’t MediaTek’s only advantage. In line with its reputation for creating innovative, market-leading platform solutions, MediaTek has deployed an advanced scheduler algorithm, combined with adaptive thermal and interactive power management to maximize the performance and energy efficiency benefits of the ARM big.LITTLE™ architecture.
The technology will allow applications software to simultaneously access all the processors in the big.LITTLE™ cluster for a true heterogeneous experience, activating both of its CPU clusters concurrently for extreme performance.
In comparison, the current octa-core SoC solution, utilizes one of the more inferior big.LITTLE™ software models. As a result, the processor is not as efficient as it otherwise might be.
As the first company to enable Heterogeneous Multi-Processing on a mobile SoC in the form of its MT8135 Reference Design, MediaTek is uniquely positioned to support the next wave of tablet and mobile devices.
Update: Optimized ARM big.LITTLETM – MediaTek Enables ARM big.LITTLETM Heterogeneous Multi-Processing Technology in Mobile SoCs [MediaTek Position Paper in PDF, July 29, 2013]
MediaTek MT8135 brings PowerVR Series6 GPUs to a mobile device near you [With Imagination Blog, July 29, 2013]
Over the years, our close partnership with MediaTek has resulted in the release of some very innovative platforms that have set important benchmarks for high-end gaming, smooth UIs and advanced browser-based graphics-rich applications in smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. Two recent examples include:
- MT8125/MT8389, an extension of MediaTek’s highly successful quad-core portfolio which integrates power-efficient PowerVR Series5XT graphics that deliver compelling multimedia features and sophisticated user experiences
- MT8135, the first in a series of PowerVR Series6-based mobile chipsets that are due to be announced in the second half of this year
MediaTek has been steadily establishing itself as an important global player for consumer products like smartphones, tablets and smart TVs, with a strong foothold in Latin America and Asia, and a rapidly growing presence in Europe and North America. Earlier this year, MediaTek introduced MT8125, one of their most successful tablet chipsets for high-end multimedia capabilities.
While MT8125 has been extremely popular with OEMs including Asus, Acer or Lenovo, MT8135 has the potential to consolidate Mediatek’s existing customer base and open up exciting new opportunities thanks to the advanced feature set provided by Imagination’s PowerVR ‘Rogue’ architecture.
MT8135 is a quad-core SoC that aims for the middle- to high-end tier of the tablet OEM market. It supports a 4-in-1 connectivity package that includes Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS and FM radio, all developed in-house by MediaTek. Miracast is another important addition to the multimedia package, enabling devices using MT8135 to stream high-resolution content more easily to compatible displays, over wireless networks.
MT8135 incorporates a PowerVR G6200 GPU [from the block diagram corresponds to the PowerVR G6230] from Imagination that enables advanced mobile graphics and compute applications for the mainstream consumer market, including fast gaming, 3D navigation and location-based services, camera vision, image processing, augmented reality applications, and smooth, high-resolution user interfaces.
As MT8135-powered mobile devices start appearing in the market, developers will have access to new technologies and features introduced by our PowerVR Series6 family such as:
- our latest-generation tile based deferred rendering (TBDR) architecture implemented on universal scalable clusters (USC)
- high-efficiency compression technologies that reduce memory bandwidth requirements, including lossless geometry compression and PVRTC/PVRTC2 texture compression
- scalar processing to guarantee highest ALU utilization and easy programming
Thanks to the PowerVR G6200 GPU inside the MT8135 application processor, MediaTek brings high-quality, low-power graphics to unprecedented levels by delivering up to four times more ALU horsepower compared to MT8125, its PowerVR Series5XT-based predecessor. PowerVR G6200 fully supports a wide range of graphics APIs including OpenGL ES 1.1, 2.0 and 3.0, OpenGL 3.x, 4.x and DirectX 10_1, along with compute programming interfaces such as OpenCL 1.x, Renderscript and Filterscript.
By partnering up with Imagination, MediaTek has access to our industry-leading PowerVR graphics, worldwide technical support, and a strong ecosystem of Android developers capable of making the most of our technology. We look forward to shortly seeing our brand-new PowerVR Series6 GPUs in the hands of millions of consumers, and see MediaTek as one of our strategic partners for our latest generation PowerVR GPUs moving forward.
End of Updates
This report consists of the following parts:
- The latest MediaTek roadmap, high-end and OS strategy
- News reports about MT6592 and its first application
Update: MediaTek True Octa [MediaTek, July 23, 2013]
Efficient video playback:
When on decoding mode, the battery used for decoding HEVC (H.265) FHD video
can be reduced by up to 18 percent compared to current quad-core solutions
(from MediaTek True Octa-Core Position Paper [MediaTek, July 23, 2013])- What is new vs. my earlier The state of big.LITTLE processing [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, April 7, 2013] report
For the preceding smartphone SoC in the current roadmap see MediaTek MT6589 quad-core Cortex-A7 SoC with HSPA+ and TD-SCDMA is available for Android smartphones and tablets of Q1 delivery [‘Experiencing the cloud’, Dec 12, 2012]. For smartphone SoCs before that see Boosting the MediaTek MT6575 success story with the MT6577 announcement – UPDATED with MT6588/83 coming early 2013 in Q42012 and 8-core MT6599 in 2013 [‘Experiencing the cloud’, June 27, July 27, Sept 11-13, Sept 26, Oct 2, 2012]. Note that MT6588 was renamed MT6589 when was launched, as MT6599 would be renamed MT6592 now.
The latest MediaTek roadmap, high-end and OS strategy
Maybank Kim Eng just published in its MediaTek Closing In Fast [July 17, 2013] report the following two SoC roadmaps:
GPU for MT6592 smartphone SoCs (and presumably for MT6588 as well) will be Mali according to Zhu Shangzu (朱尚祖), MediaTek Global Smartphone General Manager in the [Part 2] MediaTek to push 8 small cores, the mystery [ESM 国际电子商情 (International Electronic Business), July 18, 2013] exclusive interview.
According to 28nm Technology [TSMC, June 21, 2011] description: The 28nm technology node of the TSMC foundry (which is used for manufacturing by MediaTek) has a high performance (HP) process as the first option to use high-k metal gate (HKMG) process technology. The 28nm low power with high-k metal gates (HPL) technology, as the second option, adopts the same gate stack as HP technology while meeting more stringent low leakage requirements with a trade of performance speed. Explanation: From about 10 µm (1971) to below 0.1 µm (100 nm) conventional silicon oxynitride as the gate insulator with polysilicon gate, so called poly/SiON gate stack, was used for CMOS technology. It was typically possible to scale down to 45 nm (2008), only TSMC was able to scale it down further to 28 nm in which most of the current 28nm SoCs from TSMC are produced. 
While Intel (and IBM) had to introduce high-K dielectric as the gate insulator with metal gate, so called High-k / Metal Gate stack, for the performance of their 45 nm products in 2008 (in order to continue with the Moore’s law in their realm) as you could see on the right (taken from Life With “Penryn” [DailyTech, Jan 27, 2007] interview with Mark Bohr, Intel Senior Fellow, and Steve Smith, Intel Vice President DEG Group Operations), TMSC could introduce that only on the 28nm node as described above. The HKMG based 28nm SoCs are much higher performance (or higher performance still with low power by HPL) as you could see from the 2GHz clockrate of the MT6592 (above) or MT8315 (below) vs. that of the convential poly/SiON counterparts, MT6589 and MT8389 with 1.2GHz.
Complementary post reminder: H2CY13: Upcoming next-gen Nexus 7, the ASUS MeMO Pad HD 7 “re-incarnation” at reduced by $50 price, dual/quad-core mid-range tablets from white-box vendors starting from $65 [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, July 5, 2013] in which there is plenty of information regarding the non high-end tablet SoCs, from MediaTek (MediaTek MT8125, MediaTek MT8377 and MediaTek MT8389) as well as competition from Allwinner and Rockchip. The pre-eminent ASUS MeMO Pad™ HD 7 described in detail there is using the MT8125 SoC, while the new Nexus 7 (to be announced before the ending of July) the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 Quad Core SoC. In that sense we got with that post not only a complete H2 competitive tablet market picture for mid-range but some information regarding the new Qualcomm high-end as well.
For the upcoming MT8135 tablet SoC it is known from the part 3 of the Zhu Shangzu interview that the quad-core configuration will be 2xA15+2xA7, which means a big.LITTLE architecture and quite probably the already mature ‘In Kernel Switcher’ (IKS) scheduler initially GTS with MediaTek’s “advanced scheduler algorithm, combined with adaptive thermal and interactive power management” and called Heterogeneous Multi-Processing (HMP) by MediaTek (see in the updates in front of the original post). But as As ARM already decided on the architecture of the other, more general ‘Global Task Scheduling’ (GTS) solution (see much below) I would assume that the proper hardware underpinnings for GTS will already be built in (unlike in the Samsung’s Exynos 5 SoC released before), so when the scheduler software will be mature enough it will run well on MT8135. The inclusion of just two cores of each (unlike in Exynos 5) is a very strong proof-point of that. As far as the GPU is concerned we know from Zhu Shangzu interview that an Imagination GPU will be used, therefore I will leave the next-generation SGX6XX (PowerVR Series6 or ‘Rogue’) indication in the above table. Update: It is the PowerVR G6200 GPU [from the block diagram corresponds to the PowerVR G6230] as you could see from Imagination block post published on the MT8135 announcement (July 29), and included here in front of the original post.
with the following commentary:
Strong fundamentals intact. Having exceeded its 2Q13 guidance so significantly, we believe MTK will continue to ride the strong momentum in 3Q13, perhaps growing its revenue by low-to-mid-teens QoQ or 30% YoY to chalk up another record high of TWD36-38b [US$1.2-1.27B]. Importantly, a better product mix and cost structure would help lift its profitability to ±44%. We expect MTK to ship 70-72m units of smart devices, up 25-30% QoQ, with quad-core APs and tablets making up nearly 50% of total shipment. The benefits of operating leverage should drive OPM past 20%, the highest since 3Q10. MTK is set to report its 2Q13 results in late July or early August and we forecast net profit of TWD6.8b [US$227M] (EPS: TWD5.02; Street: TWD6.3b), up over 80% QoQ and 100% YoY. GM is also likely to meet the high end of its guidance, ie, 43.5%, on richer mix and improved cost structure. Reported revenue of TWD33.3b, up almost 40% QoQ and 42%YoY, is already well ahead of guidance (TWD30-32b). However, we cut our FY13/14 earnings forecasts by 3% each to factor in the delay in merger with MStar and potential inventory correction in 4Q13/1Q14. MTK remains a key BUY in our tech space.
Closing in fast on QCOM. MTK has spared no efforts to enhance its smart device portfolio since 2H12 and further signs of acceleration are evident. It is introducing two high-end APs in 4Q13 – MT6588 and MT6592 – using 28nm HKMG and advanced graphic features. While the former is a quad-core AP operating at 1.7GHz, the latter is capable of running at 2GHz (when all eight core engines are turned on). In the absence of full details, we estimate MT6592 may perform closer to Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 AP (used in Galaxy S4 and HTC One), while MT6588 should outshine Snapdragon 400. MTK has won several international OEMs with MT6589 and with MT6588/6592, its chances of penetrating tier-1 OEMs have increased significantly. In addition, it will sample its high-end 4G/LTE/LTE-TDSCDMA modem chipset in anticipation of the launch of 4G network in China later this year. As for tablets, MTK’s latest APs MT8125/8389 were well-received and it is set to deliver the high-end MT8135 (big.Little design) in 3Q13. We expect its smartphone/tablet shipments to reach 200-225m/25m units in 2013.
In the same part of the interview Zhu Shangzu explained MediaTek’s high-end strategy as follows (as translated by Google and Bing with manual edits):
… I think the future of high-end smartphones innovation will focus on the expansion of big screen multimedia applications, and this is our direction. …
Judging from the current situation, customers of high-end flagship phones are still using the products of the competitors, but there is flagship in our quad-core case as well, and OPPO, Vivo and GiONEE and other quad-core phones are also very popular. Our next goal is to get the customers of flagship machines using our platform via helping customers to achieve stronger performance on the big screen multimedia.
Therefore, the 8-core MT6592 can be regarded as our first bugle call for moving towards the high-end market. Our mission is that one day customers can also recognize MediaTek as doing high-end flagship products. MT6592 is the first step, strictly speaking, it is not the most high-end platform, next we will move step by step towards the higher end.
Q: Why will MediaTek use eight small A7 cores as a generation of high-end platform, but did not choose to use four large A15 cores or four big and four small ones as a way to achieve the goal? This is also a question for the industry as there are many controversial issues with this.
For power, or performance per watt, we did a lot of investigation. Eight A7 cores is currently the best solution, and as through a process we designed to boost peak frequency of the A7 to 1.9-2Ghz, performance is also very strong.
Currently we chose a small core, because under the existing process, the larger the chip die size, the larger is the standby leakage, resulting in higher standby power consumption. For example, the A15 is the strongest core currently, but not in run-time power cosumption. Even if its frequency is pushed down to very low levels, there is still a larger leakage. Therefore, the larger is the area of a single-core, the larger is the overhead energy efficiency, and as long as the poweris on, there will be a greater leakage.
In addition, the 8-core CPU is just one aspect of improving the mobile multimedia experience. In fact, as we have been doing MediaTek digital TV for a long time, we will extend that digital TV competency here – some strong move for the smartphones. This is what other platform vendors can not do. In the 6592, for example, the latest HEVC codec will be integrated. [HEVC is a video compression standard, a successor to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC]
…
Although our MT6592 GPU is also using a ‘Deluxe’ Mali quad-core GPU, but in order for content developers to achieve better compatibility, our HEVC is a software solution via the 8-core CPU, it is not using a GPU- based software solution. Because there are some strong content developers who will use their own HEVC decode. Currently the ‘Deluxe’ quad-core GPU on 6592 is mainly used to perform large-scale games and to do some advanced UI.
[Part 3] How to plan the future in the tablet market?
Q: I do note that the MT6592 is now using a quad-core Mali GPU, while before the MediaTek mainstream used Imagination GPU. How would you rate these two companies’ products?
The Imagination company has been doing GPUs long time in its history, the architecture design is beautiful, more artistic. The initial architecture of Mali [from ARM] would be more rough, and therefore area and power consumption will be worse. But after nearly three years of time, Mali has made a lot of progress, both are learning from each other, and by now the levels of these two are equal. The future perspective is that ARM’s overall resources are somewhat more fully available.
Q: This year we have seen MediaTek to attack the tablet market, what is the plan for the future in the tablet market?
A: Our current strategy is to carry out a mobile phone product line extension.
At the end of July the launch of a tablet chip is expected: the MT8135, with 2xA15 +2xA7, still using an Imagination GPU [Update: It is the PowerVR G6200 GPU (from the block diagram corresponds to the PowerVR G6230) as you could see from Imagination block post published on the MT8135 announcement (July 29), and included here in front of the original post], and mainly targeting the high-end tablet market. A small reminder, our MT6572 is not suitable for tablet computers as the original definition did not take into account the application of flat-screen.
…
[Part 6] If Google Android OS will be converged how MediaTek will respond?
Q: There is also a very large concern, as the industry is worried that after doing their own hardware next year (e.g. Xphone, watches, glasses, etc.) whether Google will close the Android OS, i.e. to do a Pure Android later on, and don’t let OEMs to change it? MTK will also have a very big impact, what do you think? What is the MTK attitude on other free OS’s?
A: If Google OS will be closed and converged that will have a huge impact on us. But from what we observe and communicate with Google, they will not close the OS or converge it. Google’s profitability does not depend on OS, he is relying on the service for profit. By doing hardware Google also aims to promote his services, he is very happy to use someone else’s machine on their home services.
Of course, we will also be prepared, as we comprehesively examine and take into account the prevailing factors. We will use Windows as a second priority, while using Firefox [OS] and HTML5 as a secondary backup, by keeping track of them. Because we judge that the [Android] OS convergence from Google profitability point of view is very low, therefore our vote for these two emerging open OS’s is in the ‘not so urgent’ category, in addition to and outside of Android. The other focus is again on Windows Phone 8. For the moment, however, WP8 hardware configuration requirements are still higher (mainly memory), power consumption – after optimizing the gap with Android – is not too large.
…
News reports about MT6592 and its first application
Update: MediaTek True Octa [MediaTek, July 23, 2013]
Update: MediaTek True Octa [MediaTek, July 23, 2013]
Efficient video playback:
When on decoding mode, the battery used for decoding HEVC (H.265) FHD video
can be reduced by up to 18 percent compared to current quad-core solutions
(from MediaTek True Octa-Core Position Paper [MediaTek, July 23, 2013])
July 18 this information appeared on the English http://en.v5zn.com/ website of the related smartphone vendor as well: MediaTek MT6592’s first eight-core mobile phone exposure makes you believe [July 15, 2013] as translated by Google and Bing with manual edits
MediaTek so-called true eight-core processor MT6592 was announced not long ago, it is expected the first models equipped with processors to surface. It broke the news, that the domestic mobile phone manufacturer brand named after the 19th-century French writer Jules Verne [凡尔纳] has been determined to launch a flagship model “V8” quipped with the MT6592 processor.
Verne’s current main product is the “V5” model, equipped with a quad-core MediaTek MT6589, and a 5-inch 720p OGS full lamination screen, 1GB of RAM, 4GB storage, 8-megapixel back-illuminated camera, 2400 mAh Battery, with a list price of 999 yuan [$166].
V8 has not yet announced the exact configuration bit it is estimated to have about 5.5 inch 1080p screen, 2GB RAM, 32GB storage, 13 million pixels Sony stacked camera, higher capacity battery, etc., without these natural shot himself embarrassed flagship.
It looks like that cooperation between MediaTek and the domestic Shanzhai vendors remains close. As MT6589 has rocked the Main Street, MT6592 will soon become a standard, and “an eight-core” promotion will be overwhelming.
Incidentally recap: MT6592 uses eight Cortex-A7 architecture cores, clocked at up to 2.0GHz, with TSMC 28nm manufacturing, Antutu run is known as close to 30,000, but the graphics core has not been confirmed,
PowerVR SGX 544MP4/554MP4 are likely[it will be Mali, as communicated by MediaTek, see above].The marketing of the processor has begun to customers, but mass production will be in November, so if recent high profile publicity is to be fulfilled, certainly we will have a large sale early next year.
Company introduction [Jules Verne mobile phone, January 16, 2013] as translated by Google and Bing with manual edits
Shenzhen MINDRAY Platinum Communication Technology Ltd. is is specialized in products development, production, sales and service of intelligent mobile terminals of high-tech companies. Under the “Jules Verne VOWNEY” brand the company is to create a mobile intelligent terminal brand.
MINDRAY Platinum company with “intelligent life” as the brand mission, is to “enhance the user experience, to help people grasp the development opportunities” as the goal, trying to make Jules Verne a trustworthy, continuous innovation and smart moves life guide. Every effort, just as long as you!
Jules Verne mobile phone network direct sales, stripping agents layers, increases direct benefits to consumers. We are committed to allow more consumers to have a better quality of life with an intelligent terminal.
The “Jules Verne VOWNEY ” brand aspires to be able to improve the quality of life for mobile users intelligent terminal INITIATIVE persons.
is to become quality of life can improve the user moves Smart The Terminal Guide. Lead you into “Slide 5.0”.
“Verne VOWNEY “brand aspires to be able to improve the quality of life for mobile users intelligent terminal INITIATIVE persons. I lead you into the “Slide 5.0″era.
Brand interpretation
Jules Verne: a derivative of intelligent life???
English explanation ： VOWNEY
V ： value— Value
O ： opportunity— Opportunity
W ： worth— It is worth
N ： new— New
E ： e— Mobile Internet
Y ： you— YouJules Verne is to ” create a new life guided smart” as the goal, and strive to become a trusted, sustainable and innovative mobile phone brand, all efforts, just because of you!
Mediatek MT6592 8 core processors coming by the end of July! [Gizchina.com]
Reports out of Taiwan state that Mediatek will launch the MT6592 8-core processor by the end of July.
There was word that Mediatek were working on an 8 core chipset late last year, but like many we believed it had been placed on the back burner while they prepared their LTE chip. This seems to be wrong though as sources in Taiwan claim that Mediatek’s 8-core processor will arrive before the end of this month!
The MT6592 chip will be made up of 8 Cortex-A7, 28nm processor clocked at a frequency of up to 2Ghz! Early tests have the 8 core MT6592 scoring up to 30,000 points in Antutu which is more than Samsung’s 8 core Exynos 5410 processor.
The first batch of these new processors will be ready for manufacturers to begin development by the end of July, while Mediatek are preparing full-scale manufacture for November!
If everything goes to plan we can expect powerful 8 core phones from Tier 1 Chinese phone manufacturers by December!
MediaTek to launch true 8-core, 2GHz MT6592 chipset in November? [Engadget, July 2, 2013]
Samsung may already have its 8-core Exynos 5 Octa offering, but the original “big.LITTLE” implementation means only up to four cores work together at any time — either the Cortex-A15 quartet or its lesser Cortex-A7 counterpart. In other words, we’d rather rename the chipset range to something like “Exynos 5 Quad Dual.” But according to recent intel coming from Taipei and Shenzhen, it looks like Taiwan’s MediaTek is well on its way to ship a true 8-core mobile chipset in Q4 this year.
The first mention of this 2GHz, Cortex-A7 MT6592 chip came from UDN earlier today. The Taiwanese publication claims MediaTek started introducing its first octa-core product to clients last week, and it’s expected to enter mass production using TSMC’s 28nm process in November. The first mobile devices to carry this hot piece of silicon may hit the market in early 2014 — hopefully just in time for the Chinese New Year shopping rush.
UDN adds that the MT6592 scored close to 30,000 on AnTuTu, which is pretty high but still some distance behind Qualcomm’s 2.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800. Of course, chances are MediaTek’s offering will be much cheaper, as evidenced by all the affordable MediaTek-powered devices in China these days.
In a separate article from last week, UDN pointed out that judging by over a hundred job openings released by MediaTek last month, the company is clearly putting an emphasis on 4G LTE technology, alongside GPU and Android development. The publication also quoted chairman Tsai Ming-kai saying he will launch an LTE solution in Q4 this year, by which point MediaTek will only be one or two years behind its competitors.
The second piece of info came from HQ Research analyst Pan Jiutang, who posted an alleged spy shot of MediaTek’s upcoming roadmap (pictured left). There the octa-core MT6592 is listed with a clock speed of 1.7GHz to 2GHz, along with 1080p 30fps video decoding support. There’s also a quad-core 1.7GHz MT6588 accompanying its octa-core sibling in the same period on the timeline, though it appears to be just a faster version of the current 1.2GHz MT6589.
For the sake of phone manufacturers, both new chipsets will apparently be pin-to-pin compatible with the quad-core 1.3GHz MT6582 due Q3 this year, thus lowering R&D costs. Better yet, the roadmap also states that the MT6290 LTE modem — as teased by Tsai above — will be compatible with these three chipsets.
With MediaTek quickly catching up ahead of China’s eventual TD-LTE launch, Qualcomm will need to tread carefully to keep its Chinese QRD partners happy.
[Thanks, Ryan!]
Update: It’s worth noting that ARM’s eventual “big.LITTLE MP” implementation will allow all eight cores to run simultaneously, but the Exynos 5 Octa currently doesn’t support this. Thanks, UncleAlbert!
SOURCE: Sina Weibo (login required), UDN (1), (2)
What is new vs. my earlier
The state of big.LITTLE processing [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, April 7, 2013] report
Power scheduler design proposal [by Morten Rasmussen from ARM on Linux kernel mailing list, July 9, 2013]
This patch set is an initial prototype aiming at the overall power-aware scheduler design proposal that I previously described <http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1508480>.
The patch set introduces a cpu capacity managing ‘power scheduler’ which lives by the side of the existing (process) scheduler. Its role is to monitor the system load and decide which cpus that should be available to the process scheduler. Long term the power scheduler is intended to replace the currently distributed uncoordinated power management policies and will interface a unified platform specific power driver obtain power topology information and handle idle and P-states. The power driver interface should be made flexible enough to support multiple platforms including Intel and ARM.
This prototype supports very simple task packing and adds cpufreq wrapper governor that allows the power scheduler to drive P-state selection. The prototype policy is absolutely untuned, but this will be addressed in the future. Scalability improvements, such as avoid iterating over all cpus, will also be addressed in the future.
Thanks,
Morten
From <http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1508480>
…
+-----------------+ | | +----------+ current load | Power scheduler |<----+ cpufreq | +--------->| sched/power.c +---->| driver | | | | +----------+ | +-------+---------+ | ^ | +-----+---------+ | | | | | | available capacity | Scheduler |<--+----+ (e.g. cpu_power) | sched/fair.c | | | +--+| +---------------+ || ^ || | v| +---------+--------+ +----------+ | task load metric | | cpuidle | | arch/* | | driver | +------------------+ +----------+…
Linux Kernel News – June 2013 [by Shuah Khan in Linux Journal , July 9, 2013]
As always the Linux kernel community has been busy moving the Linux mainline to another finish line and the stable and extended releases to the next bump in their revisions to fix security and bug fixes. It is a steady and methodical evolution process which is intriguing to follow. Here is my take on the happenings in the Linux kernel world during June 2013.
Mainline Release (Linus’s tree) News
Linus Torvalds released Linux 3.10. You can read what Linus Torvalds had to say about this release in his release announcement athttp://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1306.3/04336.html
Two notable features in this release are improved SSD caching and better Radeon graphics driver Power Management.
…
Power efficient scheduling design
Ingo Molnar (Red Hat, x86 maintainer), Morten Rasmussen (ARM, power mgmt.), Priti Murthy (IBM, scheduler), Rafael Wysocki (Intel, Linux PM, and Linux ACPI maintainer) and Arjan van de Ven discussed the proposed power-aware or power-efficient scheduler design and what’s the best way to integrate it into the kernel.
Power management and the ability to balance performance and power efficiency is important and complex. It is not just about scheduler or cpus. It spans I/O devices that transition into lower-power states and how costly it is to bring them back to fully active state when needed. There is latency involved in these transitions. As always, Linux developers reach consensus to solve complex problems such as these and come up with path to get to the goal taking small steps towards that goal. Here is another example of that process at work.
Power-efficient scheduler work has been active for a few months now. Several RFC patches have been floated and discussed. This work is being pursued very actively in x86 space by IBM and in ARM space by ARM. The premise is that, if scheduler could pack tasks on a few cores and keep these cores fully utilized and, transition other cores to low power states, when the scheduling goal is power savings over performance. In other words, instead of keeping all the cores active, scheduler could consolidate tasks on a few cores and transition other cores to low-power states for better power efficiency.
It is easier said than done. Scheduler is at a higher level and would not be the best judge of making decisions on transitioning CPUs to idle states and deciding on the ideal frequency they should be running at. These decisions are better left to platform drivers that have the specific knowledge of the platform and architecture as they are complex and very hardware specific. In other words, power aware scheduler tuned to run well on x86 platforms will not work as well or could fail miserably on ARM platforms.
Scheduler has to accomplish load balancing as well as power balancing in a way to meet performance and power goals and do it well on all platforms. A generic scheduler doesn’t have to control and drive low-power state decisions on a platform. However, the goal of power-efficient scheduler is to set higher level abstracted policies that would work on all platforms. After a long and productive discussion, there is a consensus and here is the summary:
- A new kernel configuration option CONFIG_SCHED_POWER to enable/disable the power scheduler feature. Power scheduler is totally inactive, when CONFIG_SCHED_POWER is disabled, and fully active when CONFIG_SCHED_POWER is enabled. The important goal is evolving the power scheduler feature without disrupting and destabilizing the current scheduler.
- Work on a generic power scheduler with hardware and platform abstractions that will work well on big little ARM, x86, and other platforms. Avoid platform specific power policies that could lead to duplication of functionality in platform specific power drivers.
Please check the Linux Foundation site for presentations made at the Linux Collaboration Summit back in April 2013 on this topic. Here is the link to Jonathan Corbet’s blog on this topic.
http://www.linux.com/news/featured-blogs/200-libby-clark/715486-boosting……
From: big.LITTLE Software Update [by George Grey on Linaro Blog, July 10, 2013]
There are also two software models now available, that ARM and Linaro have developed to enable control of workloads, performance, and power management on big.LITTLE SoCs.
The first is the IKS [In Kernel Switcher, also known as CPU Migration]software, developed by Linaro, that treats each pair of Cortex-A7 and Cortex-A15 cores as a single ‘virtual’ core. On a multicore SoC each pair is treated as 1 of n virtual symmetric cores by the Linux kernel.
Core Software Configuration for IKS (4+4)
Using existing mechanisms in the Linux kernel for each pair the cpufreq driver controls whether the Cortex-A7 is active (for low power) or the Cortex-A15 is active (for maximum performance). Overall maximum performance and throughput on a 4+4 core SoC is from 4 Cortex-A15s. The key attribute of IKS is that it relies on existing well-understood mechanisms in the Linux kernel and it is easy to implement, test and characterize in a production environment.
The second is the Global Task Scheduling (GTS) [also known as big.LITTLE MP or Heterogeneous Multi-Processing (HMP)] software developed (and now named) by ARM. This is known in Linaro as big.LITTLE MP. Using GTS all of the big and LITTLE cores are available to the Linux kernel for scheduling tasks. We are very proud that Linaro has contributed to ARM’s development of the GTS software, and that it is now publicly available in Linaro builds. ARM and Linaro recommend GTS for new products, and Linaro members are actively planning product deployments using this solution.
Core Software Configuration for GTS (4+4)
…
The big.LITTLE MP patch set creates a list of Cortex-A15 and Cortex-A7 cores that is used to pick the target core for a particular task. Then, using runnable load average statistics, the Linux scheduler is modified to track the average load of each task, and to migrate tasks to the best core. High intensity tasks are migrated to the Cortex-A15 core(s) and are also marked as high intensity tasks for more efficient future allocations. Low intensity tasks remain resident on the Cortex-A7 core(s).
IKS and GTS are now publicly available in Linaro monthly engineering releases for the ARM TC2 Versatile Express hardware, and in Linaro’s interim Long Term Supported Kernel (LSK) build. Both will also be incorporated into the first full Linaro LSK, which will be based on the next Linux Foundation, Greg Kroah-Hartman designated, Long Term Supported (LTS) kernel.
…
Until GTS functionality is fully upstream, ARM is supporting the big.LITTLE MP patch set for its licensees, leveraging Linaro’s public monthly and Linaro LSK builds, so that it is available to all ARM licensees for product integration and deployment. Linaro also expect to provide a topic branch for the latest work available on the upstream GTS implementation for interested developers.
… ARM and Linaro now recommend product development and deployment to be based on the GTS solution. However, there are some cases where hardware limitations or a requirement for the traditional Linux scheduler (for example in some embedded applications) may lead to IKS still being required.
Future Work
Power management software in Linaro is worked on by the Power Management Working Group. Other activities within the Group will enable additional power savings on ARM multi-core devices. One current project worth highlighting is the work being done by Vincent Guittot on small-task packing. Normally the Linux kernel will spread running tasks over all the available CPU cores. On a handset in standby, or even when being used with low activity, there may be a number of housekeeping and other small tasks that run in the background or relatively infrequently and therefore keep cores active unnecessarily. If “small” tasks can be migrated to one core, then the other cores could be made idle or even turned off completely, potentially resulting in significant power savings. This feature is expected to offer improved power management to systems based on symmetric multi-core SoCs (for example dual or quad-core Cortex-A7 or Cortex-A15 parts), as well as big.LITTLE SoCs.
While the current big.LITTLE efforts are focused on Cortex-A15 and Cortex-A7, the techniques being implemented today for 32-bit systems are already being run on 64-bit models. We therefore expect to see the GTS software running on 64-bit Cortex-A57 and Cortex-A53 based big.LITTLE SoCs as soon as they become available.
Real Life Results
ARM has published further information on big.LITTLE configurations and performance in a blog entry here [Ten Things to Know About big.LITTLE [Brian Jeff on SoC Design blog of ARM, June 18, 2013]].
The first commercial products based on big.LITTLE are certain international versions of the latest Galaxy S4 phone from Linaro member, Samsung. Samsung-LSI provide an ‘Octa-core’ 4+4 big.LITTLE chip for this phone. As has been publicly noted, the current generation of hardware cannot yet take full advantage of the IKS or the GTS designs because the hardware power-saving core switching feature is implemented on a cluster basis rather than on a per-core or a per-pair basis. Even so, the first big.LITTLE implementation produces performance and power consumption on a par with the latest Qualcomm multi-core Snapdragon processor according to reviews from Engadget, PocketNow and others. Often first implementations of new technology never see the light of day – it is a tribute to Samsung’s engineers that the Exynos 5 is already seeing the Cortex-A15 level of performance with the power saving of the Cortex-A7s in a mass market handset in the very first big.LITTLE iteration.
We look forward to seeing what improvements full use of GTS will bring when used on future production devices from Samsung and others.
More information: Power Management with big.LITTLE: A technical overview [by Steven Willis in SoC blog of ARM, June 20, 2013]
Why all this sudden attention on the Linux Scheduler? [LCE13, Linaro Connect Europe]
12:00 PM – 13:00 PM on Monday, Jul 8, 2013 (IST)
Description
The Linux scheduler is getting a lot of attention in the ARM ecosystem these days. Come to this discussion to find out why.
Several people working on the scheduler or interested in changes to the scheduler will be invited to talk about their requirements, what is the state of their work, who will benefit from it, etc.
Minutes of the above discussion
Determinism: problems
———————* Preemption: interrupts, locking
* Latency
* Scheduling overhead
* Realtime processingMost of the requirements are coming from LEG/LNG.
Solutions:
– PREEMPT_RT
– Adaptive NO_HZ (merged in 3.10)Came out of high-performance computing. When there is just one
task, the scheduler is switched off for that CPU. Results in
zero scheduler overhead. When the only task finishes – the CPU
will get into scheduling/idle again.There is still once-per-second tick for scheduling. There
is a patch removing that last remaining bit to make it fully
tickless.We’re not sure yet if all the possible limitations are found –
there still might be some scheduler overhead left.
If interrupt handling is offloaded to other cores, caching
related issues will still affect performance (e.g. serving IO
interrupts for the task on a different core will require the
dedicated core to cache the date once again).– Deadline
Physical process isolation: none addresses
– Needed for KVM.
Temporal isolation: all three (with some limitations)
No scheduling overhead: ADAPTIVE NO_HZ only.
Firm/Hard Real-time PREEMPT_RT only
Complexity:
high for PREEMPT_RT
low for the restRequirements:
all of the abovePower efficiency: history
————————-
* sched-mc (got removed)
* big.LITTLE MP patches implementing GTS (ARM)
* Packing Small Tasks (Linaro/ARM)
Pack all small background tasks on as little number of small cores
as possible to conserve power.Intel approach does not care about which core is selected as the
best one (Turbo Mode is effectively converting the core into a BIG
core, while all the other cores are becoming little ones). Task
migration is expensive – this approach helps avoiding it.* Power aware scheduling (Intel)
Discussions were lasting for a while and then Ingo Molnar requested
an integral solution (not a set of independent bits).He made a good point. What we have an SMP legacy implementation.
Are we starting from scratch because of that?
It is going to be a significal change. We need to re-think as it’s
not SMP case anymore. b.L is not a new architecture – Intel already
does that but differently.The task is to find the most efficient way of performing the work
needed. The best place to make those decisions is the scheduler.Power officiency – proposal (from ARM)
————————————–Separate process and power scheduler (ARM). This is the first step
to get to the fully integral scheduler in the future. Helps fighting
with the complexity at hand. In this case there are certain
limitations – one of the schedulers will be leading while the second
one will be limited.That doesn’t work well for Intel CPUs (no pre-configured small/BIG
cores).Issues:
– Topology
Missing:
– Frequency domains, which CPUs are affected. That would be
useful for the scheduler.– Idle + DVFS
Missing:
– information about the cost of using a certain core at certain
DVFS operation point to perform a certain amount of work.– Thermal
The idea is to keep an eye on the temperature trend to avoid
cases when whole cores are needed to be temporarily shut down to
cool them down.GPU contribution into the thermal budget should also be
considered.Trying to control DVFS from the scheduler. Patches are expected very
soon.Q: How much of the improvements are we looking for (power wise)?
A: Something that will get upstream. 😀
Linux 3.10 [by Linus Torvalds on Linux kernel mailing list, June 30, 2013]
Linux kernel 3.10 arrives with ARM big.LITTLE support [Engadget, July 1, 2013]
Thanks to Linus Torvalds’ figurative stroke of the pen, the Linux kernel 3.10 is now final — paving the way for its inclusion in a bevy of Linux distributions, and even offshoots such as Android and Chrome OS. The fresh kernel brings a good number of changes, such as timerless multitasking, a new caching implementation and support for the ARM big.LITTLE architecture. In simplistic terms, the new multitasking method should help improve performance and latency by firing the system timer only once per second — rather than 1,000 times — when tasks are running. Meanwhile, users with both traditional hard drives and SSDs will find performance benefits from bcache, which brings writeback caching and a filesystem agnostic approach to leveraging the SSD for caching operations. Also of significance, Linux kernel 3.10 enhances ARM supportby including the big.LITTLE architecture, which combines multiple cores of different types — commonly the Cortex-A7 and Cortex-A15 — that focus on either power savings or performance. The full list of improvements is rather lengthy, but if you feel like nerding out with the changelog, just grab a caffeinated beverage and get to it.
Linaro 13.06 Released! [by Amber Graner on Linaro Blog, June 27, 2013]
The Linaro 13.06 release is now available for download!
…
It’s been a very active cycle for the Builds and Baselines team, reporting that the Continuous Integration (CI) loop for the Linaro Stable Kernel (LSK) Android proof of concept which is based on 3.9.6 kernel version was set up and includes the big.LITTLE IKS and MP patches (also called beta patchset). Support for Kernel CI loop with Android filesystem was added to android-build and CI loop was set up to track the ARM Landing Team (LT) integration tree. The HiSilicon member build with complete CI loop was set up and now tracks the LT kernel tree.
…
How the device play will unfold in the new Microsoft organization?
After the Microsoft reorg for delivering/supporting high-value experiences/activities the Devices and Studios Engineering Group lead by Julie Larson-Green will have undoubtable the far biggest challenge of all hardware development and supply chain from the smallest to the largest devices Microsoft builds. What I found below is that the conceptual structure developed by Microsoft might have much greater chance of success in general, and Julie Larson-Green is much better in meeting that challenge, in particular, than what I thought previously about her.
In Steve Ballmer and Microsoft Senior Leadership Team: One Microsoft Conference Call [Microsoft News Center, July 11, 2013] the internal part of the challenge was briefly described as:
ADRIANNE JEFFRIES, The Verge: Hi, thanks so much. My question is, Steve, with Julie and Terry leading separate software and hardware teams, how do you feel you can bring devices to the market in a way that Apple and other competitors do? Will they work closely enough and collaboratively enough to compete with Apple?
JULIE LARSON-GREEN: I think it’s a perfect way for us to approach it. Terry [Myerson leading the Operating Systems Engineering Group] and I have worked together for a long time. We both have worked on the operating system side. I’ve worked on the hardware side [as well since joined the Windows division in H2 2006 as CVP of program management for the Windows Experience], and it’s a good blending of our skills and our teams to deliver things together.
So the structure that we’re putting in place for the whole company is about working across the different disciplines and having product champions.
So Terry and I will be working to lead delivery to market of our first-party and third-party devices.
STEVE BALLMER: Yes, and maybe just also have Tony Bates [leading Business Development and Evangelism Group with dotted line management of the OEM business in the COO/SMSG] add a little bit. Tony is going to have a critical role running business development evangelism, our role with our hardware innovation partners, our OEMs.
TONY BATES: Yes, I would just add to that. Julie alluded to this — first party, there’s also a third party — and I think having a single interface to our key innovation partners [which is one of the roles of his group], but two bringing together the way we think about offers with our partners is going to be absolutely critical. So when we think about how we work together, I think of going back to one strategy, one team. So we’re all going to be part of that. It’s going to be critical that we have that interface going forward.
ADRIANNE JEFFRIES: And is Terry there?
TERRY MYERSON: Yes. I thought Julie and Tony had it very well said. We’ve got innovative ideas coming from our OEM partners, and Julie’s team has some very innovative ideas. And the platform [engineered by his group] needs to span from the PPI whiteboard that Tony talked about to Xbox, to our phone, and beyond. So it’s exciting to have all these hardware partners in the Windows ecosystem, or in the Microsoft ecosystem, and all the innovative ideas and to bring it to market together.
Regarding the product and high-value scenario champions’ role:
From: One Microsoft: Company realigns to enable innovation at greater speed, efficiency
One Strategy, One Microsoft
We are rallying behind a single strategy as one company — not a collection of divisional strategies. Although we will deliver multiple devices and services to execute and monetize the strategy, the single core strategy will drive us to set shared goals for everything we do. We will see our product line holistically, not as a set of islands. We will allocate resources and build devices and services that provide compelling, integrated experiences across the many screens in our lives, with maximum return to shareholders. All parts of the company will share and contribute to the success of core offerings, like Windows, Windows Phone, Xbox, Surface, Office 365 and our EA offer, Bing, Skype, Dynamics, Azure and our servers. All parts of the company will contribute to activating high-value experiences for our customers.
We will reshape how we interact with our customers, developers and key innovation partners, delivering a more coherent message and family of product offerings. The evangelism and business development team will drive partners across our integrated strategy and its execution. Our marketing, advertising and all our customer interaction will be designed to reflect one company with integrated approaches to our consumer and business marketplaces.
How we organize our engineering efforts will also change to reflect this strategy. We will pull together disparate engineering efforts today into a coherent set of our high-value activities. This will enable us to deliver the most capability — and be most efficient in development and operations — with the greatest coherence to all our key customers. We will plan across the company, so we can better deliver compelling integrated devices and services for the high-value experiences and core technologies around which we organize. This new planning approach will look at both the short-term deliverables and long-term initiatives needed to meet the shipment cadences of both Microsoft and third-party devices and our services.
…
How We Work
The final piece of the puzzle is how we work together and what characteristics this new Microsoft must embody. There is a process element and a culture element to discuss.
Process wise, each major initiative of the company (product or high-value scenario) will have a team that spans groups to ensure we succeed against our goals. Our strategy will drive what initiatives we agree and commit to at my staff meetings. Most disciplines and product groups will have a core that delivers key technology or services and then a piece that lines up with the initiatives. Each major initiative will have a champion who will be a direct report to me or one of my direct reports. The champion will organize to drive a cross-company team for success, but my whole staff will have commitment to the initiative’s success. We will also have outgrowths on those major initiatives that may involve only a single product group. Certainly, succeeding with mobile devices, Windows, Office 365 and Azure will be foundational. Xbox and Bing will also be key future contributors to financial success. Our focus on high-value activities — serious fun, meetings, tasks, research, information assurance and IT/Dev workloads — also will get top-level championship.
Culturally, our core values don’t change, but how we express them and act day to day must evolve so we work together to win. The keys are the following:
Nimble
In a world of continuous services, the timeframe for product releases, customer interaction and competitive response is dramatically shorter. As a company, we need to make the right decisions, and make them more quickly, balancing all the customer and business imperatives. Each employee must be able to solve problems more quickly and with more real-time data than in the past.
Communicative
In the new, rapid-turn world, we need to communicate in ways that don’t just exchange information but drive agility, action, ownership and accountability.
Collaborative
Collaborative doesn’t just mean “easy to get along with.” Collaboration means the ability to coordinate effectively, within and among teams, to get results, build better products faster, and drive customer and shareholder value.
Decisive
As a global company with literally billions of diverse customers in an accelerating business environment, we must have a clear strategic direction but also empower employees closest to the customer to make decisions in service of the larger mission. This is tricky in a big company, but it is the key to higher levels of productivity, growth and customer satisfaction.
Motivated
In our industry, every day brings more challenges and more opportunities than the day before. But we have a unique chance to make the lives of billions of people better in fundamental ways. This should inspire all of us — those who love making products and services, those who love engaging with customers, and those who love planning and running our company in the most effective way possible. We want people who get up each morning excited to make Microsoft better — that’s how we come closer to fulfilling the potential of all people around the globe.
Our leadership team has discussed these cultural aspects a lot and is committed. In my own staff meetings, we are modeling these new characteristics yet also find ourselves occasionally slipping back. One strategy, united together, with great communication, decisiveness and positive energy is the only way to fly.
From Steve Ballmer and Microsoft Senior Leadership Team: One Microsoft Conference Call [Microsoft News Center, July 11, 2013]
In order to execute then on this one Microsoft strategy, we’re organizing by discipline and by engineering area.
Of course, at the end of the day, we have to deliver great products, a great family of devices and services and experiences that help people realize high-value activities.
So we will have teams that function across the company and across engineering areas to deliver on a high-value experience or device type like Windows, which literally has engineering content already today from our entire company, and involvement from a variety of innovation partners.
So we have the notion today that teams work across the company. That’s fundamental. But we’ll formalize, we’ll organize by discipline, and we’ll have product champions who bring together our cross-company teams to deliver our core products and high-value scenarios.
…
RICHARD WATERS, Financial Times: Thank you. Hello. Does this mean that senior managers won’t have direct profit/loss account responsibility that they might have had before? And, if so, how are you going to hold people accountable, and what kind of measures are you going to use; what kind of incentives and measures are actually going to make this new senior management team work?
STEVE BALLMER: Suffice it to say, the level of accountability we all feel for the success of the company rises when we all have to look at the company’s integrated profitability. I’ll let Amy talk a little bit about sort of the concepts. I don’t know that we’ll go into the specifics, but the concepts in terms of how we’re thinking. And there are pieces, obviously, that will have to have attention.
When it comes time to how we’re doing with our consulting business, which is a multibillion dollar business that doesn’t get discussed much, I think we’re all pretty clear. Kevin is on point. He thinks about it. He lives it. He eats it. He breathes it. He sleeps it every day. And I sleep well knowing that. There will be pieces, but I think the problem we’ve had in a sense — not the problem, but the opportunity we have — is if you subdivide the thing into too fine a set of parts you don’t think about your R&D investments as a general corporate resource that should be repurposed and used very broadly. It’s my resources, my business, and so this notion even from a P&L and resourcing perspective of getting to a one Microsoft strategy is very important, and yet we need to have strong financial accountability, and maybe Amy can talk about that.
AMY HOOD: Yes, I would not say that I wouldn’t necessarily associate this new org chart to any reduction in accountability from a financial perspective. I think we have always thought about personal accountability around this table to product success. And I think that will not change in the new organizational structure. Steve’s used words like that already. I think whether we call it accountability or a P&L or financial accountability, it will still remain just as it has in the past.
In such a setup Julie Larson-Green’s group will have an absolutely critical place to succeed with Microsoft powered or pure Microsoft devices on the market. Would Larsen-Green up to that task? What follows below is all the necessary evidence to judge for yourself:
Interview: Windows President Julie Larson-Green [ABC News, Nov 13, 2012]
From Operating Segments of the 2012 [FY12] Annual Report:
Windows & Windows Live Division (“Windows Division”) develops and markets PC operating systems, related software and online services, and PC hardware products. … approximately 75% of total Windows Division revenue comes from Windows operating system software purchased by original equipment manufacturers (“OEMs”), which they pre-install on equipment they sell. In addition to PC market volume changes …
Principal Products and Services: Windows 7 operating system; Windows Live suite of applications and web services; and PC hardware products. …
From Note 21 – Segment Information and Geographic Data of the Notes to Financial Statements of the 2012 Annual Report:
(In millions) FY12 FY11 FY10 Revenue: $ 18,818 $ 18,787 $ 18,789 Operating Income: $ 11,908 $ 11,971 $ 12,193
Windows 8 Charms Developers with New Touch Experiences [WindowsVideos YouTube channel, Sept 13, 2011]
More to view from Julie Larson-Green: Microsoft Reimagines Windows, Presents Windows 8 Developer Preview [WindowsVideos YouTube channel, Sept 13, 2011]
Interview with Julie Larson-Green about Office 2007 and Windows 7 [BryZad YouTube channel, Nov 21, 2009]
D6 Conference Windows 7 Multi Touch Keynote Demo [AllTingsD, May 28, 2008]
Julie Larson-Green [Microsoft TCN –Awards and Recognitions, Feb 28, 2010]
2008 Outstanding Technical Leadership
In revamping the interface of Microsoft Office 2007, Larson-Green effected a paradigm shift in one of the company’s most successful products.
“At first, no one wanted to change Office dramatically,” says Julie Larson-Green, who was tasked with overseeing a reimagining of the product’s end-user interaction and overall experience in the fall of 2003. Larson-Green’s leadership of Microsoft Office 2007’s redesign, the most radical revamp in the product’s history, required immense courage and conviction, to which this award attests.
A specialist in user-interface design, Larson-Green began working with Office in 1997, when she program-managed FrontPage. She subsequently helmed UI design for Office XP and Office 2003, which had evolved into a large organization of carefully negotiated compromises among the application suite’s various programs. Although Office’s great success was based on customer familiarity, the Customer Experience Improvement Program was indicating that users, while basically happy with the product, were increasingly either unaware of (possibly redundant) functions among Office’s different programs or frustrated by the amount of training necessary to use an astonishingly complex set of commands, dialogs, and interaction modes.
After deciding that Office needed to be made easier to use, Larson-Green’s team arrived at the elegant solution of the browsable Ribbon (or Office Fluent user interface) and its contextual cousins that united the product’s common capabilities and ease of experimentation. “The breakthrough,” Larson-Green says, “arrived with contextualizing the user interface and realizing that all of the product’s features didn’t have to be present all the time.”
SELLING THE REDESIGN
As development of Office 2007 proceeded, Larson-Green was confronted with the equally formidable task of selling the redesign across Office’s various programs. “Our biggest challenge,” she says, “was convincing people that we had an idea that would work.” Heavily invested in the earlier version, the Word, Excel, Outlook, and other organizations were initially reluctant to relegate control to an umbrella design team. Even more significant, Larson-Green had decided not to compromise the integrity of Office 2007 with the safety net of a “classic mode.”
It’s difficult to change the direction of a large organization at the best of times. It’s even more difficult when the goal is still incomplete. Larson-Green’s ability to argue her vision without necessarily being able to address myriad objections in detail is a remarkable trait in a data-driven culture such as Microsoft’s. One by one, however, the suite’s principals bought into the design as it was being tested and fleshed out.
Office 2007 shipped to nearly universal critical acclaim in January 2007, and Larson-Green was promoted to corporate vice president of program management for the Windows Experience. As with Office 2007, she plans to identify and solve customer problems, which will in turn drive a new design and its subsequent engineering. “In the old world,” she notes, “coding would start and design would kind of evolve with the coding.”
COLLABORATIVE EFFORTS
Flattered by her nomination for the Outstanding Technical Leadership Award, Larson-Green admits to shock at winning. “I was very pleased,” she says, “but also kind of embarrassed. I may have been the ringleader, but I couldn’t have done it without a lot of help from a lot of people.” She cites principal Office User Experience Team Program Manager Jensen Harris, Product Design Manager Brad Weed, General Manager Dave Barthol, and Test Manager Sean Adridge as key collaborators.
As for the prize, Larson-Green will treat its dispensation as a family affair. “Unless we all agree on one, we’re going to split the award and each pick a charity,” she says. “My seven-year-old son has already decided he wants to do something with animals. My fifteen-year-old daughter wants to do something with children. And my economist husband is doing all the research on how much money goes to programs versus administration.”
The Ribbon in Microsoft Office 2007 New Features & Upgrades [mydigitalworks YouTube channel, March 18, 2008]
- Q&A: Microsoft Showcases New User Interface for Office “12” Core Applications [Microsoft feature story, Sept 13, 2005] PressPass spoke with Julie Larson-Green, group program manager for the Office User Experience at Microsoft.
- HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: Microsoft Office 2007: The Story of the Ribbon [10 videos, each 10” long on the creativecrewchannel YouTube channel, Jan 11, 2009]
From Julie Larson Green BIO [Microsoft, Oct 25, 2012]
Larson-Green joined Microsoft in 1993 and has focused on technical design and development throughout her career. As a program manager in Development Tools and Languages, she was instrumental in several releases of Visual C++ for 32-bit operating systems and led the development of Microsoft’s first customizable integrated development environment for Windows. Moving to the Windows team, she was responsible for the Internet Explorer 3.0 and Internet Explorer 4.0 user experiences, including features related to the Web-integrated Windows desktop.
Continuing her focus on end-user software, Larson-Green joined the Office team in 1997 and led program management for Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft FrontPage, including the early work in information worker servers. More recently, she has been responsible for leading the user interface design for Microsoft Office XP, Microsoft Office 2003 and the 2007 Microsoft Office system, which was lauded for its innovative reinvention of the user experience for productivity software.
…
Before joining Microsoft, Larson-Green was a senior development engineer at a Seattle-based company [Aldus] that created leading desktop publishing software. She has a master’s degree in software engineering from Seattle University and a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Western Washington University. A native of Washington state, she lives there with her husband, who is a university professor, and her two children.
From The Rise of Julie Larson-Green, the Heir Apparent at Microsoft [Wired, July 11, 2013]
Today’s promotion is just the latest leap for Larson-Green. Most recently, she replaced her longtime boss and mentor, Steven Sinofsky, to become engineering head of Windows this past November, jumping two rungs up the ladder. Unlike the notoriously prickly Sinofsky, Larson-Green is known for her communication skills and ability to work well with others, uniting people, including those outside her own purview, around a common goal.
But if you step back a bit, her biography has been a story of tenacity and persistence in pursuit of a closely-held personal mission to reshape how the world uses computers, according to various press reports, public appearances by Larson-Green, and Microsoft in-house media.
…
[When applying for a Microsoft position in 1993, being a development lead in Aldus] Larson-Green found herself in the potentially embarrassing situation of giving a frank assessment of the weaknesses and strengths of software code compilers made by Microsoft, along with those made by Microsoft rival Borland, to a room that turned out to be dotted with Microsoft staffers. But the Microsofties were impressed, and soon roped Larson-Green into a gig helping to oversee the development of Microsoft’s Visual C++ — just the sort of software development tool she had critiqued.
…
It’s hard not to wonder whether Larson-Green will end up replacing a controversial boss once again, if and when Ballmer leaves the company. The longtime Microsoft sales executive has been rightly criticized for allowing once-catatonic rival Apple to surpass Microsoft in driving the growth of personal computing, first through music players and now via smartphones and tablets.
And it’s interesting that when asked about replacing Ballmer at Wired’s business conference this past May (see video below), Larson-Green was uncharacteristically blunt. “I wouldn’t rule it out, but I’m not in a hurry,” Larson Green said. “Give me a year and ask me again.”
[you can reach the video here]
From Bodyslams at Microsoft Prepared Larson-Green for Overhaul [Bloomberg, July 12, 2013]
Julie Larson-Green body-slammed a 6-foot-6 colleague who was blocking her exit one day in 2001 when the largest earthquake to hit Washington state in a half century rattled her office.
“When I have a direction I want to go, it doesn’t matter who’s in my way,” said Larson-Green, 51, who started at Microsoft 20 years ago and is the company’s highest-ranking female engineering executive.
…
Jensen Harris, the Microsoft software designer who Larson-Green shoved out of the way during the 2001 earthquake — even though she’s about a foot shorter than he is — said she makes quick work of any obstacle. The temblor “was my first experience with Julie,” said Harris, who has worked for her for the past 10 years overhauling Office and Windows. “Julie has this immediate ability to cut through things.”
…
Rene Haas, vice president and general manager of computing products at Nvidia Corp. (NVDA), which makes the chip for one of the Surface tablet’s two models, said while Larson-Green is capable, “It’s not a small task for anybody.”
Maria Klawe, a Microsoft board member and president of Harvey Mudd College, said Larson-Green will do fine. “Software-hardware integration is one of the really exciting things going on in the world right now and you really need people who can cross that boundary,” said Klawe.
…
Ballmer praised Larson-Green’s ability to play well with others, a skill he said was critical to Microsoft’s future success.
Larson-Green put that skill into practice last fall when she convened design and program management executives from various products and plied them with pricey wine. Then she pitched teams like those overseeing the Bing search engine on putting their other priorities on hold to build for Windows.
With a 15-minute conversation, she won over Derrick Connell, a Bing vice president who had never met her before. He gave Larson-Green 20 percent of his staff for six months to build the new search app in Windows 8.1. It was a big project on a short time frame.
“I trust that you will do it,” Connell said she told him. “We’ve worked harder to make sure we delivered on that trust.”
Microsoft will now have to move even faster and get things right the first time, Larson-Green said. She said she “hates that stereotype” that has trailed Microsoft for decades — that the company only gets it right on version 3.0.
“You really only get to sell something one time,” she said. “We shouldn’t do it unless we think it’s great.”
Then the functionally separate COO/SMSG under Kevin Turner will play a crucial role in the devices success, and not only because of its internal OEM part. Here is the background information on that functional organization in order to assess its importance for yourself:
Sales, Marketing and Services Group (SMSG): – SMSG employs more than 45,000 people and is responsible for Microsoft sales, marketing, and service initiatives; customer and partner programs; and product support and consulting services worldwide [2009]
– SMSG is one of the core groups at Microsoft and stands for “Sales, Marketing, Services, IT & Operations Group”. Shortened you can get Sales Marketing and Services Group (IT & Operations are actually part of the Services division). [2011]
– As Microsoft’s chief operating officer (COO), Kevin Turner leads the company’s global sales, marketing and services organization of more than 47,000 employees in more than 190 countries. Under his leadership, the sales and marketing group delivered more than $77 billion in revenue in fiscal 2012. Turner oversees worldwide sales, field marketing, services, support and partner channels as well Microsoft Stores and corporate support functions including Information Technology, Worldwide Licensing & Pricing and [Commercial] Operations. The sales and marketing organization is focused on delivering Microsoft’s family of devices and services to customers and partners all over the world. [2013]
- Enterprise and Partner Group (EPG)
- Small and Midmarket Solutions & Partners (SMS&P), see also Microsoft Small and Midsize Business Pressroom
- Public Sector Groups (PSG): Education, Public Safety & National Security, Government, Health, International Organizations see also Worldwide Public Sector Virtual Presskit
- Communications Sector
- Enterprise Services (Services)
- Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM)
- Worldwide Licensing and Pricing (WWLP)
- Marketing and Operation (M&O)
- Consumer & Online (C&O)
According to [Microsoft] Worldwide Marketing & Operations as of July 14, 2013: How exciting would it be to have a global view of the largest software company in the world, and help optimize go-to-market strategy and operations execution? The WW M&O organization does just that by integrating business, marketing, and operational leadership globally. We combine our consumer and commercial marketing into a single organization, and serve as the center of gravity for subsidiary marketing and operations. We align our corporate assets and talent to spark innovation, drive growth, win share and improve the customer and partner experience.
According to Sales Jobs at Microsoft as of July 14, 2013, with added overall/marketing descriptions when available:
- Microsoft Enterprise [and] Partner Group (EPG), Sales: Our enterprise customers call our Worldwide Enterprise and Partner Group their trusted advisors. We help these customers strengthen their own customer relationships, lower their costs, and build a strategic advantage.
- Microsoft Enterprise Services, Sales: We solve problems. What could be better than helping a customer discover a technology or service that solves a pressing business problem? Or that makes a life easier, richer, or more rewarding? Those are a winning scenarios for everyone—for the customer you satisfy, for our company, and for you—the person who solves the problem and makes the sale. That’s Enterprise Services Sales at Microsoft.
- Microsoft Enterprise Services, Overall: We are the consulting and enterprise support division of Microsoft. We help businesses around the world get a maximized return on their investment in Microsoft products and technologies. This means not only helping with deploying and optimizing IT, but also helping businesses move forward with IT initiatives that deliver the most business value. We have a global team of more than 9,720 professionals in 88 countries, we help a large number of customers worldwide achieve their business objectives each year. Why do so many businesses and individuals trust us to help them save money and improve their profitability? Because we are the experts at accelerating the adoption and productive use of Microsoft products and technologies. Our goal is to empower our customers to succeed. We help our customers get the most out of existing IT assets, saving them money and delivering real business results. We are committed to the transfer of knowledge so that our customers can drive the success of projects through best practices, intellectual property, and key insights from thousands of Microsoft Services engagements worldwide. When it comes to support, we never forget that our customers’ business and their success comes first.
- Microsoft Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM), Sales: We solve problems and engage with strategic Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) to identify and drive efficiencies, best practices, product improvements and consumer loyalty.
- Microsoft Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM), Overall: Tablets, Smartphones, Laptops, Netbooks, Desktops, Smart TVs…the device business is exciting, fast-paced & rapidly changing. We help Microsoft partners to design & sell the latest hardware solutions featuring Win7, Win8, Windows Phone, Server, Office & Bing. If you’re passionate about impacting the global ecosystem of partners, and influencing the experience on the 100’s of millions of devices that ship every year, then this is the team for you. Check out exciting opportunities in engineering, marketing, business development and policy.
- Microsoft Public Sector, Sales1: The Worldwide Public Sector team focuses on truly partnering with customers and partners in Government, Health and Education industries in new and innovative ways. This effort includes not only working on projects and programs important to them, but also staying focused on establishing Framework Agreements that are all-encompassing.
- Microsoft Public Sector, Sales2: For more than 30 years Microsoft has provided technology solutions for Public Sector organizations globally. Microsoft, along with our partner ecosystem, addresses the most complex, mission-critical technology issues for the government (federal, state and local), education (K-12 and universities) and healthcare (hospitals, physicians’ offices and other Health & Life Sciences organizations). The global Public Sector has made huge investments in our products to create practical, cost-effective solutions.
- Microsoft Small and Midmarket Solutions & Partners (SMSP / SMS&P), Sales: Our Small & Mid-market Solutions and Partners team ensures that we and our ecosystem of partners deliver technology solutions that meet the unique needs of small and medium businesses and home consumers.
- Microsoft Small and Midmarket Solutions & Partners (SMSP / SMS&P), Overall: Small & Mid-market Solutions and Partners works with our ecosystem of partners, including system integrators, resellers, distributors, hosters, managed service providers and readiness partners, to deliver technology solutions that meet the unique needs of our customers. The SMS&P team is responsible for selling the broad spectrum of Microsoft products and cloud services, an exciting growth area for both Microsoft.
- Microsoft Worldwide Licensing and Pricing (WWLP), Sales and Overall: World Wide Licensing and Pricing Group (WWLP) is accountable for leading and orchestrating the business groups, segments and field in global development and implementation of licensing business models that make it easy for customers to acquire, use, and manage Volume Licensing products while maximizing synergy among all business groups across Microsoft.
- Microsoft Communications Sector, Sales: The Communications Sector is responsible for driving the sales and marketing of Microsoft services and innovative software-based solutions to telecommunications, hosting, media and entertainment companies.
- Microsoft Consumer & Online (C&O), Sales = Marketing: Each day, more people are spending more time online—always connected, using multiple devices. The goal of Consumer & Online (C&O) is to build consumer loyalty and enable a seamless consumer experience across Windows, mobile devices, and online properties. We couldn’t do this without close cooperation of a broad network of retail and online partners, PC and device manufacturers, advertisers, and publishers. You’ll find all kinds of talent in C&O: content development, marketing, advertising sales, business development, operations, and technical. We offer world-class advertising sales, consumer marketing, and creative services to our partners and advertisers. We help them build consumer loyalty by targeting their unique styles and needs. Our consumer marketing team is also responsible for evangelizing the breadth and value of Microsoft’s consumer offerings including Windows, Windows Mobile, MSN, Windows Live (which includes Hotmail and Messenger), Bing, and other advertising-supported services. Our business is to help consumers experience a “Life without Walls,” and we hire outstanding people to do so.
Minutes of a high-octane but also expert evangelist CEO: Stephen Elop, Nokia
To me not only Nokia Lumia 1020: an excellent case of Nokia’s contribution to Microsoft as a key innovation partner [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, July 12, 2013] made a great impression but the extraordinary performance of Stephen Elop (CEO of Nokia) at that event. I found a couple of videos demonstrating my point:
The Engadget Interview: Nokia’s Stephen Elop on the Lumia 1020 [Engadget YouTube channel, July 11, 2013]
Stephen Elop Takes A Very Awkward Question & Aces It [TheHandheldBlog YouTube channel, July 11, 2013]
Nokia Lumia 1020 Press Conference Live Streaming: Nokia’s ‘zoom reinvented event July 11, 2013 [lifechannelable YouTube channel, July 11, 2013]
Compare this to the performance of other Nokia executives at the Nokia Lumia 925 Press Conference May 14, 2013 [lifechannelable YouTube channel, May 14, 2013] which is kind of average coporate executive performance
Nokia Lumia 1020: an excellent case of Nokia’s contribution to Microsoft as a key innovation partner
Update: An excellent infographic from All you need to know about the world’s coolest Nokia Lumia 1020 infographic [Nokia Conversations, July 26, 2013]
óriásméretben: http://cdn.conversations.nokia.com.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Lumia-1020-Infographic1.png
From the video presentations these two are worth to embed here:
Nokia’s Lumia 1020 event recap in 5 minutes [TheVerge YouTube channel, July 11, 2013]
Interview with Nokia’s Stephen Elop: the Lumia 1020 will take customers ‘over the goal line’ [TheVerge YouTube channel, July 11, 2013]
Note that Elop is emphasizing here the experience what is delivered as much via software as hardware. In the Q&A: How Nokia and Microsoft collaborated to create the groundbreaking new Lumia 1020 with Windows Phone 8 [Windows Phone Blog, July 11, 2013] there is even a talk about the whole set of “camera / imaging / navigation / personal experiences”. By reading my Microsoft reorg for delivering/supporting high-value experiences/activities [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, July 11, 2013] post you will understand even more this whole experiences stuff, both for Nokia and Microsoft, also as an excellent case of key innovation partnership.
From the first 24 hours media reports only the ones given below (only four) are worth to be excerpted here, as all others are emphasizing the 41MP camera:
Nokia Lumia 1020 Hands On: This Actually Might Be Amazing [Gizmodo, July 11, 2013], indeed. You should read this article to understand why I agree wholeheartedly with that.
Nokia’s strategy for selling the Lumia 1020 makes zero sense [BGR, July 11, 2013], what?
… Nokia’s obvious pride in its work on the Lumia 1020 is undermined by the company’s bizarre strategy for selling the device … what really baffles me about Nokia’s strategy for selling the Lumia 1020 is its decision to make the device an AT&T exclusive. … When a Forbes reporter pointedly asked Nokia CEO Stephen Elop on Thursday why he was sticking with his strategy of promoting carrier exclusivity despite the fact that AT&T has allegedly been a “dreadful” partner, he drew loud cheers from the crowd. Whether AT&T has been good or bad when it comes to promoting Nokia devices is really beside the point, however. What has become clear is that keeping your best devices exclusively on one carrier is a self-defeating strategy.
For Nokia, 41MP Hype Of Lumia 1020 Is Both Blessing And A Curse [Forbes, July 12, 2013], why?
… the problem with emphasizing the Lumia 1020′s pixel count is that no consumer wakes up thinking, “What I really need is larger images from my phone.” … when was the last time you walked into a retail cellular provider’s store and got information from sales staff beyond the bullet points on the display signage? … They have a product that is stylish, delivers great-looking photos and, all things considered, is reasonably priced. But none of that will mean much if the Lumia 1020 becomes defined as the “41MP phone” sitting in the back of your local AT&T retail shop, with a salesperson who can only tell you it takes big pictures.
Lumia 1020: A flash point for Nokia? [CNET, July 11, 2013], is it?
… “The device is about re-establishing Nokia as an innovator in the devices market,” said Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi. … Unlike most phone launches, which often delve into specifications such processor speeds, [Nokia CEO Stephen] Elop kept the presentation focused on all the tricks and features enabled by the monster camera. “We’re all looking forward to bringing people the next chapter in smartphone imaging,” he said. … “You can see how much software innovation is going on inside this product — that also positions Nokia in a better place than many of its competitors who still do technology for the sake of it, but are unable to package it in a way that improves the users experience,” Milanesi said. “At a time when macro-level innovation has seemed to be lacking in smartphones, Nokia’s Lumia 1020 demonstrates that there is still considerable scope to drive forward the user experience in core smartphone capabilities,” said Ovum analyst Tony Cripps.
…
While the 41-megapixel camera may wow shutterbugs and tech enthusiasts, the Windows Phone operating system gives some consumers pause when considering the Lumia 1020. The operating system, which employs live tiles, is wholly different from the standard grid of icons found on Apple’s iPhone or Android devices. Some critics have called it a fresh take on a smartphone, but consumers have been slow to embrace it. “It’s a Windows Phone challenge,” Elop conceded when asked about less-than-stellar sales. “There’s tremendous responsiblity to help everyone understand what that third alternative stands for.”
One of the challenges that Nokia faces is getting the phone in people’s hands to try out. Elop said he is working to get more carrier sales representatives trained and using a Lumia device, which he said will help convince consumers to give the operating system a shot. Elop touted the Lumia line’s higher net promoter score, or a measure of how willing a person is to recommend a product. He believes the score will help Nokia build its momentum. …
Finally, the related Nokia communications:
- Lumia 1020 whitepaper [23 pages PDF document, July 10, 2013]
Background
Best of both worlds: Sharpness and low light
– Sharpness is more than just megapixels
—Why 5MP?
—Oversampling results in 5MP photos with amazing detail
—High resolution zoom
—Getting rid of hand-shake
– Photos in the dark
—Back side illuminated sensor
—Exposure time
—Flash
– Real life sharpness measurementNokia Pro Camera
– Zoom reinvented and reframing
– Photography tools and creative control
—Manual controls: EV, shutter speed, ISO, focus, WB
—Nokia Pro Camera Video
—Nokia Rich RecordingPhoto examples
Key technologies and specs
Credits
- Nokia Rich Recording Technology – Technical overall description [6 pages PDF document, June 14, 2013]
- Nokia Rich Recording – Video that brings back the moment [Nokia Lumia 1020] [nokia YouTube channel, July 11, 2013]
- Get creative and win with Nokia Lumia 1020 [Nokia Developer, July 11, 2013]
- Nokia Imaging SDK [Nokia Developer, July 11, 2013]
- Create great imaging apps with the Nokia Imaging SDK [nokiadevforum YouTube channel, July 11, 2013]
- Nokia Lumia 1020: the smartphone camera revolution begins! [Nokia Conversations, July 11, 2013]
- Professional camera power to the people with Nokia Pro Camera [Nokia Conversations, July 11, 2013]
- Nokia Lumia 1020 picture gallery: zoom in [Nokia Conversations, July 11, 2013]
- Nokia Lumia 1020 – product gallery [Nokia Conversations, July 11, 2013]
- What the world’s saying about the Nokia Lumia 1020 [Nokia Conversations, July 11, 2013]
- Nokia Lumia 1020: hands on video [Nokia Conversations, July 12, 2013]
- 10 reasons to get excited about the Nokia Lumia 1020 [Nokia Conversations, July 12, 2013]
- Camera Grip for the Nokia Lumia 1020 [Nokia Conversations, July 12, 2013]
- Changing the game again: From Nokia 808 PureView to Nokia Lumia 1020 [Nokia Conversations, July 12, 2013], see also The 41 MP Nokia 808 PureView meeting the vanishing world challenge [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, April 4, 2012]
- Zoom. Reinvented. Nokia Lumia 1020 arrives [press release, July 11, 2013]
Espoo, Finland and New York, NY – Today, Nokia established a new benchmark in smartphone imaging with the arrival of the Nokia Lumia 1020, boasting a second generation 41 megapixel sensor. Unlike any smartphone in the market today the Nokia Lumia 1020 reinvents zoom, enabling people to discover more detail than the eye can see. With Nokia’s innovative PureView technology, including optical image stabilization, the device is able to produce some of the sharpest images possible by any digital camera.
This is made possible by leading hardware technology combined with a new application called Nokia Pro Camera, which makes it easy for anyone to take professional quality images. Either before a picture is taken or after it has been shot, the zoom capability enables people to discover and then rediscover the personal stories each image can tell. With a beautiful interface that visually demonstrates how settings will affect the final photo or video, Nokia Pro Camera makes it easier than ever to capture, edit and share photos and videos with unrivaled clarity.
Using a new feature called dual capture, the Nokia Lumia 1020 simultaneously takes a high resolution 38 megapixel image for endless editing opportunities, and creates a 5 megapixel picture that is easy to share to social networks with Windows Phone 8.
The Nokia Lumia 1020’s 41 megapixel sensor features leading ZEISS optics with six physical lenses, plus optical image stabilization, delivering crystal clear pictures even in low light conditions. It also captures blur free videos with stereo sound even at the loudest concerts thanks to Nokia Rich Recording, which handles sound pressure levels six times louder than conventional smartphone microphones.
“We want to take people on a journey from capturing pictures to recording and sharing their lives,” said Stephen Elop, President and CEO, Nokia. “The Nokia Lumia 1020 will bring new meaning to pictures and continues to strengthen Nokia’s leadership in imaging.”
Nokia also released a new imaging software development kit (SDK) that provides key image editing features of the Nokia Lumia 1020 to developers. The SDK is available today at developer.nokia.com with a number of developers including Vyclone, Yelp and CNN integrating these features into future releases.
Hipstamatic showcased Oggl PRO, an exclusive application for the Nokia Lumia 1020 offering the most advanced smartphone camera controls for their creative community. It was also announced that popular applications Vine, Path and Flipboard will soon be available on Windows Phone.
Adding further professional capabilities and additional battery life, Nokia announced the new Nokia Camera Grip. This is an accessory that complements device features usually reserved for stand-alone cameras, like the Nokia Lumia 1020’s built-in xenon flash and mechanical shutter. The Nokia Camera Grip also has a tripod mount, and is expected to be available this month for an estimated retail price of USD 79.
The personal nature of Windows Phone makes it the perfect platform for the Nokia Lumia 1020, showcasing live images on the Start screen with the Photos tile, quick sharing to social networks, and easy access to files across a number of devices with SkyDrive. With the dedicated camera button, Windows Phone is designed with imaging in mind.
To help people see what’s around them and discover new places to take photos, the latest developments in LiveSight will available in HERE Maps soon. The Nokia Lumia 1020 also comes with ad and subscription free Nokia Music streaming.
The Nokia Lumia 1020 will arrive first on U.S. shores exclusively with AT&T, with sales expected to start on July 26 at a price of USD 299.99 on a two-year contract.
The Nokia Lumia 1020 is then expected to arrive in China and key European markets this quarter. Nokia plans to ship an exclusive variant of the device with Telefonica to select European and Latin American markets. The Nokia Lumia 1020 will be available in yellow, white and black.
Nokia Lumia 1020
Operating system
Windows Phone 8
HERE location services
Free global HERE Maps and HERE Drive+; Free HERE Transit available in the Store
Display
4.5″ AMOLED WXGA (1280×768), 2.5 D sculpted Corning Gorilla Glass 3, PureMotion HD+, ClearBlack, high brightness mode, sunlight readability, super sensitive touch, Nokia Glance Screen
Battery
2000 mAh battery, wireless charging supported via cover
Processor
1.5 GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4
Main camera
PureView 41 MP with optical image stabilization, Resolution: 7712 x 5360. Includes Nokia Pro Camera. Xenon flash for still images, LED flash for video
Front facing camera
HD 1.2 MP wide angle
Memory
2 GB RAM, 32 GB internal memory; 7 GB free SkyDrive cloud storage
Read more about the Lumia 1020 on our product pages and at Nokia Conversations.
Microsoft reorg for delivering/supporting high-value experiences/activities
Too elevated and abstract formulation? Not at all, as just 3 days ago we’ve seen a really great example of such an experience/activity at the WPC 2013:
Power BI Demo [msPartner YouTube channel, July 8, 2013]
Even the title of the post reporting on the WPC 2013 was Microsoft partners empowered with ‘cloud first’, high-value and next-gen experiences for big data, enterprise social, and mobility on wide variety of Windows devices and Windows Server + Windows Azure + Visual Studio as the platform [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, July 10, 2013]
Still find too elevated and abstract the high-value experiences/activities formulation now put into the center of what Microsoft does? Watch this Nokia’s Lumia 1020 event recap in 5 minutes [TheVerge YouTube channel, July 11, 2013] video from Nokia showing how a major innovation partner could join Microsoft in all that (in this case with incredible camera experience):
It is not by chance that the Lumia 1020 event was synchonized with Microsoft reorg announcement of July 11.
Have doubts how such high-value experiences/activities could be presented to everyday customers? Watch this video:
This is a month-old ad for Dell Tablet vs. iPad [WindowsVideos YouTube channel, June 13, 2013] showing how much it is possible, and more importantly it is possible exactly because of such value focus:
Now it is time to show the scope of such high values Microsoft found it could and should focus on. In Transforming Our Company [Microsoft memo, July 11, 2013] the following high-value activities based on devices and services delivery were defined:
Reinventing expression and documents. People love and need to express themselves in new ways. Documents are going from being printed to being experienced. There are many high-value needs for personal creative expression — some just for fun, others at work or at school. We will reinvent the tools and form of expressing oneself (and expressing things as a group) from paper and slides to online. We will ensure that the tools handle multimedia (photos, videos, text, charts and slides) in an integrated way and natively online. These documents/websites will be easily sharable and easily included in meetings. They will offer complex options such as imbedded logic and yet be easy to author, search and view. These documents will be readable from a browser, but the experience will be infinitely better if read, annotated or presented with our tools. |
Next-generation decision-making and task completion. Our machine learning infrastructure will understand people’s needs and what is available in the world, and will provide information and assistance. We will be great at anticipating needs in people’s daily routines and providing insight and assistance when they need it. When it comes to life’s most important tasks and events, we will pay extra attention. The research done, the data collected and analyzed, the meetings and discussions had, and the money spent are all amplified for people during life’s big moments. We will provide the tools people need to capture their own data and organize and analyze it in conjunction with the massive amount of data available over the Web. Bing, Excel and our InfoNav innovations are all important here. Decision-making and tasks mean different things in personal versus professional lives, yet they are important in both places. |
Social communication (meetings, events, gathering, sharing and communicating). Social communications are time-intensive, high-value scenarios that are ripe for digital re-imagination. Such innovation will include new ways to participate in work meetings, PTA and nonprofit activities, family and social gatherings, and more. We can reimagine email and other communication vehicles as the lines between these vehicles grow fuzzy, and the amount of people’s digital or digitally assisted interaction continues to grow. We can create new ways to interact through hardware, software and new services. Next-gen documents and expression are an important part of online social communications. We will not focus on becoming another social network for people to participate in casually, though some may use these products and services that way. |
Serious fun. This expression may sound like an oxymoron, yet it encapsulates an important point of differentiation for us. There are many things people do for light fun, for example play solitaire, spend three minutes on a word game or surf the TV. Although we will enable these activities effectively, our biggest opportunity is in creating the fun people feel most intensely, such as playing a game that lasts hours and takes real concentration, or immersing them in live events and entertainment (including sports, concerts, education and fitness) while allowing interactive participation. Interactivity takes engagement and makes things serious; it really requires differentiated hardware, apps and services. People want to participate at home and on the go, and in gatherings with others. We see a unique opportunity to make experiencing events with others more exciting with interactivity. We also see opportunity in fitness and health because, for many, this is serious fun much more than it is a task. |
The rationale behind is best represented by following excerpts from:
[1] One Microsoft: Company realigns to enable innovation at greater speed, efficiency
[2] Transforming Our Company
[2] we realized our strengths are in high-value activities, powering devices and enterprise services.
[2] The bedrock of our new strategy is innovation in deep, rich, high-value experiences and activities. It’s the starting point for differentiated devices integrated with services. It’s at the core of how we will inspire ourselves all to do our best work and bring to our customers the very things that will make a difference in their lives.
[1] We will plan across the company, so we can better deliver compelling integrated devices and services for the high-value experiences and core technologies around which we organize. This new planning approach will look at both the short-term deliverables and long-term initiatives needed to meet the shipment cadences of both Microsoft and third-party devices and our services.
[1] services core technologies in productivity, communication, search and other information categories [within Applications and Services Engineering Group]
[1] We will see our product line holistically, not as a set of islands. We will allocate resources and build devices and services that provide compelling, integrated experiences across the many screens in our lives, with maximum return to shareholders. All parts of the company will share and contribute to the success of core offerings, like Windows, Windows Phone, Xbox, Surface, Office 365 and our EA offer, Bing, Skype, Dynamics, Azure and our servers. All parts of the company will contribute to activating high-value experiences for our customers.
[1] We will pull together disparate engineering efforts today into a coherent set of our high-value activities.
[1] Our focus on high-value activities — serious fun, meetings, tasks, research, information assurance and IT/Dev workloads — also will get top-level championship.
[2] people also turn to technology for more important tasks in their lives — and we will focus our energies on creating new, memorable and even extraordinary experiences across our family of devices and services. Think of the student stuck on that term paper looking to display all his creativity in ways that will get him an A+; the family that’s getting together for a reunion and wants the delightful memories to last forever online; the gamer who is taking his fantasy team to the playoffs; or any of us who could be faced with a tough medical decision and needs to plan care and finances.
Such high-value activities include the full breadth and depth of areas like personal expression, decision-making and tasks, social communication, and serious fun — and we have both the drive and the capacity to reinvent these experiences for people across the globe.
[2] Our devices must support the same high-value activities in ways that are meaningful across different device types.
[2] We will be on a new path centered around delivering high-value activities on a family of devices with integrated services.
[2] We will engage enterprise on all sides — investing in more high-value activities for enterprise users to do their jobs; empowering people to be productive independent of their enterprise; and building new and innovative solutions for IT professionals and developers.
[2] Building upon Windows, Xbox and our growing suite of consumer and enterprise services, we will design, create and deliver through us and through third parties a complete family of Windows-powered devices — devices that can help people just as much in their work life as they do after hours. Devices that help people do more and play harder.
[1] The evangelism and business development team will drive partners across our integrated strategy and its execution.
[1] Our marketing, advertising and all our customer interaction will be designed to reflect one company with integrated approaches to our consumer and business marketplaces.
[1] As devices become further integrated into everyday life, we will have to create new and extraordinary experiences for our customers on these devices. We are going to focus on completely reinventing experiences like creating or viewing a creative document and what it means to communicate socially at home or in meetings at work. We are going to immerse people in deep entertainment experiences that let them have serious fun in ways so intense and delightful that they will blur the line between reality and fantasy. And as we develop these new experiences, we will also support our developers with the simplest ways to develop apps or cloud services and integrate with our products. We will help businesses that find themselves in a new world of ever-mounting information to manage that information through greater enterprise information assurance. We will make these high-value activities priorities in our strategy.
Media completely missed the above essence of Microsoft reorg, as quite well evidenced even with the Microsoft’s New Management: Too Little, Too Late? [Bloomberg YouTube channel, July 11, 2013] video
from such a prestigous source. Absolutely amazing how much they miss the whole point of this reorg.
Whether you come from the understanding of the overall change of attitude towards a complete high-value focus, or you see this as a kind of catch-up play in terms of the devices and services approach announced a year ago, you will arrive at talking about the following functional organization as per [2] which is replacing the previous divisional organization:
Business Development and Evangelism Group. Tony Bates will focus on key partnerships especially our innovation partners (OEMs, silicon vendors, key developers, Yahoo, Nokia, etc.) and our broad work on evangelism and developer outreach. DPE, Corporate Strategy and the business development efforts formerly in the BGs will become part of this new group. OEM will remain in SMSG with Kevin Turner with a dotted line to Tony who will work closely with Nick Parker on key OEM relationships. |
Operating Systems Engineering Group. Terry Myerson will lead this group, and it will span all our OS work for console, to mobile device, to PC, to back-end systems. The core cloud services for the operating system will be in this group. |
Devices and Studios Engineering Group. Julie Larson-Green will lead this group and will have all hardware development and supply chain from the smallest to the largest devices we build. Julie will also take responsibility for our studios experiences including all games, music, video and other entertainment. |
Applications and Services Engineering Group. Qi Lu will lead broad applications and services core technologies in productivity, communication, search and other information categories. |
Cloud and Enterprise Engineering Group. Satya Nadella will lead development of our back-end technologies like datacenter, database and our specific technologies for enterprise IT scenarios and development tools. He will lead datacenter development, construction and operation. |
|
Dynamics. Kirill Tatarinov will continue to run Dynamics as is, but his product leaders will dotted line report to Qi Lu, his marketing leader will dotted line report to Tami Reller and his sales leader will dotted line report to the COO group. |
Advanced Strategy and Research Group. Eric Rudder will lead Research, Trustworthy Computing, teams focused on the intersection of technology and policy, and will drive our cross-company looks at key new technology trends. |
COO. Kevin Turner will continue leading our worldwide sales, field marketing, services, support, and stores as well as IT, licensing and commercial operations. |
Marketing Group. Tami Reller will lead all marketing with the field relationship as is today. Mark Penn will take a broad view of marketing strategy and will lead with Tami the newly centralized advertising and media functions. |
HR Group. Lisa Brummel will lead Human Resources and map her team to the new organization. |
Finance Group. Amy Hood will centralize all product group finance organizations. SMSG finance, which is geographically diffuse, will report to Kevin Turner with a dotted line to Amy. |
Legal and Corporate Affairs Group. Brad Smith will continue as General Counsel with responsibility for the company’s legal and corporate affairs and will map his team to the new organization. |
From Steve Ballmer and Microsoft Senior Leadership Team: One Microsoft Conference Call [Microsoft News Center, July 11, 2013]
ADRIANNE JEFFRIES, The Verge: Hi, thanks so much. My question is, Steve, with Julie and Terry leading separate software and hardware teams, how do you feel you can bring devices to the market in a way that Apple and other competitors do? Will they work closely enough and collaboratively enough to compete with Apple?
JULIE LARSON-GREEN: I think it’s a perfect way for us to approach it. Terry and I have worked together for a long time. We both have worked on the operating system side. I’ve worked on the hardware side, and it’s a good blending of our skills and our teams to deliver things together. So the structure that we’re putting in place for the whole company is about working across the different disciplines and having product champions. So Terry and I will be working to lead delivery to market of our first-party and third-party devices.
STEVE BALLMER: Yes, and maybe just also have Tony Bates add a little bit. Tony is going to have a critical role running business development evangelism, our role with our hardware innovation partners, our OEMs.
TONY BATES: Yes, I would just add to that. Julie alluded to this — first party, there’s also a third party — and I think having a single interface to our key innovation partners, but two bringing together the way we think about offers with our partners is going to be absolutely critical. So when we think about how we work together, I think of going back to one strategy, one team. So we’re all going to be part of that. It’s going to be critical that we have that interface going forward.
ADRIANNE JEFFRIES: And is Terry there?
TERRY MYERSON: Yes. I thought Julie and Tony had it very well said. We’ve got innovative ideas coming from our OEM partners, and Julie’s team has some very innovative ideas. And the platform needs to span from the PPI whiteboard that Tony talked about to Xbox, to our phone, and beyond. So it’s exciting to have all these hardware partners in the Windows ecosystem, or in the Microsoft ecosystem, and all the innovative ideas and to bring it to market together.
Microsoft partners empowered with ‘cloud first’, high-value and next-gen experiences for big data, enterprise social, and mobility on wide variety of Windows devices and Windows Server + Windows Azure + Visual Studio as the platform
… even non-Microsoft devices are supported as Android and Apple phones are embraced as well
Preliminary information from this same ‘Experiencing the Cloud’ blog:
– Windows Embedded is an enterprise business now, like the whole Windows business, with Handheld and Compact versions to lead in the overall Internet of Things market as well [June 8, 2013]
– Proper Oracle Java, Database and WebLogic support in Windows Azure including pay-per-use licensing via Microsoft + the same Oracle software supported on Microsoft Hyper-V as well [June 25, 2013]
– Windows 8.1: Mind boggling opportunities, finally some appreciation by the media [June 27, 2013]
– Windows Azure becoming an unbeatable offering on the cloud computing market [June 28, 2013] Important note: Samsung was complete missing from device OEM roundup of Day 1 keynote despite of its leadership ATIV Q, ATIV Tab 3 and ATIV One 5 Style devices. It is not by accident as according to Intel’s tablet challenge: How Israel helped lay the foundations of its Samsung-led fightback [ZDNet, July 9, 2013]:
Intel, along with Samsung and other companies, are betting that the public is going to go for a new breed of device — two in one devices, which be switched between tablet and laptop mode, running both Android (when separated from the keyboard/base) and Windows 8 Pro (when attached).
Brief subject summary:
- industry megatrends:
– [MS leading the enterprise cloud era] cloud,
– [MS has unmatched offerings, unmatched insight] big data,
– [MS solution is woved in, not forced] enterprise social, and
– [MS has best devices for doers, best tools to manage] mobility - Partners going ‘cloud first’ with Windows Azure
- Microsoft unique point of view: delivering high-value experiences through our software value-added devices and experiences
- support non-Microsoft devices: embrace Android and Apple phones
- new user experience design [partner] competency [to be launched in January]
- Windows 8.1:
– one modern and complete experience across the devices that matter today
– the best of the modern UI and the best of the desktop UI brought together in a harmonized way
– multitasking on one or any number of screens to increase productivity in a workstation like way - Windows 8/8.1 devices:
– Windows Embedded 8
– large-format touch, or the all-in-one (also as a desktop replacement)
– ultimately thin and light ultrabook
– tablet with touch, and convertible form factors
– docking tablet (also as a desktop replacement)
– waterproof tablet
– tablet with ink/stylus
– ruggedized tablet
– “one-handed Windows”
– thinnest and lightest tablet with ARM
– phones
– innovation: in hinge, in screen quality, in combined desktop replacement/home device/flat tablet mode - Self-service BI with Power BI for Office 365 Preview: next giant leap via building into Excel and SharePoint data discovery, data navigation, visualization, collaboration, and enterprise features around auditability
- Application development: sea change with Windows Server + Windows Azure + Visual Studio as the development platform
– “A platform that is capable of both infrastructure as a service and platform as a services (IaaS + PaaS)”
– “That means any mission-critical Web application you want to build, any mobile front-end you want to build, where you’re automating a business process with a mobile front-end; any cloud service you want to build, you want to have this rich capability of both infrastructure as a service and a platform as a service”
– “And you want to be able to deliver that, by the way, in both Windows Azure, as well as on Windows Server. So that symmetry of development runtime is also very important, and that’s what we’re building out.”
– Visual Studio 2013 Preview availability announcement
– SQL Services, or SQL Database Premium Services for Windows Azure announcement: “unique already with the fact that we have a PaaS-based SQL Service” - Cloud infrastructure: “No one else in the industry, neither Amazon nor VMware can promise or deliver this level of consistency, this level of mission-critical readiness because of the battle testing of all the diverse set of first-party workloads.”
From: Jon Roskill: Worldwide Partner Conference 2013 Introduction [Speech transcript, July 8, 2013]
JON ROSKILL: Now let’s turn our attention and look forward, because while WPC is about celebrating, it’s also about us coming together to build our business plans together for the next year and kick off the fiscal year. That’s what WPC is all about.
And we’ve made a few changes in WPC, some of which you’ve already noticed as you look at things we’ve done in MPN today, but changes based on your feedback.
One of the key ones we’ve made is in the keynotes. You guys told us that you needed to have all of the product strategy upfront in order to be able to go and build your business plans over the remaining days. And so we’ve taken the day two keynote and the day one keynotes, and we’ve combined them together into a WPC day one supersession. So that’s what we’re going to do this morning.
Then you have day two fully open to go and do networking, go to sessions, and build out those business plans.
And then on day three we’ll come back together here with me, Kevin Turner. And then Wednesday night we will celebrate. And boy, are we going to have an amazing celebration. And by Wednesday night I’m going to be so excited to go crowd surfing with you guys.
We’ve also made this year ‘s WPC, we’ve built it around a customer-centric notion, customers at the center of WPC. And we’ve done that by basing WPC around these four industry megatrends: mobility, enterprise social, cloud, and big data. These are trends that are relevant every day to customers, and they’re driving demand for all of our solutions. So you’re going to see these four trends reflected not just in the keynotes and the sessions, but also in the expo across the commons, in the BG areas, et cetera.
Windows 8 takes center stage at Worldwide Partner Conference [Blogging Windows blog, July 8, 2013]
At Microsoft’s annual Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Houston, Texas, executives discussed the company’s approach to services and devices. Tami Reller, Windows chief marketing officer and chief financial officer, announced that Windows 8.1 release to manufacturing (RTM) will be available for original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partners in late August, so they can prepare Windows 8.1 devices just in time for the holidays.
New Power BI solution for Office 365 delivers self-service business intelligence on nearly any device [The Fire Hose blog from Microsoft]
Today, at the Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft announced a new offering: Power BI for Office 365 – a cloud-based business intelligence (BI) solution that enables customers to easily gain insights from their data, working within Excel to analyze and visualize the data in a self-service way.
Developments from Worldwide Partner Conference: Partners can go ‘cloud first’ with Windows Azure [Windows Azure blog, July 8, 2013]
At Day 1 of the Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft made several announcements that highlight new ways for our partners and customers to embrace cloud computing using the Windows Azure platform.
Partners in the cloud for modern business [The Official Microsoft Blog, July 8, 2013]
From the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Houston, Texas, Microsoft President of Server and Tools Business Satya Nadella announced new programs and services that are designed to help Microsoft partners and customers embrace the challenges and opportunities associated with cloud computing and big data. One such program, Cloud OS Accelerate, brings together Microsoft and key partners – Cisco, NetApp, Hitachi Data Systems, HP and Dell – who will invest more than $100 million to help put thousands of new private and hybrid cloud solutions into the hands of customers.
Partners: Want higher profits and faster growth? Sell cloud solutions, new IDC study says [Microsoft press release, July 8, 2013]
Today from the Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston, Microsoft released a new study from IDC that shows partners selling cloud-based solutions benefit from higher gross profit, more new customers, higher revenue per employee and faster overall business growth. The study also revealed customer buying preferences that highlight the importance of the role of partners in the overall industry cloud transition.
Microsoft survey reveals SMB and enterprise opportunities for partners [Microsoft press release, July 9, 2013]
IPSOS study released at Worldwide Partner Conference highlights utilization of social tools and showcases opportunities for partners.
Windows Embedded partners to join Microsoft Partner Network [Microsoft feature story, July 9, 2013]
Resources will strengthen opportunities in rapidly growing intelligent systems market.
Details
Steve Ballmer at the Day 1 Keynote [msPartner YouTube channel, July 8, 2013]
From: Steve Ballmer: Worldwide Partner Conference 2013 Keynote [Speech transcript, July 8, 2013]
… There’s 15,000 of you here in the room today, and to all of you I want to start with a simple message of thanks. Thanks for your support, thanks for your good work, and thank you every day for taking care of our customers. (Applause.) We have a total of 750,000 partners around the world, but about 90 percent of the revenue that we do is actually represented in some way, shape or form with the partners who are here today: systems integration partners, resale partners, hardware partners, development partners, software partners, cloud partners, framing partners, distribution partners. The range in breadth of the activities in which you engage are amazing. This year, our partners in aggregate had really quite a good year. Growth in the businesses from our partners was about 6.5 percent year over year, but on a base of $650 billion. That’s the total revenue of our partner network, $650 billion, and you still manage to grow at 6.5 percent. Congratulations everybody. (Applause.) …
…
We spend a lot of time as a leadership team thinking about the remaking of Microsoft. About a year ago in our annual report, we talked about the move from being a “software company” to a “devices and services company.” What that really means? It means that the world, and I’ve been saying this at our partner conferences here for a while, the world we grew up in was a world of software. When I dropped out of school and joined Microsoft, I had to explain to my mother and father what software was and why I was joining a software company. That was a long time ago.
And software development, I believe, is still the most valuable skill that anybody on the planet can possibly have. And yet the way in which software innovation gets really packaged and presented now is through a set of devices that include the software, and through a set of cloud services that deliver that software.
Just about six or seven years ago, I started talking about the cloud here at WPC. And it was highly unpopular the first time I talked about it, because it looked like an end around. And yet I think today everybody understands that this is the future of innovation. Even Windows, if you think about it, has really always been much more of a device than a piece of software.
Windows defined a class of devices called the PC. And we are certainly incredibly determined to have Windows define new classes of devices, tablets, phones, two-in-ones, living room devices, defined by Windows as a piece of software, but purchased and implemented by our partners as tested software. So we’re in the transformation from delivering our software value one way to delivering it in a new form, and we need our partners to come with us on that journey, whether you design and build computers, whether you deliver systems integration services, whether you provide custom development, there’s a place in this journey for all of us.
At Microsoft we say, what’s our unique point of view. Our unique point of view is on delivering high-value experiences through our software value-added devices and experiences. We think we understand the tools, the technologies that it takes to help people get work done better than anybody else on the planet, whether you are an employee, whether you are a customer or a trading partner, whether you are an IT person or a developer, we build experience that help people get stuff done. You need to do a piece of analysis, we’re going to have the best tools, the best devices and services for helping people do analysis. You want to participate in a virtual meeting, nobody is going to give you a better experience to participate in a virtual meeting than Microsoft does. You want to ensure information integrity in your customer, because no matter what happens with consumerization, it’s still the IT department that has to protect the integrity and value of corporate information. We together understand these things, and we together, Microsoft and our partners, will deliver the devices and services that really bring these things alive when people want to be productive.
Now, we have another side of ourselves at Microsoft, too. That’s the fun side. I refer to it as serious fun, because unless you’re hardcore about fun, the Xbox probably hasn’t been the product for you. But when it’s serious fun, or serious business, we’re going to make sure that we provide the core experiences through our devices and services, and through the value add of people in this room to really bring that alive. That’s not easy. It takes a lot of core technology investment in operating systems, in user interface, and particularly now natural user interface, in machine learning, in cloud infrastructure.
…
So what is on our customer’s mind? These are the four big trends that I think in particular our IT customers, but businesses in general, want to speak with us about every day. They come to us and they say, what about the cloud? They say it to you. They say it to us. They say, hey, I hear about big data, or I understand big data, or I’m afraid I’m missing out on big data, how are you going to help me get there, they’ll say to the two of us.
Social, part of the consumerization theme of the day is how do we apply techniques and software services that people get to know in their personal lives, how do we apply those to enable business productivity? And we’re going to show you a lot today of what we’re doing with social so that people can come together in what I would call human ways to do superhuman tasks at their work.
And last, but certainly not least, is mobility. I get to do something that the rest of you don’t do, because I sit on the stage, I get to count the number of mobile devices that go up for pictures and various other things during my speech. We’re at about 25 percent would be my gauge this year. I’m sure everybody has got a mobile device with them, but what it says is that the range of applications of mobility just continues to increase. And I want you to really understand just how rich our mobile offering has become, both in terms of the Windows devices that you can use as part of your solution, and the work that we are doing to support some non-Windows devices. So let me dive into each of these in turn.
First is the cloud, the cloud remains a little bit of an amorphous thing. But, at the end of the day, the task of the cloud probably means, and it might be 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, it is really a path that leads for almost all companies to the public cloud. And that puts a lot of pressure on providers, whether it’s Microsoft, folks we compete with, our service provider partners, it puts a lot of pressure on us to make sure that we have world-class scaled, low-cost, low latency, high-bandwidth cloud infrastructure across the world. How do we, from a public cloud application, deliver with incredibly low-latency and with exactly the right data security and privacy and protection? How do we deliver information, whether it’s in the U.S., or Australia, or China, or Malaysia, or any place else in the world? And we are investing in that infrastructure.
We actually started the investment process in that infrastructure in order to support our own applications, to support Bing, to support Office 365. And what we would tell you is that our cloud infrastructure, Azure, is being proven out, is being battle tested, and is being advanced on the backbone of our own first-party applications, but then that infrastructure, that Azure infrastructure, is there for all of you to use, to deliver solutions to your customers.
I claim there really are almost no companies in the world, just a handful, that are really investing in scaled public cloud infrastructure. We have something over a million servers in our datacenter infrastructure. Google is bigger than we are. Amazon is a little bit smaller. You get Yahoo! and Facebook, and then everybody else is 100,000 units probably or less. So the number of companies that really understand the network topology, the datacenter construction, the server requirements to build this public cloud infrastructure is very, very small, very small. And the number of companies that are at the same time seriously investing in the private cloud, which is not going away, and in these hybrid clouds is really just one and that’s us. We are building in a compatible way private cloud infrastructure based on Windows Server, and public cloud infrastructure based on Windows Azure, and we will talk to you about that today.
Sixty-three percent of customers surveyed will say they really want a single vendor who can provide them both public cloud and private cloud. We think we are the only solution and certainly the best solution for customers who want that. We continue to advance with our cloud applications, our Bing search service has made progress each and every month, improving not only its market-share and its quality, but also the speed and performance with which we deliver our results, which should be a key indication to you on just how rich our cloud infrastructure is.
Through your good work our Office 365 service has literally exploded. For the last few years we were saying SharePoint was the No. 1 fastest growing product at Microsoft. Then it was Lync, the No. 1 fastest growing product at Microsoft. Through your good work it’s Office 365. And what all of that means is our mutual customers are ready for the cloud, and our product line is ready for the cloud. People want full, familiar, world-class productivity tools in the cloud. Only we give people those tools that really let you get work done. There are pretenders who come from the consumer world, but there’s only one set of tools for your business customers who really need a productive, high-security, high-reliability, infrastructure in the cloud for their applications.
No. 2, big data, big data is I think one of the areas that is still very, very early actually in its exploitation. Big data means a lot of things to a lot of people, and it’s very important that we continue to push forward on these big data themes. You’re going to see demonstrations today of some of our tools, some of the work that we’ve done with Excel, and SQL Server, I guarantee you for people who have a lot of data, there is no question that the No. 1 sort of most familiar, easy-to-use toolset to get insight out of data comes from Excel and SQL Server.
Ninety percent, literally, of the world’s data, this is a very interesting fact, ninety percent of the world’s data has actually been created in the last two years, 90 percent of all of the online data in the world in the last two years. What it says is there’s an explosion in this data. And so tools that let people mine it, get insights from it, and understanding from it are essential. We’re going to show you a demonstration of some of the things that you can do with our big data and BI suite later on today that I think will absolutely blow your mind.
But, we’re also providing you with the infrastructure that lets you build out automated solutions for your customers, because over time most of the value in big data will actually be in having the data learn from itself and take automated actions on our joint customers behalf. We’re building out our Hadoop infrastructure on Azure, so that you can do a mix of things with structured and unstructured data. We are certainly doing a lot of work on SQL Azure, so that you can access the structured data in the cloud. Because of our investment in Bing, we know we have a lot of data. We are putting that data in a structured form, where you can use it as part of the applications you deliver.
One of the key things that we showed at our developer conference a couple of weeks ago in Windows 8.1 is the way we’re starting to take entities that Bing understands and make them part of a platform for you to use as developers in your applications.
Last but not least is the Azure Data Marketplace. There is going to be a lot of data that people are going to want to use inside their applications that don’t actually live inside the enterprises you serve. If you want to write a forecasting application for one of your customers that forecasts how many raincoats they need in each of their retail stores, I guarantee you the weather data is a helpful input. And yet most of our joint customers don’t keep the weather data in their enterprise systems. And so we want to let you mix and match public data and private data. We want you to be able to bring that data together in structured and unstructured ways. We want to bring it together in ways in which humans get the insights, and we want to give you the machine-learning infrastructure so that the computers themselves can actually help your customers respond to their customers in real time. The work we’re doing here you’ll hear about throughout the morning, and particularly the demonstrations you’ll see I think will really bring these things alive.
Social. Some people think social is one product. I don’t. Social is a way of working. How do four of us come together and collaborate on a project? How do we collaborate if we work in the same company? How do we collaborate if we work in different companies? How do I reach you if you are in my customer base and I want to do a seminar for you? Or I want to put on and have an event where we communicate real time? All of these are social activities that are involved in business. So it’s people to people, it’s people to businesses, it’s employees to employees, it’s all of the constituents, consumers, employees, customers, and partners. How do you bring them together naturally? Sometimes you want to do that on a real-time basis, and sometimes you want to be able to do that in a way in which people can participate asynchronously.
I’m glad to have 15,000 people here today, but many more people will watch the video of this section in our partner community around the world. And it’s part of, if you will, the social infrastructure, letting people participate the way they want when they want. And we’ve woven this into the fabric of everything we do. Windows devices come from the get-go with integrated communications and social capabilities like Skype. Skype and Lync are being brought together to allow the consumer and the businessperson to interact together in real time.
We continue to push forward in Outlook, adding more social capabilities directly into the e-mail client that is the base station from which most of us would communicate with other people. We acquired Yammer over a year ago, and you’ll see the way we’re using Yammer both inside companies and now enabling it to stretch between companies and their partners to involve real-time communication that feels very much like what somebody would do on Twitter or Facebook, but in a productivity context. We continue to push SharePoint social capabilities forward, and even in our Dynamics product line, even when we’re talking about line of business process, it is very important to collect the information from the social realm, and to be able to let people in formal line of business processes actually connect to social environments. And we’re going to show you some of that later on in the demonstration.
Last but not least is mobility. This is an area where we’ve made huge strides in the last year. I had a chance to beat my chest a little bit, get excited about Windows Phone, but we’re also going to show you today what we’ve done with Windows 8.1, and what our hardware partners have done with Windows devices. You can buy beautiful Windows devices today in so many different shapes and forms. Windows PCs, everybody has a notion of what we mean by a Windows PC. But we’re going to show you small Windows tablets. They’re still all Windows all the time, but they’re hard to mistake for a PC.
We’ll show you Windows two-in-ones, devices, which depending on how you configure them at any time will feel like a PC or can feel like a tablet. I happen to think this will be the most popular configuration for business people because they’ll want the ability to seamlessly go back and forth between their productive life, their consumptive life, and their personal life.
I talked about Windows Phone. You’re going to get a chance to see the Surface. Hopefully many of you will choose to pick one up, but what we’re doing with Surface I think is also amazing. We’re trying to really lead the way on products like Surface Pro, and the use of the pen, which I think is pretty fundamental in mobility.
While we’re making these investments in sort of Windows mobile form factors, if you will, we also continue to do work to support non-Microsoft devices. You’ve seen us certainly move with SkyDrive, with Lync, with OneNote, with a number of our offerings to embrace Android and Apple phones. We’re going to show you some technology today for managing mobile devices that apply outside the Microsoft sphere. So our mobility strategy, as centered as it may feel in our Windows devices, and they are beautiful, and they are the most productive, for those people who just don’t happen to have one, we’ll also show you a little bit of some of the technology that we’ll give you so you can stay well anchored in Windows and Active Directory as the center point for managing devices of all shapes, sizes and forms.
At the end of the day we may see ourselves focusing on high-value experiences, and our customers may ask us collectively about cloud, and big data, and mobility, and social, but at the end of the day we deliver to you some products. And with those products in hand you turn around and try to serve our joint customers.
Windows, we’ll show you 8.1 and I couldn’t be more pleased with the progress. Windows Phone, if you haven’t checked it out recently you must. Surface, I hope you get the opportunity to delve in and really explore at the partner conference. Office 365, including Yammer, and Skype, and Lync, and SharePoint and Excel, and BI, and all of these phenomenal capabilities, the footprint of what you can do with Office is continuously expanding. And when you leave here, we want to make sure you leave here understanding completely the breadth of footprint that Office is embracing. Windows Azure, and when I say Azure today I include Windows Server, and the full on-premise product line. Your ability to go out and articulate a hybrid cloud story with Windows Server, SQL Server, and Windows Azure is incredibly important to us. So we are going to try to equip you to do that by the time you’re done today.
And then last, but not least, is Dynamics. Dynamics continues to evolve in its footprint, in its embrace of the cloud. Dynamics is an amazing business for Microsoft. I’ll bet we get less PR on the business that is billions of dollars for Microsoft, and where we probably have the most loyal committed partner base in the world, and the most loyal committed customer base. And for those of you who have not come back and looked recently at the amazing work that we’re doing in business applications I hope you’ll feel enthused to go do that by the end of the day.
We will only succeed as a company if we arm you to go approach these challenges. You need to see these products. You need to understand their potential. You need to believe that they can help you serve our joint customers. You need to know each other. Some of you are experts in hardware. Some of you are experts in systems integration, some are developers, some are resellers. Bringing you all together and equipping you with the common base, so you understand where we’re going, what we’re doing, and collectively how we can serve our joint customers that’s what WPC is all about, and if we take advantage of this opportunity and certainly with the phenomenal product lineup that we have today, and we’ll roll out over the next month, we know absolutely that we can succeed together.
Thank you all very much and enjoy WPC.
Windows 8.1 Product Enhancements [msPartner YouTube channel, July 9, 2013]
See also: Windows at WPC 2013 [Blogging Windows, July 8, 2013]
From: Tami Reller: Worldwide Partner Conference 2013 Keynote [Speech transcript, July 8, 2013]
Tami Reller: … everything that we are talking about today is anchored by this idea that we can do something that no other company can. And that is one modern and complete experience across the devices that matter today. Your experience, your data, everything can travel with you. And it’s connected through this trusted foundation of Windows. This is one experience that is unique to Windows, but it’s also uniquely yours.
I mean, we know that when a customer chooses an Apple product, they get a device that reflects Apple. When you choose an Android device, you get a device that reflects a dizzying number of points of view. But when you choose a Windows device, you get a device that reflects you.
Start a Word document from your laptop, then easily finish it on a Windows Phone. You get music, video, and games from Xbox. The best of the Web with Internet Explorer. The best cloud storage in SkyDrive. And of course the best way to stay connected, Skype. And the absolute best in productivity with Office. All of this across every device providing the most complete experience from the start.
Well, we’re believers, continue to be believers that user experience and the design is going to continue to be an important differentiator for Microsoft, and it’s also going to continue to be an important differentiator for the experiences that you are building for customers.
What we’re finding is that businesses are seeking trusted partners who can not only write great code, that’s critical of course, but they can also design beautiful and engaging experiences for customers.
Apps that are better designed, they absolutely achieve better ratings in the Windows store, and even equally as important, they are more engaging for customers, and they deliver greater monetization opportunities.
So to support all of this, I’m excited to announce that in January we will be launching a new [partner] competency: The user experience design competency. And the whole idea behind this competency is to give you the best way to train your designers and to get recognized for your expertise with the Microsoft design language and user experience for app building.
This competency will provide your designers with training and certification and gives your firm a head start in building great apps, and we think will help you recruit the best people. So I hope you’re as excited about this as we are, look for this in January.
So we’ve been talking about devices and services for about a year now. And while so much of the opportunity that we see for us and that we see for you is still ahead, there’s a lot of great momentum to talk about.
…
Let’s take, for example, Windows Phone, which Steve did such a great job talking about. Our sales are growing six times faster than the overall smartphone market. Safe to say that we are now officially the third ecosystem in mobility. (Applause.) Thank you. Thank you.
Windows. We are moving forward. Steve did a great job talking about that. We’re moving forward, and you heard us talk about 100 million licenses. I can also report that we have over 20 million enterprise evaluations. So great in consumer and a lot of enterprise traction starting.
And Windows 8, so far, has logged 60 billion hours of use. And our new customer activation continues at a consistent pace.
Office. It’s a great example of a product that is used multiple times every day and it is known and loved by more than a billion people. The new Office is our fastest-selling release in history. Worldwide, one copy is sold every second.
Additionally, one out of four enterprise customers are already on Office 365. And I love this next statistic. Partners lead three out of four enterprise Office 365 deployments, three out of four, great opportunity. Thank you so much for your role in moving businesses to the cloud. (Applause.)
Amazing momentum on Skype. More than 300 million people use Skype each month. And that’s a service that can see up to two billion minutes of use per day on some peak days.
So how our products come together really starts with the experience. And people are using our products as part of everyday life. Important parts of their life. And Steve talked about this as well.
So I have this short video that I think does a great job of showing what we mean by this. Take a look.
(Break for video segment.) [6:40 … 7:10 essentially for Office 365]
… [Office 365: complete Office in the cloud … this is the Office enhancement … +extension to the Open program … +investment in partner enablement]
… [Windows Phone: Lumias … suitable to build end-to-end enterprise solutions … tools to build enterprise solutions]
… [xBox: … newest xBox One …]
… [Surface and Surface Pro: … hand down more productive than iPad … better with Windows 8.1 …]
… [Windows: … mobility is top for CIOs … Windows 8 tablets are best for the business … SkyDrive … destination for developers … more than 100,000 apps … LOB customers need partners … 2 out of 3 enterprise enterprise organizations are investing today in mobile applications … great UI enhancements, great usability functionality … migration from XP opportunity … Windows Accelerate program continued … new Touch Win program incentives directly to authorized distributors as well as reseller partners …]
… [Windows 8.1: … 900 continuous improvements and hundreds of updates to our inbox apps … represents responsiveness, it represents rapid timeframe … feel natural on everything from a small tablet to a large work station …]
[21:18 Jensen Harris showing Windows 8.1 via a jam-packed demo here for the next few minutes, including some things that we have never publicly shown before]
… [Nokia Lumia 925 … 8-inch Acer Iconia W3 … in landscape games and productivity … +optimized Windows 8.1 specifically for portrait for working great on these small tablets e.g. Reading List, ergonomics … ]
Now I’m going to move over here to a Surface and I’m going to show you one of the most important near features in 8.1. Every month, 20 billion searches are performed just in the United States on Windows PCs — 20 billion searches every month. We looked at this as an opportunity to say if we made search better in this product, we would be making 20 billion things every month better for people. And so we’ve introduced search in 8.1.
… [search hero: … curated, built-on-the-fly app that brings together information from Bing, information from your PC, files from the cloud, things from the Web, and puts it all together in one view … integrated with Maps functionality…]
… [xBoxMusic app: … redesigned totally to make it fast, to make it efficient, and to focus on your collection of music …]
[Dell all-in-one, 27 inches with touch … the world’s best Skype device, a Windows 8.1 PC … Start screen changes: all the things that you love on one screen … new personalization options … multiselect … Reading List … SkyDrive … picture editing built-in … a lot of new [built-in] apps: e.g. Food & Drink … hands-free mode … Windows Store big-big update: e.g. recommendation engine built one Bing … … OneNote syncing with SkyDrive …]
[Surface Pro: “play to Xbox One” … Miracast built-in … OneNote
Windows Phone: OneNote syncing with SkyDrive ]
… [desktop PC: … doesn’t need touch …bring together the best of the modern UI and the best of the desktop UI and harmonize them in Windows 8.1 … Start button .. enterprise cosumer dashboard … productivity (… multitasking) taken to next level: e.g. new version of Outlook … ]
Suddenly, I have something that is starting to look like a very productive work station. And I can move these windows around, I can put them where I want. We have maximize, we have resize, and all of a sudden you start to realize that there’s more than one way of doing awesome productivity. This uses all the pixels on my PC.
And on this sort of smallish monitor, I can fit three. But if I had something like a 2550 x 1440 monitor, I could show four apps on the screen at once. And all of a sudden, now you’re way more productive than you could have been on the desktop. You’ve got your Twitter feed, you’ve got your full running mail app, you’ve got multiple browser windows or multiple mails up at once.
And it gets even better. If I attach a second monitor, then suddenly I can do the same thing on multiple monitors at once. So I have any collection of apps across my monitors in any configuration I want, any size I want, blending desktop and modern apps across my screens. I can bring the Start screen up on one and just leave it, and this doesn’t just work for two monitors, it works for three, four, five, six, seven, as many as I have. And so this sort of shows the power of Windows 8.1 and the modern UI even on a desktop engineering workstation making you more productive.
[1:02:06]
Tami Reller: … I’m also quite happy to be able to confirm today that Windows 8.1 will be available for our OEM partners in late August. Meaning that holiday devices, many of them will have Windows 8.1. So late August available to OEMs. So very pleased to confirm that today.
What better timing to talk about our OEM devices? We’d like to do that. Please help me welcome to the stage Nick Parker. To do that, I’d like to open with a little video, a commercial we have on air that shows just why Windows 8 tablets are so special.
(Windows tablet commercial video.) [1:04:05 … 1:04:35 essentially iPad 32 GB $599 vs. Windows Tablet $299 (Dell XPS 10 32GB) Limited time offer at Dell.com]
Dell Tablet vs. iPad [WindowsVideos YouTube channel, June 13, 2013] here the limited time offer at the end stands at $399
Nick Parker:
… Windows Storage Server: e.g. Western Digital Sentinel, a 16-terabyte small business server … Windows Embedded 8: e.g. IEI [?Institute for Emerging Issues?] display panel … large-format touch, or the all-in-one: e.g. Dell XPS 18 also as a desktop replacement … ultrabook: e.g. the world’s thinnest and lightest one Sony VAIO Pro 13 … tablets with touch, and convertible form factors: e.g. Lenovo Helix … tablet with stylus … docking tablet, also as a desktop replacement: e.g. Latitude 10 … Fujitsu Arrows Tab waterproof tablet … Hewlett Packard ElitePad 900 the choice of Emirates Air for their in-flight device, also with a very innovative sleeve … Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 2 , not just a small app running a stylus capability, but ink immersed as part of your input mechanism … Panasonic FZ-G1, the Panasonic Toughpad ruggedized computer … Acer W3 one-handed Windows … thinnest and the lightest tablet that you can get, as well as having all-day battery and integrated 4G, and those are capabilities built on the ARM platform: Asus VivoTab RT … phones: Nokia 925 and Nokia 520 … innovation: Acer Aspire R7 with innovation in hinge, Toshiba KIRAbook a 221-pixels-per-inch device, HP Rove the 20-inch IPS all-in-one for both desktop replacements as well as great home devices + complete flat tabletop mode for using an application that’s maybe multi-orientational …
[1:22:24]
Note that Samsung was complete missing from this device OEM roundup despite of its leadership ATIV Q, ATIV Tab 3 and ATIV One 5 Style devices, as you could read in 20 years of Samsung “New Management” as manifested by the latest, June 20th GALAXY & ATIV innovations [‘Experiencing the Cloud, July 2-5, 2013]
Satya Nadella about Platform, Infrastructure, and Applications [msPartner YouTube channel, July 8, 2013]
From: Satya Nadella: Worldwide Partner Conference 2013 Keynote [Speech transcript, July 8, 2013]
… <before that: how to enable dynamic business … demoed across Office 365, Dynamics CRM Online Windows Intune, and System Center Configuration Manager, and Azure Active Directory … >
[30:08] When you think about having lots of data and having lots of rich processing capabilities, the next step is to be able to empower your end users with the best tools to drive insights. This is where we collectively have really created one of the most amazing phenomena when it comes to BI with self-service BI. We took the most ubiquitous tool around data in Excel, combined it with the power of SQL Analysis Services, and started the self-service BI revolution, and especially in combination with SharePoint, we really have done a fantastic job of driving insight at the edge of all data, big or small.
Today I’m really pleased to announce the next giant leap, if you will, when it comes to self-service BI. We are announcing Power BI for Office 365 Preview. It takes all of the rich capabilities around data discovery, data navigation, visualization, collaboration, enterprise features around auditability, taking all of that, building it right into Excel and SharePoint, so that every user has friction-free access to it. They’re also delivering all of the rich cloud capabilities that power this natively in Azure. So that means all of the SQL analysis capabilities that power this experience are all there natively in the cloud.
So to show you a glimpse of what this new solution, Power BI for Office 365, can do I wanted to invite up on stage Amir Netz.
Amir.
Power BI Demo [msPartner YouTube channel, July 8, 2013] for those who want to watch only this part, watch especially from [8:10] on especially (incredible demo/performance)
AMIR NETZ: Thank you, Satya.
Power BI brings self-service analytics to the cloud and the power of the cloud directly into Excel. It opens amazing new ways for users to connect with data. So let’s take a look. We have here on the screen our Excel 2013. And I want to create a report about our datacenters. I don’t have the data. With Power BI we can actually go and find the data that we need. You see here online search, I am going to use it to go and find the data for my report.
I’m going to type in my search query and just here within Excel Power BI is searching for millions of public data tables, and finding the data that I might need. It comes from Wikipedia, it comes from the marketplace, it comes from Bing, but because I’m a Microsoft employee I’m also getting data not just from the public data sources, I’m also getting data from my enterprise data assets. Those were mapped into the catalogue of Power BI. So here we see a table from my data warehouse, and I can go and add that table to my Excel, and just like that Power BI connects and aligns the data directly to my sheet just like that. It’s so easy.
Now I want to create my report. I’m going to go and use PowerView. It’s also integrated into Excel 2013. So let’s go and create a nice report here. We’re going to take a look at the let’s take the location of the datacenter, the square footage of the datacenter, let’s make it a bit larger. It’s Excel 2013 so we can just convert it immediately to a map. We can go and categorize my datacenters by generation. Just with a few clicks, a beautiful report and it’s not the only report I have here in my workbook. I have a couple more.
So this report here shows me the storage of Azure, just an amazing explanation of the growth in the business. This one here shows me the subscriber’s growth in the business. You see almost 200 percent in just over a year. I mean I can slice and dice and look at segments of users, and see the growth there. So I have this beautiful report, interactive, and I want to share it with other people and to do that I go to the file menu, I do a save as and I’m saving it to the Power BI side in Office 365.
And now what does this site look like? Let’s see how this site looks like in SharePoint Online. This is it. You can see how well organized it is. You see my Azure report, my Office 365 report. It’s clean. It’s crisp. It’s beautiful. I want to go and take a look at one of those reports. I click and of course, because the reports are all created inside Excel, Excel is the application used to be able to browse the reports in my browser. So you can see here the explanation of growth you see in the compute resources of Azure, you can go and look at the other reports of that, the database growth, and of course the whole thing is fully interactive. So I can go select different time slices and in the browser get the full interrogation of the data.
It’s very easy to share, very easy to explore, but it’s more than that, it’s a full enterprise offering. So let’s take a look and see all the options that we have here. So see this menu here, take a look at what we have. I can share with other people, I can protect the data, I can schedule data refresh, where Power BI will reach back from the cloud to the enterprise, go to the original data sources, bring the data on the regular basis up to the cloud, up to the report that we have here. I can track the data usage by my users. And one more thing I can do here, I can add that report to my mobile favorites. And you can see this mobile star here, now that report is here and it’s showing up on my mobile device. It’s a beautiful application Power BI. It’s fully interactive as you use it. And it’s not just this report. I have a full gallery of reports that I can use here. You can see I can browse through that. It’s just the best way you can have to consume reports on the go.
So you’re seeing what kind of a gorgeous, great offering we have here. But, there’s one more thing, one more capability that I think you need to see, because in my opinion it’s the true game changer. So for this I’m going to take a look at another Power BI slide. Look at this one here, and make it a bit larger. This one Power BI slide is for a media company. And you see it has these reports that we created in Excel. But, there’s another role here, we call it “Featured Answers.” And these are the most common questions my users ask about the data. For example, show our sales pipeline. I’m clicking on it and now Power BI connects automatically to the sales pipeline data source and shows me the results. Now it looks like a comp report, but it is not. It is the beginning of a conversation with Power BI.
So I can compute that, show our sales pipeline only with opportunity size greater than $20,000. And as I type I immediately get the answer. You can see that there are six opportunities greater than $20,000. It’s very easy, right. (Applause.) Now one of those opportunities is this rock-themed event series. And I want to continue the line of interrogation I want to ask questions about that, so I can go and ask maybe the top rock classics. And notice I’m using, something magical happens. As I was typing the questions the results came up and I actually realized I’m asking about songs. So I moved away from the pipeline data set, automatically it connects me to a different one. This one is the historical data set for all the music charts in the United States. So I can see that “Bohemian Rhapsody” here, by the way my favorite song of all time, is the top rock classic. And I know it’s right, because Power BI tells me what it understood from me.
Look at that. It tells me that when I said rock I meant rock songs. And when I said classic, I meant a certain period of time, the ’70s and the ’80s. It is not the oldies from the ’50s. And when I said top it said you probably want to rank it by something, so you rank it by the number of weeks it stayed on the charts. So I like that interpretation, but not exactly. And again, Power BI comes to help me. It says, hey, I know what you mean now. So how about instead of ranking by weeks on the chart, I offer other options, rank it by the weeks the song stayed at No. 1. And I can see that “I Love Rock and Roll” is showing at No. 1. And every other part of the sentence is understood with Power BI.
So you say, maybe you don’t want to look at songs, you might want to look at artists or albums. Maybe not rock, here’s other genres. How about pop? Let’s go with pop. And see “Physical,” Olivia Newton John, the top pop classic from that era. It’s just an easy and fun way to interrogate the data. Let’s take this for example; let’s ask for songs about true love. And I can see immediately five different songs, one of them by Bing Crosby, another by Elton John, all called “True Love” showing up on the charts. I can ask questions about people that I know. Songs about Bill Gates, and you’d be surprised there’s actually a song called Bill Gates showing up on the charts, three years ago. Yes, by Lil Wayne, one week on the charts. I looked at the lyrics. It actually is truly not a love song.
We can ask more business questions like number of songs. You can see we have 2,600 songs in the database. Let’s list it by year. And now notice how the system automatically detects what I’m asking, giving me a much better visualization. This is a better way to look at it as a chart, automatically. I don’t have to say anything. And you can see this very interesting chart. It shows how many songs showed up on the music charts every year. And you can see in the late ’60s and early ’70s over 700 different songs on the charts. And then we go to the new millennium you see how it’s kind of dropping gradually and it’s less than half of that when you get to the new millennium. And then there is some recovery. But, when you turn on the radio and it seems like it’s the same song playing again, and again, and again, well now you know, we actually do listen you have the proof. We do listen to way less songs than people in the ’60s and ’70s listened to, very interesting.
Now the picture is even more interesting when you look at it by genre. And again, the system just changed the visualization for me on the fly, and look at that, this is the pop genre. And you see the peak that we saw before, the decline, and some of the recovery. Rock starts the same way, peak, decline, but it doesn’t recover. Something is going on here. And look at that hip-hop. From the mid-’80s hip-hop is growing and growing, and growing and it’s not taking from pop, it’s taking all the market share from rock. So you can see how the data is telling you this fascinating story of the music industry just like that.
[8:10] Now, of course you might want to know other questions. For example, what is the best song of all time? And you can see that we have here Jason Mraz with “I’m Yours.” The first time I saw that I said, who the heck is Jason Mraz? But I had to go look at the data three times and unfortunately it is Jason Mraz, scientifically speaking, it’s the best song of all times, over a year and a half on the chart, like no other song. It’s amazing. And of course, the age old question, who is the best artist? And now we get here, again, a different visualization, and you can see here that you have Mariah Carey, you have The Beatles, we have Usher, we have Elvis, really fantastic artists that we have here. But, these are very different periods of time and it’s really hard to compare The Beatles from the ’60s to Mariah Carey from now. So maybe other visualizations can help me. And with Power BI we can switch the visualization. Look at that, I have a whole list of visualizations. I can change it to a table, for example. It doesn’t help me to explain it. But, there’s one more visualization here that we call the king of the hill. And this one is just specifically designed to explain changes over time.
Now we can see here, let me just explain how it works. It’s kind of a bubble chart. In the middle we have the biggest bubble, it will be the artist that has the most weeks at No. 1 on the chart is the king, right. It’s going to be the center big bubble, around it will be the contenders, the people who want to take the center position from it, the other artists with less weeks on the charts. And we’re going to animate over the time dimension.
So we start with 1955, Frank Sinatra, Pat Boone, and we’ll see the Motown area, so we’re going to see here the Platters joining in. But, in 1957 something amazing happened, Elvis Presley breaks through with “All Shook Up,” and he is the king. This is Elvis in the center. He is going to have over 100 different songs on the Billboard 100. It’s just dominating. But, in the ’60s come and so over the pond the greatest band in the history of music, The Beatles are showing up. And they would have 26 No. 1 hits. They’re going to have eight consecutive ones. They just dominated the rest of the decade into the ’70s, and they’re breaking up. And this is kind of a weird condition. Look at that, Three Dog Night, never heard about them? Forget about them, because the next one is going to be Elton John, he’s a legend. Candle in the Wind is still the No. 1 selling single of all time. This is also the disco era. So we have the Bee Gees, I danced to their songs with my first girlfriend. And of course, it was Olivia Newton John, a giant mega-star in the early ’80s.
And now look at that, what do you have in the ’80s, Paul McCartney, going to be followed by Michael Jackson, going to be followed up by Madonna, going to be followed up by Whitney Houston. This is a parade of the greats we had in the ’80s, George Michael, Paula Abdul, I have no idea what she is doing here. Now, we’re seeing Mariah Carey, she is going to dominate the ’90s. She’s going to have a fight with Boys To Men. But, look at it, she’s in that fight and she’s pushing them out. She is going to continue with 79 weeks at No. 1. She is going to dominate the ’90s. But, the ’90s are coming to an end. Santana is taking over. He is going to take over and then it’s the hip-hop and rap, with Nelly, Kid Rock I cannot stand, and then Usher he is a genius, wonderful, wonderful. But, look at that, it’s Mariah. She’s over here again. She’s looking for a fight in the 2000s, and she’s pushing them out. And now we are getting ready for the era of the divas. Rihanna, look at it she’s taking over. Katy Perry is trying. Adele is trying. But, no Rihanna is here to stay. Thank you, Rihanna. Thank you Power BI.
Thank you all. [43:30]
SATYA NADELLA: Thank you, Amir.
Hopefully you got a good feel for the power of Power BI in Office 365, and now just imagine if you can sort of replace all of the pop data and music data with your business data and your customer data. Mix it up, in fact, with some of the public data inside of Bing, and doing these kinds of demos where people are able to get insights from all of the data that they have inside their organization, and doing a join of that with, in fact, information that’s available publicly. We think that this is the next big leap when it comes to BI and insight around big data. [44:16]
So let’s switch gears and talk about application development. I know many of you in the room have lots of projects that you’re doing application development for. This is something that we have historically done very well together with Visual Studio and .NET. And, in fact, all of our client and server runtime platform. But this is going through a sea change. And, therefore, we are building and retooling for the sea change a few apps that you want to build.
It all starts by having a platform that is capable of both infrastructure as a service and platform as a services. So that’s IaaS plus PaaS. And that means any mission-critical Web application you want to build, any mobile front-end you want to build, where you’re automating a business process with a mobile front-end; any cloud service you want to build, you want to have this rich capability of both infrastructure as a service and a platform as a service. And you want to be able to deliver that, by the way, in both Windows Azure, as well as on Windows Server. So that symmetry of development runtime is also very important, and that’s what we’re building out.
Since you’re building applications for enterprise customers, you’ll want to have real richness of business logic. And this is where we are making some changes, and innovations, which are going to fundamentally change the economics and the repeatability of your business application development, or mission-critical application development. From identity, you saw Azure AD already from an IT perspective, but from a developer perspective now you have a fully programmable identity management solution where you can handle multiple identities, consumer identities as well as enterprise identities.
We have BizTalk services in the cloud now where you can use that to be able to automate your enterprise application integration, or even B-to-B integration. We have all the richness of the data platform I talked about previously that now you can incorporate as part of your solutions without having to really build that all on your own, whereas you now will be able to make API calls.
And, lastly, perhaps most interestingly, is you can, in fact, incorporate all of Office 365 as part of your solution. Office 365 has a very modern API surface area across the entire length and breadth, both on the client side as well as on the server side, that you can now program as part of your solution. Think about all the document workflows within the enterprise business application context that you can incorporate.
Of course, at the end of the day, what matters to you as well as your customers is productivity. And that’s where we’ve always led with the fantastic tooling in Visual Studio. We’re taking that a step further to make rapid application development, especially with the Lightswitch features inside of Visual Studio 2013, we’re making it possible for you to build your Web applications or business applications with Web fronts that much more simple for you to do rapid application development, especially in combination with Office. So the combination of Visual Studio, Lightswitch, the services that go with Visual Studio, either on TFS or on Azure with source code control, project management, build, test, all of those services come together to really improve your productivity.
And we have many, many customers and partners who are taking advantage of this. The one I wanted to highlight was a solution built by .NET Solutions for IT, a financial services company in the UK. And it’s a very cool solution in the sense that they were able to take a very innovative approach to doing codes where they were monitoring the in-car telematics getting back information to Azure, then rendezvousing that with a code system which was on premise to be able to do real-time codes, and do custom codes for their customers. So that’s a pretty innovative way to think about mobile applications, Web tier, as well as being able to service relay back to data inside of your enterprise. And that richness of both tooling and capabilities in the runtime are unparalleled and unique to what we do with the combination of Windows Server and Windows Azure.
So I’m really pleased to announce the availability of Visual Studio 2013 Preview. I really encourage those of you who have .NET practices, Visual Studio expertise, now you can take the tooling coming out, the runtimes that are coming out as part of Windows Server, Windows Azure, as well as Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone, and really build this next generation of mobile applications as well as Web applications, and cloud services.
I’m also pleased to announce SQL Services, or SQL Database Premium Services for Windows Azure. Windows Azure has been going through significant growth, and particularly there’s not a solution that’s built in Windows Azure that does not use SQL Azure. And we are now introducing some capabilities that allow you to make those reservations. That means you can bring your most mission-critical applications over to the cloud. This is, again, something that we are going to be very unique. We are unique already with the fact that we have a PaaS-based SQL Service. And now we are making it much more ready for mission-critical applications.
[49:28] So the last piece of the presentation today is cloud infrastructure. Now all of the things that we talked about rely on cloud infrastructure. And our goal has been to build the most robust cloud infrastructure. And to live the cloud lifestyle we build Windows Azure using our server software. So when we sort of say we are serving millions of virtual machines on Windows Azure, it runs, in fact, on Windows Server 2012 hypervisor. So that’s an amazing feedback cycle. Not just that, but all of our first-party workloads, from Office 365 to Bing to Xbox Live, are all running on Windows Azure capabilities. So that this reinforcing feedback cycle is what battle tests our cloud infrastructure.
We are, again, unique in that we take that same cloud infrastructure that we are using on a day-in and day-out basis inside of Azure as well as our first-party applications, and making it available as part of Windows Server and System Center for others to be able to build their own cloud. And that’s what really gives us the ability to deliver a true boundary-less datacenter infrastructure with consistency to our customers.
We think that that is very, very important to be able to really service the needs that enterprise customers have around infrastructure and support of their applications, and this is something that we believe we are setting the pace, and no one else in the industry, neither Amazon nor VMware can promise or deliver this level of consistency, this level of mission-critical readiness because of the battle testing of all the diverse set of first-party workloads.
We have lots and lots of partners who are already taking advantage of it. One example that I wanted to highlight today is what Skyline Technologies did for Trek Bicycles. They really took advantage of all of the capabilities of this boundary-less datacenter. They built out a private cloud solution. They, in fact, used the IaaS capabilities inside of Azure to be able to deploy the retail management solution. They even built a PaaS solution on Azure to be able to automate all of the partner management. So again, you can see how having this consistency gives you the flexibility to be able to take advantage of all the resources in your datacenter, in your partner datacenter, and in Windows Azure, but still have the one consistent virtualization and management pane of glass from an IT perspective.
So now to really show you this boundary-less datacenter in action, I wanted to invite up on stage Jeff Woolsey from our team. Jeff. [52:08]
Related post: Partners in the cloud for modern business [Satya Nadella on The Official Microsoft Blog, July 8, 2013]
Today, at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), I am excited to announce new programs and services that are designed to help our partners and customers embrace the challenges and opportunities associated with cloud computing and big data.
The first new program we are announcing is Cloud OS Accelerate. As part of this new program, Microsoft and key partners – Cisco, NetApp, Hitachi Data Systems, HP and Dell – will invest more than $100 million to help put thousands of new private and hybrid cloud solutions into the hands of customers. We are also announcing a new Windows Intune offer, effective Oct. 1, that will help connect partners and customers with the latest in cloud connected management at a 30 percent discount. These new programs, and others you will hear about throughout the Worldwide Partner Conference, are designed to help our partners realize the opportunities in cloud computing – today.
We are also announcing previews of new technologies– including:
· Power BI for Office 365 – our new self-service business intelligence (BI) solution that combines the data analysis and visualization capabilities of Excel with the power of collaboration, scale and trusted cloud environment of Office 365. This new solution will help partners deliver powerful BI solutions to small and medium businesses everywhere. Customers and partners can sign up here.
· New Windows Azure Active Directory capabilities that will make it possible for ISVs, CSVs and other third parties to leverage Windows Azure’s directory to enable a single sign-on (SSO) experience for their users, at no cost. Customers can sign up here.
· A Premium offer for Windows Azure SQL Database, which delivers reserved capacity for more powerful and predictable performance. This will allow partners to raise the bar on the types of services and products they can offer to customers. A limited preview will be available in a few weeks, so sign up today so we can notify you when it’s ready.
This news wraps up a wave of new enterprise cloud announcements from the Server and Tools Division, including: new versions of Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2, SQL Server 2014 and Windows Intune at TechEd North America and TechEd Europe; the general availability of Windows Azure Mobile Services and Windows Azure Web Sites at Build 2013; and a new strategic partnership with Oracle to improve customer flexibility and choice.
The technology to help our partners realize the opportunities in cloud computing and big data is here and the time to collectively help our customers embrace these mega trends is now. Together, Microsoft and our partners helped customers successfully navigate the client-server and enterprise IT technology transformations. Going forward, we’re committed to doing that again for enterprise cloud.
H2CY13: Upcoming next-gen Nexus 7, the ASUS MeMO Pad HD 7 “re-incarnation” at reduced by $50 price, dual/quad-core mid-range tablets from white-box vendors starting from $65
(while entry level will start from $40) … with that there would be tremendous pressure on low-volume tablet supliers (branded or white-box alike), as well as Samsung and Apple. Meanwhile China strengthens its position as the world leading PC Market.
Complementary post reminder:
Eight-core MT6592 for superphones and big.LITTLE MT8135 for tablets implemented in 28nm HKMG are coming from MediaTek to further disrupt the operations of Qualcomm and Samsung [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, July 20, 2013] from which the following excerpts I will include here as the ones directly related to the content given here as well:
At the end of July the launch of a tablet chip is expected: the MT8135, with 2xA15 +2xA7, still using an Imagination GPU, and mainly targeting the high-end tablet market. If Google OS will be closed and converged that will have a huge impact on us.
… We will use Windows as a second priority, while using Firefox [OS] and HTML5 as a secondary backup, by keeping track of them. Because we judge that the [Android] OS convergence from Google profitability point of view is very low, therefore our vote for these two emerging open OS’s is in the ‘not so urgent’ category, in addition to and outside of Android. The other focus is again on Windows Phone 8. For the moment, however, WP8 hardware configuration requirements are still higher (mainly memory), power consumption – after optimizing the gap with Android – is not too large.
End of the complementary post reminder
Rumor: New Nexus 7 specs, features and launch details mentioned in chat with Asus rep [Android Authority, June 30, 2013]
AE: The Tablet should be released before the ending of Q2
C: when exactly is before Q2?
AE: That will be before the ending of July…
AE: There has not been confirmed specification as yet, but here is some basics specification , that you can look at:
7 inch LED with 1980*1200 resolution
Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 Quad Core CPU / Snapdragon APQ8064 CPU
2GB of RAM
32GB internal storage
5Mpx rear camera and 1.2Mpx front camera
Android 4.3
4000mAh battery
Wifi a/b/g/n,Bluetooth 4.0 and NFC enabled
LTE / WCDMA / GSM supportThis is not confirmed specifications but you can review it
vs. the first one: Nexus 7: Google wanted it in 4 months for $199/$245, ASUS delivered + Nexus Q (of Google’s own design and manufacturing) added for social streaming from Google Play to speakers and screen in home under Android device control [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, June 28, 2012] which already has an ASUS only “reincarnation:
Experience MeMO Pad HD 7 [asus YouTube channel, June 16, 2013]
- 7-inch HD [1280 x 800] tablet with a wide-view angle IPS display for stunning visuals
- Rear 5MP and front 1.2MP dual cameras to capture the moments
- Dual stereo speakers with Sonicmaster Technology for incredible sound effect.
- Ultra light, weighs only 302g
- Up to 10 hrs battery life to make it through your day
ASUS Announces MeMO Pad HD 7 and MeMO Pad FHD 10 Tablets [press release, June 3, 2013]
ASUS MeMO Pad™ HD 7 — the value tablet for mobile entertainment
ASUS MeMO Pad™ HD 7 has a quad-core processor and 1GB RAM for smooth and responsive performance with apps of all kinds. The 7-inch display has a 1280 x 800 native resolution for crisp text and images, and IPS technology for accurate, vibrant colors with 170-degree wide viewing angles. MeMO Pad™ HD 7 also features high-quality stereo speakers with enhanced sound, courtesy of ASUS SonicMaster audio technology.MeMO Pad™ HD 7 has a 1.2-megapixel front-facing HD camera that can capture 720p HD videos and models are also available with a rear 5-megapixel camera. Just 10.8mm thick and 302g, the feature-packed MeMO Pad™ HD 7 has a lithium polymer battery that lasts for up to 10 hours with 720p video playback. Models are available in four colors — black, white, pink and green.
MeMO Pad™ HD 7 has 16GB of storage and a MicroSD card slot, plus 16GB ASUS WebStorage free for one year. Together with the ASUS WebStorage Office, users can view, create, edit and share Microsoft Office documents online.
AVAILABILITY & PRICING
ASUS MeMO Pad™ HD 7 has an MSRP of US$129 for 8GB capacity and US$149 for 16GB [a “follow up” to the $199 Nexus 7 tablet developed jointly by Google and ASUS and announced a year ago], and will be available starting in July 2013.
Asustek and HP enter China tablet market with entry-level models [DIGITIMES, July 1, 2013]
Asustek Computer and Hewlett-Packard (HP) are both set to enter the China tablet market with new cheap tablet models: the Asustek 7-inch 8GB MeMO Pad HD 7, priced below CNY999 (US$163) and HP Slate 7, priced at CNY999 [$163], according to sources from channel retailers.
Asustek’s 8GB MeMO Pad HD 7 will be supplied to the China market exclusively and is expected to appear later in July.
Prior to Asustek and HP, Acer already offered its 7-inch Iconia B1-A71 tablet [1.2GHz dual-core MT8317T based] at CNY699 [$114], while Lenovo is pushing its A1000 for a price of CNY999 [$163].
Compared to first-tier vendors, most China-based white-box tablet players are offering their products at prices between CNY299-500[$49-81.5], giving them advantages in pricing, but first-tier vendors still outmatch white-box players in product quality, specifications and after-sales service, the sources said.
Currently this is the best 7” quad-core offering from purely mainland China technology:
7” quad-core Allwinner A31s based Onda tablets for $65 (v701s) and $81 with IPS (v711s) in China, while for $89 and $99 outside [‘USD 99 Allwinner’, June 22, 2013] for which here is the Onda V711s Quad Core A31s 7″ IPS Tablet PC In-depth Review [dealsprime YouTube channel, June 24, 2013]
With and 1280×800 resolution Onda V712 quad-core version is available from April 8, 2013. The current price for Onda V712 Quad Core RAM 2GB 7 Inch IPS Screen Android Tablet 16GB outside China is $139 (699 yuan, $114 inside). It has 0.3MP front and 2MP back camera (vs. 1.2MP front and 5MP rear on ASUS MeMO Pad HD 7), but its video capability is 4K.
Meanwhile the cheapest dual-core mid-range tablet from white-box vendors is the new ICOO D70PR03 for 399 yuan i.e $65. This is with 1.2GHz Allwinner A20 SoC and 1024×600 IPS screen.
China white-box tablet players seeing success in landing government procurement orders [DIGITIMES, July 1, 2013]
China-based white-box players are gaining the upper hand in the competition with first-tier brand vendors for tablet procurement orders from Asia Pacific governments due to their advantages in pricing, while improved product quality and stability also helped the white-box players to narrow their gap with first-tier players, according to sources from tablet players.
The government in Thailand recently released procurement orders for 1.6 million education-purpose tablets which were mostly taken by a China-based white-box player, and first-tier vendors are having trouble competing due to considerations about profitability, the sources noted.
The sources pointed out that the white-box maker landed orders for a total of 800,000 tablets from the Thailand government worth NT$1.57 billion (US$52.35 million), equivalent to a price of NT$1,900-2,000 [US$63-67] for each device.
However, even with such a low price, the sources believe the white-box maker is still profiting from the orders.
Currently, an entry-level 7-inch tablet from a China white-box player is priced at about US$50 and can go up to US$70-90 in the retail channel, giving them strong advantages in price competition.
Although first-tier brand vendors are also aggressively trying to enter the entry-level tablet market, white-box players are still expected to achieve shipments of 120 and 170 million units in 2013 and 2014, respectively.
Thailand school kids get tablet computers [Aljazeera via AussieNews1 YouTube channel, Aug 23, 2012]
Surprise auction winners [Bangkok Post, June 29, 2013]
Dark horses Shenzhen Yitoa Intelligent Control Co of China and Supreme Distribution (Thailand) won yesterday’s bidding for the second phase of the One Tablet per Child scheme to supply 1.22 million tablets, beating out Shenzhen Scope Scientific Development.
The Chinese firm clinched the bid for the first and second zones, while the Thai company won the contract for the third zone.
The Office of the Basic Education Commission (Obec) held an e-auction for the tablets yesterday seeking bidding winners to supply 1.63 million tablets.
Education Minister Phongthep Thepkanchana said Shenzhen Yitoa won a bid to supply 431,105 tablets for Prathom 1 students worth 842 million baht for the first zone in central and southern provinces.
The company offered a price of 1,953.12 baht [$63] per tablet, 28.2% lower than the median price set at 2,720 baht each.
According to earlier information: “The tablet will have government specifications of a seven-inch display with a camera resolution of 1024×600 pixels, a minimum 1.5-gigahertz dual-core processor unit, one gigabyte of RAM, eight gigabytes of storage memory, 3,600 milliampere hours of lithium polymer battery life, and continuous Wi-Fi internet access for at least three hours.”
The Chinese firm also won the bid to supply 373,637 tablets for Prathom 1 students worth 786 million baht for the second zone in the northern and northeastern provinces.
The company offered 2,103.64 baht [$67.5] per unit, 22.7% below the median price.
Supreme Distribution, meanwhile, proposed the lowest price for tablets in the third zone, covering Mathayom 1 students in the central and southern provinces, at 2,908.24 baht [$93], down slightly from the median price of 2,920 baht.
The Thai computer assembly firm will supply 426,683 tablets worth 1.24 billion baht.
Obec postponed the bid for the fourth zone – covering some northern and northeastern provinces – to July, as Shenzhen Yitoa was the only bidder in the auction. The conditions require at least two bidders in competition.
Mr Phongthep said purchasing contracts are expected to be sealed in the week ahead. All winners are obliged to deliver their tablets within 90 days of signing contracts.
Panuwat Khantamoleekul, the managing director of Supreme Distribution, said the company could not offer a sharp rate cut since Mathayom 1 specifications are higher than those for Prathom 1.
He said his company will build its own factory in Thailand to assemble materials sourced from China.
It set up a local office here two decades ago and also won an earlier bid to supply tablets in Russia.
Shenzhen Yitoa Digital Appliance Co. Ltd [Global Sources, April 14, 2013]
Offering a Wide Range of Electronic Products
Shenzhen Yitoa Digital Appliance was founded in 2007, which is affiliated to Shenzhen Yitoa Intelligent Control Co., Ltd. We are a nationally known enterprise designing, developing, manufacturing and selling intelligent controllers of digital equipment. Our main products include e-book readers, MIDs, tablet PCs and other devices.Releasing Three New Products Monthly
Every year, we invest $800,000 in our R&D department to innovate and renew users’ digital life. This gives our 100 experienced engineers the resources they need to add up to three new products a month. Simply send us your OEM/ODM requirements, and we’ll complete a sample for you in as fast as one week. Now our company cooperates with Aigo, Newsman, Skyworth and other national famous companies.Recipient of International Certifications and Recognitions
With a 16,000-square-meter factory, 100 engineers, 1,600 workers and 25 assembly lines, our monthly capacity is over 1 million pieces. For your assurance, all of our products carry CE, CQC, CCC, UL and VED approvals, and are manufactured under ISO 9001:2000 and ISO 14001:2004 guidelines. Moreover, we have been recognized as a hi-tech enterprise in 2004, one of the top 100 Shenzhen Software Enterprises in 2005, and one of the top 20 Shenzhen Software Export Enterprises in 2006.
Leading Tablet PC Brands Reduce 2013 Targets [DisplaySearch blog, June 27, 2013]
We recently pointed out [Smaller Tablets to Get Even More Popular in the Second Half of 2013 [DisplaySearch blog, June 18, 2013]] that 2013 would be the year in which smaller tablet PC shipments (especially 7” and 8”) would surpass larger tablet PC shipments (such as 9.7” and 10.1”). Tablet PCs are starting to overlap with larger smart phones, as well as with ultra-slim notebook PCs.
Our latest forecast for the tablet PC market in the Quarterly Mobile PC Shipment and Forecast Report is for 67% Y/Y growth – from 153.6M in 2012 to 256.5M in 2013. Within this growing market, the share held by the top 12 brands, including Apple, HP, Acer, Dell, Lenovo, ASUS, Samsung, Toshiba, Sony, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, is falling because the whitebox market [iPad-sized Tablets No Longer Driving Panel Growth Momentum [DisplaySearch blog, June 27, 2013]], especially in China, is growing faster. We estimate that the top brands, which shipped a combined 104.2M units in 2012, have reduced their 2013 shipment plans from 172M forecast in April to 167M forecast in June.
Apple’s iPad series accounted for 67M units in 2012 and remains the market leader, but is also the leading example of this trend. We estimate that Apple originally planned to ship 88M iPads in 2013, has reduced its target to 74M, including 31M iPads and 43M iPad minis.
We estimate that Samsung’s total tablet PC and phablet business plan is nearly 50M units in 2013, a big jump from 15.6M in 2012. Samsung plans include 39.5M tablet PCs, and 10M Galaxy Mega series (5.8” and 6.3”; while Samsung defines these as phablets, we classify them as smart phones).
Other tablet PC brands expect to grow their business in 2013. Among them, Lenovo, Microsoft, HP, and Acer are the most aggressive. Lenovo has two product lines for its tablet PC – X86 and ARM series. In 2013, Lenovo is planning for 3M X86 and 8M ARM.
Tablet PCs and Touch Adoption Expected to Drive Mobile PC Shipments Through 2017, According to NPD DisplaySearch [press release, May 6, 2013]
SANTA CLARA, CALIF., May 6, 2013—The mobile PC market is expected to increase from 367.6 million units shipped in 2012 to 762.7 million globally by 2017, driven by touch-enabled form factors, according to the NPD DisplaySearch Quarterly Mobile PC Shipment and Forecast Report. The majority of this shift will come as tablet PCs begin to replace notebook PCs this year as the dominant mobile PC form factor, and touch becomes a key feature in mobile PC adoption.
“The mobile PC industry is undergoing significant change this year,” said Richard Shim, senior analyst with NPD DisplaySearch. “The rapid rise and establishment of white box tablet PCs (tablets made by small local brands, mainly in China) is putting pressure on traditional notebook PCs. These low-cost tablets are reaching further into emerging regions where notebook PC penetration rates have remained low, resulting in cannibalization by tablet PCs.”
Tablet PC shipments are forecast to increase 67% Y/Y to 256.5 million in 2013, and reach 579.4 million by 2017. White box tablet PCs accounted for one-third of tablet PC shipments in 2012 and will maintain at that level for the next several years.
Notebook PC shipments are expected to decline 10% over the next four years, from 203.3 million in 2013 to 183.3 million in 2017, but there will be pockets of growth. Shipments of notebooks with touch capabilities are expected to grow 48% Y/Y in 2014. In the notebook category, touch will be used mainly in ultra-slim PCs, which includes Intel-specified Ultrabooks, the MacBook Air, and other slim form factor notebooks. Ultra-slims, which are at the premium end of the notebook market, are forecast to account for two-thirds of touch-enabled notebooks in 2013. By 2017, they will be 80%. Intel’s recent mandate that third-generation Ultrabooks (using the company’s next generation Haswell processors) must include touch will also help adoption.
Figure 1: Global Mobile PC Shipments, 2012-2017
Source: NPD DisplaySearch Quarterly Mobile PC Shipment and Forecast Report
New operating systems such as Windows 8 are unlikely to be a major driver of touch adoption. Rather, penetration of touch in notebook PCs will be driven by a reduction in cost and new form factors, such as hybrids, sliders, and convertibles.
“Thus far, Windows 8 has had a limited impact on driving touch adoption in notebook PCs, due to a lack of applications needing touch and the high cost of touch on notebook PCs,” added Shim. “Form factors aimed at differentiation from standard clamshell notebooks will help to drive consumer adoption of touch-enabled notebook PCs, starting in the second half of 2013.”
The NPD DisplaySearch Quarterly Mobile PC Shipment and Forecast Report covers the entire range of mobile PC products shipped worldwide and regionally. With analysis of global and regional brands, the Quarterly Mobile PC Shipment and Forecast Report provides an objective, expert view of the market with insight into historical shipments, revenues, forecasts, and more. For more information about the report, please contact Charles Camaroto at 1.888.436.7673 or 1.516.625.2452, e-mail contact@displaysearch.com or contact your regional NPD DisplaySearch office in China, Japan, Korea or Taiwan for more information.
About NPD DisplaySearch
NPD DisplaySearch, part of The NPD Group, provides global market research and consulting specializing in the display supply chain, including trend information, forecasts and analyses developed by a global team of experienced analysts with extensive industry knowledge. NPD DisplaySearch supply chain expertise complements sell-through information from The NPD Group, thereby providing a true end-to-end view of the display supply chain from materials and components to shipments of electronic devices with displays to sales of major consumer and commercial channels. For more information, visit us at http://www.displaysearch.com/. Read our blog at http://www.displaysearchblog.com/ and follow us on Twitter at @DisplaySearch.
About The NPD Group, Inc.
The NPD Group provides global information and advisory services to drive better business decisions. By combining unique data assets with unmatched industry expertise, we help our clients track their markets, understand consumers, and drive profitable growth. Sectors covered include automotive, beauty, consumer electronics, entertainment, fashion, food/foodservice, home, luxury, mobile, office supplies, sports, technology, toys, and video games. For more information, visithttp://www.npd.com/ and npdgroupblog.com. Follow us on Twitter: @npdtech and @npdgroup.
China [branded] smartphone vendors to foray into tablet segment [DIGITIMES, July 1, 2013]
China-based smartphone vendors, including Huawei, ZTE, Lenovo and Xiaomi Technology, all will step up their efforts to penetrate the tablet market, according to industry sources.
Huawei plans to launch a new 7-inch tablet in the third quarter of 2013, and together with a 10.1-inch model released in early 2013, Huawei is sourcing about two million flat panels from China-based Truly Opto-electronics currently, the sources indicated.
Meanwhile, Huawei also purchases a portion of displays used in its new tablets from Innolux. However, the Taiwan-based flat panel maker declined to comment on orders from individual clients.
Lenovo also unveiled its Windows 8-based tablet, the Lenovo Miix10, recently. The Lenovo Miix, which is expected to hit the market in the third quarter, is equipped with a 10.1-inch 1366 by 768 IPS display and is power by an Intel dual-core Atom processor.
Xiaomi reportedly will step into the tablet segment by unveiling its first tablet in mid-August, the sources revealed, adding that Xiaomi will utilize tablet chipset solutions from MediaTek.
White-box vendors expected to lower prices for entry-level 7-inch tablets to US$40 in 2H13 [DIGITIMES, June 7, 2013]
The market for 7-inch tablets is seeing intense competition and white-box vendors are expected to further reduce prices for entry-level models to US$40 in the second half of 2013, according to Taiwan-based supply chain sources.
Entry-level white-box tablets are expected to continue selling well in markets such as China, and supply chains are able to increasingly decrease pricing for entry-level components, said the sources.
Meanwhile, Digitimes Research predicts that 254 million tablets will be sold in 2013, up 63.9% on year.
China-based white-box 2013 tablet shipments likely below forecasts [DIGITIMES, June 14, 2013]
China-based white-box tablet vendors’ shipments in 2013 were originally forecast at 120 million units, but actual shipments may fall short due to strong competition from inexpensive models launched by brand vendors, according to supply chain sources.
In addition to brand vendors, the white-box tablet vendors also face increasing competition from entry-level large-size smartphones, the sources said, adding that smartphones sized 5.7- to 6-inch are posing some of the biggest challenges.
Pricing for both the inexpensive brand models and entry-level large-size smartphones are becoming more similar to white-box tablet vendors’ products and that trend is expected to continue, causing the shipments to be less than expected in 2013, the sources added.
Digitimes Research: China mobile AP market to expand in 2013 [press release, June 14, 2013]
The China mobile application processor (AP) market will expand over 60% in 2013 to 506 million units, with smartphone-use APs accounting for 77.4% of total shipments, Digitimes Research said in its new report.
The market for smartphone APs in China climbed to 241.5 million units in 2012, up significantly from 69 million in 2011, according to Digitimes Research. The number will increase to 391.7 million units in 2013.
Shipments of China-made smartphone APs are forecast to account for 34% of the global smartphone AP market in 2013, compared to 26% in 2012 and around 10% in 2011, Digitimes Research noted.
As for China-made tablet APs, the market will reach a size of 115.2 million units in 2013, compared with a mere 10.5 million units [in 2011], Digitimes Research indicated.
Dual-core processors will overtake single-core chips to become the mainstream spec for tablets produced by China’s brand and white-box companies in the second half of 2013, while the penetration of quad-core powered tablets will also expand substantially, Digitimes Research pointed out.
China-based mobile AP vendors will ship a combined 506 million units in 2013, while the global mobile AP market will come to a size of 958 million units, Digitimes Research projected.
Prices of smartphone and tablet solutions to drop 10-20% in 2H13 [DIGITIMES, June 18, 2013]
Prices of chipset solutions for smartphones and tablets are expected to decline 10-20% sequentially in the second half of 2013 due to competition between MediaTek and Qualcomm, according to industry sources.
Qualcomm is scheduled to host its annual QRD (Qualcomm reference design) forum in Shenzhen on June 20, which is expected to attract participants from China-based branded as well as white-box smartphone and tablet vendors, the sources noted.
While showcasing its new solutions for the second half of the year, the forum also aims to grab smartphone and tablet solution orders from MediaTek, which has been prevailing in China’s solution market using a variety of reference designs, said the sources.
Qualcomm said earlier that over 40 OEMs have launched more than 200 new smartphones and tablets in 14 countries recently, mounting increasing pressure on MediaTek, said the sources.
China-based solution vendors such as Spreadtrum Communications have also joined the price competion, driving the unit price of quad-core smartphone solutions to below US$10 in China recently, the sources revealed.
China market: White-box tablet makers approaching MediaTek for quad-core solutions [DIGITIMES, May 27, 2013]
China-based white-box tablet makers are reportedly approaching MediaTek for the purchase of the chipmaker’s integrated MT8125 and [the upcoming] 8135 [to be based on A15 + A7 “big.LITTLE” architecture] quad-core application processors for tablets, according to industry sources.
The move by the white-box tablet makers comes after branded tablet vendors in China and Taiwan have begun using the MT8125 and 8135 solutions for tablets targeting the US99-149 segment, the sources noted.
White-box tablet makers currently purchase quad-core solutions mainly from China-based IC vendors including Allwinner Technology and Rockchip Technology, while buying Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips from Realtek Semiconductor and RDA Microelectronics.
The 28nm quad-core solutions from Allwinner and Rockchip are priced at US$4-5, or about 50% lower than the comparable quad-core chips offered by MediaTek, since the chips offered by Allwinner or Rochchip do not support voice communications, said the sources.
In order to compete effectively in China and other emerging markets and differentiate products, white-box tablet makers have been forced to adopt MediaTek’s quad-core solutions, commented the sources.
MediaTek Introduces New Quad-Core Application Processor for Fast-Growing Tablet Market [pres release, May 29, 2013] used in ASUS MeMO Pad HD 7 shown earlier
TAIWAN, Hsinchu – 29 May, 2013 – MediaTek Inc., a leading fabless semiconductor company for wireless communications and digital multimedia solutions, today announced the availability of the new quad-core application processor – MT8125 designed for the fast growing global tablet markets. The new tablet platform is an extension of the company’s highly successful quad-core portfolio, it integrates a power-efficient quad-core Cortex™- A7 CPU subsystem with speed up to 1.5GHz, PowerVR™ Series5XT Graphics that delivers compelling multimedia features and sophisticated user experiences. To simplify product design and speed time-to-market, the MT8125 supports 3G HSPA+, 2G EDGE and Wi-Fi versions, all of which are pin-to-pin compatible, allowing device manufacturers to easily expand their portfolios with a full range of tablets by leveraging the existing or planned design requiring no additional rework.
Inheriting MediaTek’s technology breakthrough of quad-core SoC platform and high-end multimedia capabilities, the MT8125 incorporates premium multimedia features, supporting up to Full HD 1080p video playback and recording, 13MP camera with integrated ISP and Full HD (1920 x 1200) displays. The new tablet SoC also delivers ground breaking visual quality powered by the leading picture quality technology – MiraVisionTM, derived from MediaTek’s extensive experience in the Digital TV market.
The MT8125 includes full support for MediaTek’s leading 4-in-1 connectivity combo that converges Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS and FM, bringing highly integrated, best-in-class wireless technologies and expanded functionality to high-performance multimedia tablets. The MT8125 also provides support for Wi-Fi certified Miracast™ which makes multimedia content sharing between devices easier.
“During the last two years, application processors used in tablets have taken a fast evolution from single-core 1GHz to quad cores, clocking over 1.5GHz. Competition will force chipset vendors to maintain pace – by implementing more advanced features while reducing the system cost by increasing the level of integration*,”said Gartner Research Director Roger Sheng.
“MediaTek’s team has worked closely with Lenovo to integrate their solutions into our design process, helping us accelerate the development and introduction of new, innovative tablets. In turn, this allows us to fulfill our commitment to delivering the outstanding user experience our customers demand. The tablet market is moving fast, and Lenovo aims to be at the forefront of tablet innovation. MediaTek helps us do that,” commented Wayne Chen, vice president and head of mobile business unit for Lenovo.
“We’re confident that our comprehensive reference designs will be the industry benchmark, particularly benefiting the mid-to-high-end tablet market. It is an innovative, cost-effective and definitely faster time-to-market solution.” said Joe Chen, GM of Home Entertainment Business Unit, MediaTek. “By taking advantage of our strengths in the multimedia field, mobile communications and multi-screen technologies, we offer a complete multi-core processor family for smartphones and tablets, enabling a significant difference in performance and power efficiency – all while ensuring seamless streaming performance across the array of devices when users are consuming entertainment and information. ”
The MediaTek quad core tablet SoC is now being widely adopted by MediaTek’s global customers including Lenovo IdeaTab S6000 series.
Lenovo S6000 10.1″ MediaTek MT8389 [Charbax YouTube channel, March 4, 2013]
Note:
1. According to LinuxGizmos.com “It appears, however that Lenovo’s 10-inch, quad-core S6000 Android tablet uses a scaled down, 1.2GHz version of the MT8125 called the MT8389. … The MT8389 also appears to have a lesser PowerVR SGX GPU, according to All-RSS.com. As a result, the Lenovo S6000 has more limited 1280 x 800-pixel resolution and a 5-megapixel camera.”
2. Quad-core SoC competition in as per this:
MT8125 / 8389
Quad-Core Cortex-A7 1.5GHz + CPU Tablet Platform [May 29, 2013]
Overview
MT8125/8389 is an extension of MediaTek’s highly successful quad-core portfolio, it integrates a power-efficient quad-core Cortex™- A7 CPU subsystem with speed up to 1.5GHz, PowerVR™ Series5XT Graphics that delivers compelling multimedia features and sophisticated user experiences.
Features
High-end Multimedia Capabilities
• Supporting up to Full HD 1080p video playback and recording, 13MP camera with integrated ISP and Full HD (1920 x 1200) displays
• Delivering ground breaking visual quality powered by the leading picture quality technology – MiraVisionTM, derived from MediaTek’s extensive experience in the Digital TV market.
Best-in-class Connectivity Technology
• Including full support for MediaTek’s leading 4-in-1 connectivity combo that converges Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS and FM, bringing highly integrated, best-in-class wireless technologies to tablets
• Providing support for Wi-Fi certified Miracast™ which makes multimedia content sharing between devices easier
Supports 3G HSPA+, 2G EDGE and Wi-Fi
• MT8125/ 8389 supports 3G HSPA+, 2G EDGE and Wi-Fi versions, all of which are pin-to-pin compatible, allowing device manufacturers to easily expand their portfolios with a full range of tablets by leveraging the existing or planned design requiring no additional rework.
MT8377
1 GHz Dual-Core Tablet Platform [May 29, 2013]
Overview
The MediaTek MT8377 features a dual 1GHz Cortex™-A9 application processor from ARM, a PowerVR™ Series5 SGX GPU from Imagination Technologies, MediaTek’s proven 3G/HSPA/Edge modem, and runs the Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich”. y integrating a dual-core application processor architecture widely deployed in the majority of today’s premium tablets, the MT8377 boosts application and browser performance by up to 40% compared to single-core platform.
Features
Richest Multimedia Features
• Providing rich multimedia features including a 8MP camera and high-definition 1080p video playback
• Supporting high-resolution displays of up to HD720 (1280×720) resolution
• Integrating built-in stereo 3D panel support and DTV-grade display picture quality
Best-in-class Connectivity Technology
• Including full support for MediaTek’s leading 4-in-1 connectivity combo that converges Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS and FM
MediaTek allocating more resources for development of tablet solutions [DIGITIMES, June 10, 2013]
MediaTek is relocating its tablet solution unit from its wireless communications group to the home entertainment group, meaning that the Taiwan-based top IC design house is looking to put more of its hardware and software resources into developing chips for tablet applications, according to industry sources.
The move echoes company president Hseih Ching-chiang’s statement that MediaTek aims to roll out new chips for tablet applications on a quarterly basis in the next few years.
The emphasis on the development of chips for tablets indicates that MediaTek believes that tablets will become the next-generation killer application and that the global tablet market is likely to continue to grow robustly in the coming years, commented the sources.
Meanwhile, MediaTek has adopted a strategy to push sales of its tablet solutions to non-Apple branded vendors in China and Taiwan, which have been focusing on promoting mid-range tablets for the US$99-199 segment, the sources indicated.
Given the high price/performance ratio and reliability of MediaTek’s chipset solutions, more and more entry-level tablet vendors in China are likely to queue up for table solutions from MediaTek, said the sources.
MediaTek is expected to ship a total of 20 million chipsets for tablets in 2013, accounting for 15% of the global non-iPad tablet market, estimated the sources.
MediaTek 2Q13 performance beats guidance [DIGITIMES, July 5, 2013]
MediaTek has reported consolidated revenues of NT$9.77 billion (US$323.52 million) for June, down 10.6% sequentially but up 24.6% on year.
MediaTek’s second-quarter revenues totaled NT$33.28 billion [US$1.1B], increasing 38.8% sequentially and surpassing the company’s guidance of NT$30-31.6 billion set for the quarter.
For the first half of 2013, revenues amounted to NT$57.25 billion [US$1.9B], up 33% from a year earlier.
Digitimes Research: China mobile AP shipments rise in 2Q13 [press release, June 24, 2013]
The China mobile application processor (AP) market is forecast to reach a total of 114.5 million units in the second quarter of 2013, up 9.6% sequentially and 88.6% from the 60.7 million units shipped a year ago, Digitimes Research said in its new report. Smartphone-use APs continued to account for the majority of total shipments.
The market for smartphone APs in China will amount to 92.3 million units in the second quarter, representing a 16% increase compared to 79.6 million units in the first quarter, whereas that for tablet-use APs declined 10.8% on quarter to 22.2 million units, according to Digitimes Research.
The China mobile AP market, which consists of smartphone- and tablet-use APs, is set to total 219 million units in the first half of 2013, said Digitimes Research. The top-5 suppliers – MediaTek, Qualcomm, Spreadtrum Communications, Allwinner Technology and Rockchip Electronics – contributed as high as 192 million units, or 87.7%, to the overall shipments, Digitimes Research indicated.
MediaTek has enjoyed robust growth in its SoC shipments for smartphones and tablets with shipments for the first half estimated at 84 million units, while Qualcomm‘s shipments to China’s mobile AP market are set to total about 42.7 million units, Digitimes Research predicted. Meanwhile, Spreadtrum with its low-price strategy is expected to ship 38 million units in the first half of 2013, Digitimes Research said.
Specializing in tablet-use SoCs, Allwinner and Rockchip will both report significant on-year growth in their shipments for the first half of 2013, Digitimes Research indicated. Allwinner‘s shipments will climb to 18 million chips in first-half 2013 from only 4.7 million units a year earlier, while Rockchip‘s shipments for the same period will reach 10 million chips compared with the 5.5 million units shipped in the first half of 2012.
Note: Out of 47.1 million units used in tablets for H1CY13 28 million came from Allwinner and Rockchip, which is almost 60%. 38% belongs to Allwinner, 21% to Rockchip.
Digitimes Research: TSMC expanding in China [press release, June 20, 2013]
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has significantly expanded its presence in China’s IC industry, as the foundry’s technology advantages and manufacturing capabilities help it ride the wave of smartphone and tablet growth in the local market, according to Digitimes Research.
TSMC has received a pull-in of orders from a number of China-based IC design houses, which specialize in mobile SoCs such as application processors and place a heavy emphasis on demand domestically. Their booming businesses have boosted TSMC’s sales coming from the China market, said Digitimes Research.
TSMC saw sales generated from the total orders placed by its China-based clients climbed to US$820 million in 2012 from US$510 million in 2011, an about 61% increase. Sales are set to rise further to top US$1.4 billion in 2013, Digitimes research forecast.
China-based Semiconductor Manufacturing International (SMIC) has also enjoyed growth in its sales coming from the local market, Digitimes Research indicated. Sales generated from orders placed by SMIC’s local China-based clients arrived at the highest quarterly level for a third consecutive quarter in the first quarter of 2013, Digitimes Research said.
In addition, Digitimes Research noted that China’s IC design sector has entered a new phase of development. The number of China-based IC design companies exceeded 500 in 2012 with their combined output value ranked third worldwide.
IHS Boosts Tablet Panel Shipment Forecast as White-Box Products Storm the Market [press release, July 2, 2013]
EL SEGUNDO, Calif.(July 2, 2013)—Boosted by orders from unbranded, white-box Chinese manufacturers, global demand for tablet panels is exceeding expectations, spurring IHS to increase its forecast for displays by 6 percent for 2013.
A total of 262 million displays for tablets are forecast to be shipped in 2013, compared to the previous forecast of 246 million, according to the May Edition of the “LCD Industry Tracker—Tablet” report from information and analytics provider IHS (NYSE: IHS). This will represent 69 percent growth from 155 million in 2012, as presented in figure 1 attached.
“Competitive dynamics in the tablet market have changed dramatically this year as Chinese white-box smartphone makers have entered the tablet market in droves,” said Ricky Park, senior manager for large-area displays at IHS. “These companies are producing massive quantities of low-end tablets that appeal to consumers in China and other developing economies. Because of this, the white-box manufacturers are driving up demand for tablet panels, particularly smaller displays using the older twisted nematic (TN) technology, rather than the newer screens using in-plane switching (IPS).”
Unbranded tablet makers purchased 40 percent of all tablet panels in April, up from just 17 percent in the first quarter of 2012, as presented in figure 2 attached.
Partly because of the rise of white-box makers, shipments of smaller 8- and 9-inch tablet displays will rise by nearly 200 percent in 2013. In contrast, larger displays in the 9-, 10- and 11-inch range will suffer a 5 percent decline.
The boom in white-box tablets is being driven the introduction of turnkey designs offered by processor makers. The designs make it easy for new, inexperienced market entrants to offer tablet products.
The Chinese white-box manufacturers hold certain advantages over the major incumbent tablet manufacturers. The white-box manufacturers are able to produce tablets at lower cost, more quickly and with greater flexibility in production. These companies also have the capability to manufacture both unbranded tablets, and make products for the major brands on a contract manufacturing basis.
Such white-box players also have been agile enough to take advantage of the current high availability and low-cost of tablet panels. Makers of displays for the shrinking PC market have switched over to the tablet market, spurring a glut that has depressed pricing. As prices have fallen, the white-box makers have demonstrated enough flexibility to boost production of low-cost tablets.
“Playing to their strengths, the white-box manufacturers are set to continue to increase their presence in tablets and propel the expansion of the overall tablet market,” Park said.
IHS believes the strong growth of tablet panel demand continued in the second quarter. The arrival of more turnkey tablet design solutions will drive up demand for 7- and 8-inch panels throughout the year.
The 8-inch panels are becoming an increasingly large segment of the tablet market, with a display area more appealing to users than the 7-inch size. In all, the 8-inch panels accounted for 11 percent of panel shipments in April, with Samsung and Acer having recently launched new tablets in that size. With more introductions likely coming in the third quarter, IHS expects a substantial market share for the 8-inch by the end of this year.
The market for larger-sized, 10-inch and bigger tablet panels may begin to enjoy a recovery in shipments with the launch of the new Intel Corp. Atom microprocessor, code-named Bay Trail. This new device could help reduce the cost of x86 microprocessor-based tablets and improve battery life. Bay Trail also could generate opportunities for hybrid-form tablets that include keyboards.
The x86 tablets, with Microsoft Corp.’s new Windows 8 operating system, would have functionality better suited to the needs of the commercial and business worlds than either the Google Android- or the Apple iOS-based tablets, which are designed with the consumer in mind.
About IHS (www.ihs.com)
IHS (NYSE: IHS) is the leading source of information, insight and analytics in critical areas that shape today’s business landscape. Businesses and governments in more than 165 countries around the globe rely on the comprehensive content, expert independent analysis and flexible delivery methods of IHS to make high-impact decisions and develop strategies with speed and confidence. IHS has been in business since 1959 and became a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange in 2005. Headquartered in Englewood, Colorado, USA, IHS is committed to sustainable, profitable growth and employs 6,700 people in 31 countries around the world.
Flexible Display Market to Reach Nearly 800 Million Unit Shipments by 2020 [IHS press release, June 5, 2013]
EL SEGUNDO, Calif. (June 5, 2013)—Demand for flexible displays is set to undergo massive growth during the next seven years, with a broad variety of applications—ranging from smartphones to giant screens mounted on buildings—driving a nearly 250 times expansion in shipments from 2013 through 2020.
Global shipments of flexible displays are projected to soar to 792 million units in 2020, up from 3.2 million in 2013, according to a new IHS report entitled “Flexible Display Technology and Market Forecast” . Market revenue will rise to $41.3 billion, up from just $100,000 during the same period, as presented in the attached figure.
“Flexible displays hold enormous potential, creating whole new classes of products and enabling exciting new applications that were impractical or impossible before,” said Vinita Jakhanwal, director for mobile and emerging displays and technology at IHS. “From smartphones with displays that curve around the sides, to smart watches with wraparound screens, to tablets and PCs with roll-out displays, to giant video advertisements on curved building walls, the potential uses for flexible displays will be limited only by the imagination of designers.”
Generation flex
IHS classifies flexible displays into four generations of technology. The first generation is the durable display panels that are now entering the market. These panels employ a flexible substrate to attain superior thinness and unbreakable ruggedness. However, these displays are flat and cannot be bent or rolled.
Second-generation flexible displays are bendable and conformable, and can be molded to curved surfaces, maximizing space on small form-factor products like smartphones.
The third generation consists of truly flexible and rollable displays that can be manipulated by end users. These displays will enable a new generation of devices that save space and blur the lines separating traditional product categories, such as smartphones and media tablets.
The fourth generation consists of disposable displays that cost so little that they can serve as a replacement for paper.
Starting small
With their thin, light and unbreakable nature, flexible displays initially are expected to be used in smaller-sized products, such as mobile phones and MP3 players. However, once large-size displays are available, flexible technology will be used in bigger screen-size platforms, such as laptops, monitors and televisions.
The largest application for flexible displays during the next several years will be personal electronic devices. This segment will be led by smartphones, with shipments climbing to 351 million units by 2020, up from less than 2 million this year.
Flexible stars at SID
Flexible displays were a major topic at the Society for Information Display (SID) Display Week event in Vancouver in May.
During an SID keynote address, Kinam Kim, president and CEO of Samsung Display Co., discussed his company’s flexible organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display technology. Kim said that the technology will be suitable for wearable electronics devices like Google Glass.
Also at SID, LG Display showed a 5-inch OLED panel constructed out of plastic that was both flexible and unbreakable.
Furthermore, Corning at SID showed its Willow Glass, which can be used as with both OLEDs and liquid-crystal displays (LCD) in mobile devices such as smart phones, tablets and notebook PCs. Because of its thinness, strength and flexibility, Willow Glass could enable future displays to be wrapped around a device or a structure.
IHS predicts OLEDs will be the leading flexible display technology during every year for the foreseeable future, accounting for 64 percent of shipments in 2020.
How Intel Can Enable a Successful $200 PC in the Age of the Media Tablet [IHS press release, May 20, 2013]
Vancouver, British Columbia (May 20, 2013)—Can PC makers produce ultrathin, touch-screen PCs that are appealing to consumers—and that are priced at just $200?
The astounding answer seems yes—if microprocessor Intel Corp. is willing to cut the price of its semiconductor components to PC makers, according to a PC Dynamics Market Brief from information and analytics provider IHS (NYSE: IHS).
Speaking at the IHS/SID 2013 Business Conference, held May 20 in Vancouver, Canada, Zane Ball, Intel vice president and general manager, Global Ecosystem Development, is presenting his company’s plan to empower the PC industry to produce low-cost notebooks incorporating touch technology. Craig Stice, senior principal analyst for compute platforms at IHS, believes Intel has a shot at success.
“A price point that low seems far-fetched considering the mobile PC prices of today, with Ultrabooks and other ultrathins going as high as $1,000 or more,” Stice said. “However, the small laptops known as netbooks saw their prices reach down into the $200 range at the height of their popularity a few years ago, and a cost analysis of netbooks shows how such a low level of pricing can be used to support a no-frills type of ultrathin PC.”
The cost estimate for a standard netbook, based on the IHS Compute Systems Cost Analyzer that calculates the major components of a netbook on a third-quarter 2013 timeline, comes out to $207.82, as shown in the attached table.
“Hitting this kind of price point is not impossible for the PC industry, already a cutthroat market accustomed to razor-thin margins,” Stice said. “Such a possibility was stated by outgoing Intel CEO Paul Otellini, who during Intel’s first-quarter earnings call in April made the bold prediction that touch-enabled, ultrathin Intel-based notebooks using non-core processors could be available by the end of this year.”
Intel holds the cards
The key factor that could make this happen is Intel, which can control up to 33 percent of the total bill-of-materials cost for the PC through the central processing unit (CPU) and motherboard. If Intel decides to provide a price break for just these components, PC original equipment manufacturers could see their margins improve, allowing them to drive down prices for the retail market. With PC competition so fierce, it takes only one PC manufacturer to find a price point that sells—and others are bound to follow suit shortly afterward.
Intel could also be instrumental in introducing an even more powerful ultrathin-type mobile PC than netbooks, which have now been overtaken by media tablets and are on their way out of the market altogether.
Intel’s next-generation Atom processor, called Bay Trail, has the potential to deliver a performance boost that will clearly separate the traditional netbooks of old from the new generation of mobile and ultrathin PCs.
Avoiding netbooks’ fate
While netbooks had limited computing power and were regarded more as devices for content consumption, the new and much more economical ultathins, in contrast, would possess considerably more power and be categorized as content-creation devices. Such a perceptible enhancement could increase their chances of survival in the marketplace, unlike the short-lived netbooks.
Much depends on Bay Trail, which Intel says will move from two processing cores to four to provide beefed-up performance. Along with Bay Trail, Intel’s own high-definition embedded graphics and an extended battery life for improved power will yield a processor bearing similar performance to the chipmaker’s renowned family of Core processors. All these traits could be part of the new, less expensive ultrathin being projected.
What PC manufacturers also must do
What these developments portend for the PC industry is significant. If the PC industry is able to get down to the $200 price point, and Intel’s Bay Trail processor delivers what it claims to do, then the PC market will have its much-needed shot in the arm. Such a turn of events could then spark the mobile PC market, which has been losing steam to flashier rivals like smartphones and tablets.
Besides Intel’s willingness to cut its own price point to make chips available at a lower cost to customers, a second important factor involves the PC makers themselves. For their part, PC manufacturers also need to find a way of getting to the magic price point of $200—and possibly sacrifice even more margin in exchange for the greater amount of volume that they seek.
All told, the scenario above—merely hypothetical at this point—is not entirely out of reach. A strong second half is already being forecast for PCs this year: add in the potential for lower-priced next-generation ultrathin systems, and the PC industry may finally have a valid competitor to lower-priced media tablets.
China Becomes World’s Leading PC Market in 2012 [IHS press release, April 29, 2013]
EL SEGUNDO, Calif. (April 29, 2013)—China rose to the top of the PC market for the first time ever on an annual basis last year, relegating the United States to second place with a lead of more than 3 million units, according to an IHS iSuppli PC Dynamics Market Brief from information and analytics provider IHS (NYSE: IHS).
PC shipments in 2012 to China amounted to 69 million units, exceeding the 66 million total reached by the United States. Only a year earlier in 2011, the United States was the leading global destination for PCs.
Beyond its large size, China’s PC market exhibits distinct characteristics that set it apart from the computer trade elsewhere, possessing a vast untapped rural market and unique consumer-purchasing patterns. While desktop PC shipments lagged notebooks around the world, the two PC segments were on par in China in 2012, with an even 50-50 split, as shown in the attached table.
“The equal share of shipments for desktops and notebooks in China is unusual, since consumers in most regions today tend to prefer more agile mobile PCs, rather than the bulky, stationary desktops,” said Peter Lin, senior analyst for compute platforms at IHS. “The relatively large percentage of desktop PC shipments in China is due to huge demand in the country’s rural areas, which account for a major segment of the country’s 1.34 billion citizens. These consumers tend to prefer the desktop form factor.”
The market will change gradually as desktop PCs face rising competition from the high value proposition presented by notebooks. Notebooks will then surpass desktops in the country by 2014, tracking more closely with the worldwide desktop-to-notebook PC ratio of 36 to 64 percent.
The desktop vs. notebook pattern of consumption in China is only one example of the distinctive hallmarks of the country’s dynamic PC market. In another indicator, China also has approximately a 50-50 proportion in consumer vs. commercial PCs, compared to the 65-35 percent ratio for the rest of the world.
A third pattern unique to the China PC market is the preferred notebook display size of 14 inches, which accounts for more than 70 percent of notebook PC shipments in the country. For the rest of the world, the 14-inch makes up less than 30 percent.
A fourth pattern of note is the attach rate of PCs with a pre-installed operating system, especially for notebooks. While mature PC markets in other parts of the world claim a 90 percent attach rate, the proportion for China comes out to lower than 50 percent, with the ratio even lower in the desktop PC market.
Despite such exclusive behavior, the China PC space shares one common trait with the worldwide PC market. Like the rest of the world, demand in China remains weak as consumers migrate to using mobile devices like cellphones. China’s PC market is projected to grow only by 3 to 4 percent this year.
Even so, a vast market opportunity continues to exist for PCs in the country, in the form of potential first-time buyers mostly residing in the countryside. The government already plans this year to invest some 40 trillion yuan—equivalent to some $6.4 trillion—to build rural infrastructure in the next 10 years, and PC original equipment manufacturers can take advantage of the initiative to build out and expand from the cities, IHS believes.
China is also on track to retain its position as the largest PC market in the world for the foreseeable future unchallenged and alone—further providing PC brands a rare opportunity for expansion, counter to the myriad travails they face in the rest of the world.
