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Linkbait 25

This week’s.

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• Ewan McLeod explains once more how hugely important operator subsidies are in the mobile market.
• Horace Dediu wonders whether LG is about to exit the phone market. It loses money and is unable to participate in the new mobile world. Also, although Horace doesn’t mention this, LG is known for its well-designed but crappily working phones. It’ll be hard to change this image of a low-end player.
• And promptly LG cuts 30% of its overseas mobile staff.
• Tomi Ahonen gives his preliminary projection of Q3 and Q4 smartphone sales. Apple: 100 million in 2011 as a whole. That’s more than I heard elswhere; and it’s even without the Nano.
• Good overview of where Windows 8 stands right now. Hands-on report; looking good. And an opinion that Microsoft is now ahead of Apple in producing post-PC devices: Microsoft has made desktop and tablet one. And John Gruber warns that Windows 8 tablets are still a year away, and a lot can happen in one year.
• TechCrunch report on the Kindle tablet, which runs on a branched Android OS. GigaOM’s take on why the Kindle will not compete directly with the iPad is also worth reading. And The Next Web reports that Amazon’s terms for content providers (i.e. publishers) will likely be better than Apple’s. They can hardly be worse.
• Yet another Android fork in China. The fourth. Here’s Baidu’s. Alibaba also has one; the fourth is by Xiaomi, a device vendor. We’ll see.
• By the way, did you know Google owns a web-based mobile OS?
• BlackBerry OS 7, the penultimate step before QNX, is in the market and is doing ... OK-ish, I guess. Om Malik feels the 7 devices will buy RIM enough time, while BGR points out that RIM is hurrying its QNX devices because of flaccid OS7 sales.
  RIM may be down, it’s not out. At least, not as out as Nokia. And BlackBerry has its hardcore fan base, unlike Symbian. Youth texters just don’t buy a new device all that often.
  RIM will give its quarterly figures on Thursday after the US stock exchange closes. Then we’ll know.
• Mobile browser stats, baby! Safari leads with about 52% of the market.
  Hey, wait! Didn’t I say last week that Safari is at 19%, below Opera and Android? Yes, I did, and I stand by it.
  Then why the difference? Net Applications, the source of the 52%, counts tablets, and StatCounter, the source of my stats, doesn’t.
  All this proves is that we need a different way of looking at mobile browser stats. Include tablets? And what about non-smartphones? This question of definition will become more important as time goes by.
• Apple doesn’t serve its Chinese customers very well. The iPhone is a status symbol, but for actual use many Chinese iPhone owners carry a second device. Why? Because it’s not easy to enter Chinese characters on the iPhone.
• SMS improves literacy, study finds.
• Nice bit of responsive design by the Riegers for Nokia.
• ReadWrite compiles a list of the five worst tech CEOs. Three out of five are from aspiring mobile device or OS vendors, with HP’s Apotheker taking the ... err ... palm.
• Vision Mobile ponders MotoGoogle.

  We believe that the Motorola acquisition was sold to the Google board as a patent deal, with the hardware business being an unwanted but inseparable part of the package.

  Now Google faces a fundamental dilemma. The combination of Google and Motorola is like building a skyscraper in the middle of the ocean; the two companies are built on very different business models.

  Google is a profitable, 28,000-strong direct marketing company. Google uses Android as a platform with which to commoditise mobile handsets, flatten network access and reach billions more consumer eyeballs.

  Motorola, on the other hand, is an unprofitable, 19,000-strong hardware company, one that uses Android as a ticket to sell more hardware to more consumers and more carriers in the form of smartphones.

  [...]

  The question then is which parts of Motorola Google plans to keep, besides the patents. This presents a major strategy dilemma for Google – and one whose outcome will have fundamental impact on how Google runs the Android Empire.

• Simon Judge unearths an interesting nugget in a recent IDC report:

  The smartphone segment was strongly impacted by the sharp decline of Nokia, which was not totally offset by the remaining players, which may indicate that Symbian fans are holding off on their phone replacements until Nokia launches its Windows Phones

  I disagree with the conclusion. Symbian fans aren’t holding off on replacements, they’re buying feature phones. The average Symbian user is not a smartphone user. When he bought his Symbian device he just wanted a Nokia, not necessarily a smartphone. So now that the operators are boycotting Symbian he goes for the cheapest solution: a feature phone.
• Mobile money can help destroyed states such as Haiti or Somalia to revive. But it turns out that Western advisors usually don’t understand the countries, and mostly fight their own turf wars.
• Excellent new resource by Maximiliano Firtman: a mobile HTML5 compatibility table. Hey, I thought this was my job! I’m now supposed to say that competition is good, and it’s true that I haven’t done as many tests as I could have.
  I hope firt adds links to his test pages. I can use then; also to add a few missing browsers to the list.
• Apple will rate shops and other physical places by the amount of iPhone users that enter it and hang around for a while, so recent patents prove.
  This sounds rather Big-Brother-like, and might lead to shops giving iPhone users discounts, but Apple does have a point:

  Search results ordered by proximity do not account for quality of the search result relative to the query. Search results ordered by average-user-ranking are based upon opinions of relatively few people whom take the time to review the location.

  Search results based on actual visits evade these particular problems.
• Michael Mahemoff discusses three new job titles that are on the verge of breaking through to the mainstream. To me number 2, developer evangelist, is by far the most important one. The mobile web world needs whacking great cartload lots of them, and there aren’t that many.
• JavaScript history for beginners. Surprise: it’s not the same as Java! Includes a comment from Brendan Eich further down.
• Good overview of Google’s new Dart programming language that is supposed to take JavaScript’s place.
  Hah! I say, and again: Hah!
  Remember VBScript? Remember that it didn’t really work out even when Microsoft owned 90% of the browser market? Chrome owns only about 20% of the desktop market, so why would anyone bother to use its proprietary Web language?
  No hint of an Android port, either.
  Desperate rearguard action of developers who think JavaScript isn’t good enough. Well, that may or may not be so, but it’s there, if you know what I mean. Deal with it.
• If, like me, you have a client that expects you to say something useful about a plugin architecture, you can do worse than read this article.
• Nice test page for JavaScript key codes. It made me discover that the §/± and the `/~ keys on my Air both have key code 192.
• Nice 404 page. Worth scrolling down.
• There is a plan to install traffic cameras with the ability to recognise licence plates around Amsterdam, and no doubt elsewhere in the world. This Polish guy is prepared.
• Have a tip for the next Linkbait?