RIM Chief Marketing Officer Frank Boulben commented at CES that RIM will be leaving no stone unturned when it comes to pricing offering low, mid and premium price points.
The BlackBerry Z10, a touchscreen handset, and BlackBerry X10, which features a qwerty keyboard will be launched in a few weeks. A further 4 handsets are planned.
Is it to late for RIM. Lets hope not. Competition is healthy.
John Lewis a well established UK department store reported huge increases in its online orders over Christmas and made a jibe back at Amazon, stating it paid UK tax unlike Amazon.
John Lewis gained online sales despite Amazon’s dominant position. This shows that Amazon is not invincible to clever competition.
Now Target, a US store, has stated it is going to price match Amazon all year round, so as not to allow its stores to become browsing only but to encourage browse and purchases.
So if Amazon is all about price, what happens when price is no longer their unique selling point. I wonder of this is the first fight back by traditional retailers against Amazon.
Somehow, I think Amazon is too well established but anything is possible.
An interesting topic and probably with mixed views. What would happen if you had a mobile contract that didn’t cover the cost of the handset or the subsidised cost. Instead mobile operators would help by offering payment of the handset over the contract period.
I could see premium phones struggling to be sold and the more mid prices and low cost value phones become more popular. This may be more of a reality in today’s economic crisis. However, some phones always have a lust factor and people will pay regardless.
What do you think?
Polaroid are looking to revive their fortunes. They are launching lens cases in bright colours, that snap onto the case with a minimum of fuss to your iPhone or iPad.
They come in three main flavours: a standard fisheye, a telephoto lens that will bring you two feet closer to whatever it is you’re snapping and a tele zoom good for three feet. The fisheye and tele zoom are constructed of metal, while the telephoto is a white plastic affair. These seem similar to Olloclip concept, although the Olloclip is simpler IMO.
The price of these lenses will be around $20 to $30.
At CES this week, ZTE announced a new partnership with Nuance that will bring voice recognition software to ZTE’s upcoming smartphones in 25 different languages and feature a new car mode app.
Following Apple’s Siri it seems voice is the new must have feature, and many smartphone manufacturers wants their own voice integration. ZTE’s partnership with Nuance, will be adding the feature to its own smartphones this year. Car Mode will enable users to make calls, read text messages, and control their media using their voice. Unlike Siri, it has been designed to work well in noisy environments, and won’t require a network or data connection.
The requirement not to need a data connection is excellent, but if you have no data connection you won’t be able to make calls or send texts!
Further to my post here yesterday, I have been thinking more and more about this new smartphone from Sony.
Often with smartphones, there is always one feature that isn’t quite as good as you would have liked, but thinking about the Sony Experia Z, everything seems fit for a king.
Firstly, the design is very drool worthy. It’s glass front and back and made with precision. It’s has a decent size screen at 5 inches. For clumsy people it is water resistant and dust proof, so using it in the rain shouldn’t be an issue. How many times have you had you phone ring but you didn’t want to answer it as it was raining. Then there is the audio quality. Sony claim to be using Walkman sound I this device. So this phone could be your high quality MP3 player. Next up is the camera optics. We all know Sony camera optics are excellent, and the Experia Z features class leading smartphone optics, even including software available in its own DLSR cameras.
And then you have this powerhouse of a phone and the battery goes flat too fast. Sony have thought of this and have battery controls to enhance phone life by up to 5 times on standby.
There is so much more this phone can do but in summary not only do you have too notch features throughout, but actually a phone that looks gorgeous.
Samsung’s second keynote was held today at CES. They have announced the Exynos 5 Octa chip, based on the ARM big.LITTLE / Cortex A15 architecture. Designed to be a low powered, high performance mobile processor. Samsung claims that the 3D gaming performance is twice that of anything available. Watching movies hardly draws on power.
Could this new chip appear in the new Samsung Galaxy S4 or Samsung Note 3? If so,this could really be interesting to see what could be capable from a smartphone.
Hi everyone.
Since my blog started mid December 2012, the number of blog entries has nearly reach 150 articles.
I am looking at ways of making it easier to find articles, so I have introduced a new category called Jan 2013. This will change for each month, and will be in addition to whatever category the article subject matter is.
I have added an index page too which divides the articles into categories and has a month option too. If you select tech news, this pulls every article.
Not sure of the best way yet, so if anyone has any ideas on this, please let me know in the comments.
Happy Reading.
This has to be a truly wacky opening keynote speech from Qualcomm. It featured Big Bird, a running Ballmer, Desmond Tutu, CM10, HTC One X, and a Rolls Royce. Plus plenty more cringe worthy lines.
To see the whole speech and be left dazzled see it on Qualcomm’s website .
Kingston have introduced the world’s first 1TB USB 3.0 flash drive.
The DataTraveler HyperX Predator 3.0, has read/write speeds of up to 240MB/s and 160MB/s, and USB 3.0 certification.
Kingston already market a 512GB drive now, while the 1TB version is expected to hit the launch later this quarter.
Only one problem. The price for the 512GB is rather pricey at $1,750. The larger 1 TB will be in the mortgage a home price bracket.
This just shows where memory capacity is going. The prices will eventually lower but for most these are just too high. I can still recall getting excited upgrading a 64 mb SD card to 128mb. Haven’t times changed?
