Mobile Network Comparison

What are the best ways for manufacturers of smartphones and other handsets to distinguish themselves in the market today? With the increasing dominance of Samsung and Apple phones (they sell about 50% of all smartphones produced now), their rivals are becoming increasingly desperate to get a foothold in the market. They want to ensure that they get as big a slice of the smartphone pie as possible.

There have already been plenty of rumours about a new cut-price iPhone – presumably as Apple’s only mobile products are aimed at the upper end of the market and this will allow them to dominate across the entire horizontal. And it’s hard to argue with the sales figures from Samsung over the last twelve months. Not only are they now outselling the iPhone 6 with their flagship Galaxy SIII but they have leapfrogged Nokia to be the world’s biggest mobile producer by handsets sold.

Many are claiming that there’s a very obvious reason why Samsung is doing so well. We would agree – it seems to make perfect sense. The reason Samsung sells so many phones is because it’s flooded the market with a huge variety of Android smartphones for just about every imaginable niche. It has got high powered camera phones, dedicated media playing phones, phones that are good for gaming and others that are good for business. And most, importantly of all, it has a range of phones at every possible price point.

Samsung’s arsenal of mobiles starts with the sub-£100 cheapies that networks can give away on budget contract or, alternatively, you can pick up in the supermarket for your kids or to keep as a spare. And they go all the way up to the mighty Samsung Galaxy SIII with its mighty 8MP camera, gorgeous screen and lightning-fast quad-core performance. No matter how much you’ve got to spend or what sort of phone you’re after, chances are there’s a phone for you. Conversely, if you want an Apple iPhone, even if you’ll put up with a tired old iPhone 4 (a 30 month old model) you’ll be looking at paying more than £600 over the course of your contract. So it seems much of Samsung’s success is attributable to the breadth and depth of their smartphone offering.

But not every mobile manufacturer is going down this route. A top Sony executive has claimed that Sony Mobile might withdraw from the entry-level smartphone market. The claim is that they don’t want to compromise the brand with sub-standard products but cynics might see a relationship between Sony’s statements and the terrible Xperia J which came out last year.

Instead, Sony are potentially going to be focussing solely on the pricier smartphone for the more well-to-do customer. This is backed up by the latest announcement fresh from the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas. Sony’s most impressive handset yet will be the Xperia Z and it comes complete with a huge 1080p screen, 2 gigs of RAM a quad-core CPU and, of course, 4G connectivity. It’s due out in March but all this comes at a price – it’s looking like the Xperia Z will set you back more than £500 just for the phone.

By concentrating on high-end expensive phones Sony are helping they will gain traction as a premium brand in customers’ eyes and be distinguished from other companies in this way. Sony want to sell more but they also want their phones to be immediately recognisable as high quality.This definitely seems to be their tactic for the future as CEO Kaz Hirai has directly confirmed his aim to concentrate on the high end.

It’s not just Sony who are trying out this new tactic though. HTC have long had a reputation for producing great phones for cheap but in recently months they too been trying to produce a smaller number of higher quality smartphones rather than relying on a “spray and pray” strategy. Similar murmurings have been emanating from Motorola Mobility too so it may well turn out to be a larger trend.

What’s your take on all this? Is Samsung’s success really down to its range of handsets. Will companies actually do better by focussing on fewer better-quality phones? And do you like the look of Sony’s Xperia Z?

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Nokia has just announced that they will be axing over 1000 jobs to cut costs for the struggling mobile manufacturer. The company’s aim is to save money and streamline its operations but the net result is tons of people out of a job. The redundancies come after an announcement in June last year that large-scale lay-offs would be inevitable.

All the job losses will be in the Finnish company’s IT department. Over 1000 workers are set to lose their jobs outright with 300 positions being removed completely and over 800 more outsourced to India with companies such as HCL Technologies and TATA Consultancy Services. Almost all the people affect work for Nokia in its Finland offices although there are workers in Canada and Germany too.

Nokia has been making a big effort to produce savings and these latest redundancies are the final batch of a total of around 16,000 job losses since 2010. It has already closed its production plants in Europe as well as its headquarters to try and get some positive cashflow.

The news from Espoo, Finland is that Nokia has been having a tough time recently and is haemorrhaging cash as it struggles to play catch-up with bigger players like Apple and Samsung. The company is currently not turning a profit and is aiming to producing savings of £1.3 billion by the final quarter of the year.

These particular cuts are not related to the recent news that Nokia has been overtaken in global mobile phone sales by Samsung. But it’s definitely going to be a tough few months coming up for the company. Nokia has already issue a warning about its upcoming 2013 Q1 results even though its Lumia handsets performed relatively well over the Christmas period.

What do you make of these redundancies? Is Nokia right to outsource more staff? And will they be able to turn things around this year or might this be the beginning of the end for the Finnish company? Let us know 🙂

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An IT consulting and technology firm in Cambridge has managed to get a mobile network up and running on a Raspberry Pi board. PA Consulting Group has won numerous awards for its innovative projects before but the latest hack is probably the most impressive. They’ve managed to get a full-blown GSM cell base-station to run on the $25 computer.

The Raspberry Pi is a tiny single-board computer that is very low priced yet have power features and hardware and can run Linux. When it was first released earlier this year, it made headlines and quickly sold out many times over. It has a speedy ARM processor, a USB port, HDMI interface and was designed to help today’s youth learn to do proper computer programming.

It was invented by Cambridge University professors who also work in the area’s Silicon Fen tech industry and has proven to be massively popular for a variety of inventive applications. It’s sold not-for-profit and people have used it to make a physical drum kit out of vegetables, a high altitude balloon (pretty much a do it yourself space probe) and a voice-controlled robot. It can even play Quake III.

However, this is the first time someone has managed to run a mobile phone network on the hardware. The idea was to show how you don’t always need expensive specialist hardware – sometimes, bulk-produced off the shelf solutions can be usable. This proof of concept demonstration shows that the cheap and minuscule computer can successfully do everything a base station needs to do such and route voice calls and text messages over a GSM network.

The method used open source software such as OpenBTS which implements the GSM mobile standard and FreeSWITCH which routes the traffic and interfaces the platform to the internet. It wasn’t that simple though, the engineers had to optimise the code for the Raspberry Pi. Check out this fascinating video for more:

What do you think? Is this just an interesting test or would it be possible to expand this to use in the real world? Are you tempted to get a Raspberry Pi or have you got one already? And what do you think the coolest thing someone’s done so far with these computers?

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