Guest author Dr. Rado Kotorov is chief innovation officer at Information Builders.

The challenge of making business intelligence (BI) easier to use and more pervasive has been widely debated for the last five years. During that time, BI has stalled at an estimated penetration of between 10% and 20% of enterprise users. Every year sees a new analytical technology, a new analytical tool, a new process that promises more analytical power to the business analysts, but none of them have been able to move the needle toward widespread adoption, or "consumerization" of BI.

How Many Business Analysts Do We Really Need?

But is it reasonable to expect more tools for the business analysts to increase Business Intelligence's enterprise penetration? How many business analysts does a business really need?

Instead, we should be thinking about delivering BI to operational employees, suppliers and partners. For every business analyst, there are thousands of other employees who could benefit from the timely information BI can provide. To jump beyond BI's current adoption rate, the needs and skills of those stakeholders must drive BI's technology and the usability considerations.

Apple vs. Microsoft And Apps vs. Tools

When we look at BI through the eyes of end-users as well as business analysts, we can see two different approaches centered on two different philosophies, roughly comparable to the differing philosophies of Apple and Microsoft. While Microsoft has always tailored itself to the business world, Apple aimed its software to the consumer, creating an epic battle between tools and apps.

Microsoft offers a relatively limited set of tools packed into its Office productivity suite. They were designed to satisfy every business need. But of Excel's approximately 30,000 different functions, guess how many the average Excel user utilizes? Most use less than 5%. Only a few know how to use Pivot tables, and IT departments have to build thousands of macros to simplify Excel templates.

Apple, meanwhile, created an app store with 500,000 mostly single-purpose apps designed to meet the broadest possible set of wants and needs, many of which you didn¹t even know you had!

When asked whose paradigm is better, the vast majority of BI stakeholders would likely agree that their end-users would prefer apps over tools.

Fighting Functionality Overload

This is because knowledge workers suffer not only from information overload, but also from functionality overload. End-users are not analysts. When individuals need to check the weather, they do not perform a detailed analysis of the weather patterns. They trust what the weather app says. Similarly, business users want apps that deliver them the trusted information they need to do their jobs.

From this perspective, the consumerization of BI can only be driven by technologies that turn the classic enterprise BI portal into a BI app store, where end users can go and select targeted, specific apps that address their concrete questions.

Two Kinds Of BI Tools

Of course, the simplicity of end-user info apps should be complemented with higher-end tools to help professional analysts learn to perform new and more complex analyses and derive even better business insights.

Rather than striving to turn end-users into analysts, we have to give those users info apps that let them focus on their primary job skills. And vice versa: Rather than making simplistic BI tools for analysts, let's help them learn new methods and methodologies to maximize the insights they can derive. Analysts are coping with new data sources, new types of data and new forms of interaction with consumers, all of which provide plenty of opportunities for analysis, but also requires significant skills development.

How to "consumerize" Business Intelligence may not yet be completely clear, but one thing is certain: It's pretty clear that a one-size-fits-all approach won't do the job. BI-related apps could meet the varying needs of end-users more efficiently than the all-encompassing tools analysts require, and help make BI a core part of enterprise decision making.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

The PC is market is expected to shrink. Again.

The smartphone market is expected to grow. Again.

On Monday, IDC predicted that PC sales will fall 1.3% in 2013, and that smartphone sales will continue their explosive growth, topping 50% and displacing the legacy feature phone as the dominant mobile phone platform. 

Although IDC released the two reports separately, they're best considered together, for context. What IDC predicts merely reflects the conventional wisdom: that the age of the PC is ending, and that the smartphone is the dominant platform. And, if the Apple iWatch is real, and Google Glass becomes a viable platform, then we have the past, present, and future of the computing market: the PC, the phone, and wearable computing. 

The Windows 8 Phenomenon

The 2012 performance of the PC market could be written off as a consequence of Windows 8: the pause in sales before the launch, followed by what might be called a "mild" reception by the market. PC sales fell 3.7% for the year, IDC found, with an 8.3% drop in fourth-quarter shipments. U.S. PC sales fell 6.5% for the fourth quarter and 7.6% for the year.

"The PC market is still looking for updated models to gain traction and demonstrate sufficient appeal to drive growth in a very competitive market," said Loren Loverde, an analyst for IDC, in a statement. "Growth in emerging regions has slowed considerably, and we continue to see constrained PC demand as buyers favor other devices for their mobility and convenience features. We still don't see tablets (with limited local storage, file system, lesser focus on traditional productivity, etc.) as competitors to PCs – but they are winning consumer dollars with mobility and consumer appeal nevertheless."

Gartner hasn't yet released its 2013 PC forecasts, but has already said that PC sales dropped 4.9% in the fourth quarter, as it seems consumers just didn't really care about them any more.

Smartphones: A Worldwide Phenomenon

Smartphones, meanwhile, have worked their way through "mature" markets like the United States and into the high-volume, lucrative BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries, IDC reports. As the smartphone begins selling in high volume in those regions, look for even higher shipment numbers: IDC predicts that more than 1.5 billion smartphones will be shipped by the end of 2017, worldwide, or more than two-thirds of the phone market. In India, for example, less than half of the phones sold there in 2017 will be smartphones, IDC predicted - and yet it will be the world' third-largest smartphone market.

Gartner, meanwhile, said that sales of mobile phones actually fell 1.7%  during 2012 - not because of lack of demand, but due to consumers turning to smartphones instead of feature phones.

Meanwhile, IDC reported earlier this month that tablet sales reached record levels, 52.5 million units, during the fourth quarter.

PC sales may yet rebound - Microsoft seems to believe that, and it still maintains close ties to enterprises and consumers. But, increasingly, the PC seems be a legacy device of interest to a slowly declining number of users.

After backing out of plans to compete with Netflix, Blockbuster is all but done. That's not great news for the streaming-video space, and Netflix is in a rough spot. But Blockbuster's latest stumble toward oblivion isn't necessarily the final nail in NetFlix' coffin.

On October 4, Dish Network scrapped its plans to revamp the Blockbuster brand and launch a subscription-based streaming-only product to compete directly with Netflix. Dish ran the numbers, evaluated its options, and (correctly) assumed it didn't have the assets to make a Netflix competitor work.

That leaves Blockbuster on the ropes again, with just 900 of its former 3,300 retail stores and no clear digital strategy. But don't assume that the math will work the same way for Netflix.

The Bad News For Netflix

Dish's decision confirms what I've been saying for some time: the flat-rate streaming market isn't a very profitable place. As I noted in Netflix Deathwatch over the summer: expensive bandwidth, second-rate content and strained relationships with content providers are par for the course for the entire industry.

Paul Sweeting, Principal at Concurrent Media Strategies, told E-Commerce Times that "…studios have long been leery of subscription-based streaming of movies because it produces the lowest per-view/per-capita return for the rights holder of any business model, and it cannibalizes higher margin businesses like pay-per-view rentals and even purchases." In the same article, another analyst predicted that flat-rate streaming may have only another five or six years of life.

The market is obviously sick, and it needs to change.

The Good News For Netflix

Troubled or not, Netflix still owns the streaming video market, and that brings advantages Dish and Blockbuster couldn't match. Most importantly, Netflix has existing content relationships that, while strained, put it in a better position than a startup.

In an October 8 analyst note, Morgan Stanley's Scott Devitt estimated that Amazon, which already has relationships with most studios, would need to spend an additional $1 billion to $1.2 billion in licensing rights to launch a similar service.

If that price is too steep for Amazon, it's probably beyond most competitors. Barriers to entry don't validate the streaming-video business model, but they do buy time for Netflix to try to sort out its problems.

In the long term, Netflix has an infrastructure advantage, since it owns its own Content Distribution Network (CDN), and its massive user base should help it secure content from overseas and underexposed independent sources.

It's also developing original content with headliners like Kevin Spacey to hedge against expiring contracts and differentiate from competitors. Netflix's margins per customer may not be fantastic, but with all those users, it has cash to invest in programming.

Eventually, though, Netflix needs to balance cheap back-catalog offerings with enough premium and custom content to create a profitable offering "good enough" to justify its prices. It also needs to keep an eye on Hulu, HBO and other content providers looking to ramp up their streaming businesses.

Put it all together, and I wouldn't want to be in Netflix' shoes. Blockbuster's implosion is a reminder of how tough things have gotten in Netflix' core business, but at least Netflix still controls its own destiny.

Blockbuster and Kevin Spacey images courtesy of Shutterstock.

Clause 2.25 was spotlighted first in an article in PocketGamer citing concerns of several app developers. The new language first  appeared in the Review Guidelines of iOS 6.

PocketGamer noted that clause 2.25 probably is aimed at app-promotion services such as AppoDay, Daily App Dream, AppShopper -- all third-party app marketers within the App Store that compete or divert the central experience out of Apple's hands. 

App marketing has grown with app markets since the launch of the App Store in 2008. As the App Store has grown, marketing firms have expanded to help clients with monetizing products and analytical services.

These are new aspects of the technology industry and a certain amount of market correction is inevitable. This is one of the reasons that Apple has instituted clause 2.25, to mitigate the influence of certain marketing practices that compete with its core App Store experience. Third-party aggregators like Appshopper become a destination for users and the deals they offer could unfairly influence Apple's rankings.

Clause 2.25 is supposed to protect the integrity of App Store product rankings. Low-ranking apps are all but invisible potential buyers. So, some app marketers use nefarious tactics to boost app visibility, such as hiring people to download apps to drive up rankings. 

“It's always difficult to interpret Apple's clauses,” Apsalar CEO Michael Oiknine wrote in an email. Apsalar, a San Francisco startup, focuses on mobile analytics, engagement and retention of app users.

"I am not sure who is going to be affected, but my view is that Apple is sticking to its position of closing loopholes around the gaming of the download charts," wrote Oiknine. "This is very much consistent with their banning of incentivized downloads." 

Incentivized downloads are when app promoters offer some type of reward, such as a virtual currency, to consumers who download their apps. The most notable circumstance of Apple cracking down on incentivized downloads was when it banned Tapjoy from the App Store because its virtual currency encouraged people to download apps and thus influenced the rankings within the market. 

The PocketGamer post noted that marketing and analytical services like Tapjoy, Flurry or Apsalar need to pay attention to clause 2.25.

"Upon close reading of the TOS changes, it seems that Apple is merely bolstering its long-held position that you can't make an app that appears to users to be an app store," wrote Sam Abadir, CTO of HTML5 development studio appMobi and a intellectual property attorney, in an email.

“We don't see anything here that limits or prevents TapJoy-style cross-promotional ads in apps - Apple is well aware that freemium apps use ads to make money, and they have no control over what is being promoted in those ads," according to Abadir.

"The target of this refinement seems to us to be app-promotion services that display their apps in an ‘App Store-like’ way,” he wrote.

The key words in clause 2.25 are, “similar to or confusing with the App Store.” Companies like Apsalar and Flurry focus on “re-engaging” mobile users either through in-app promotions or advertisements for other developer apps within apps. Neither of the companies’ approach could be confused with the actual Apple App Store.

“From our point of view, Flurry services do not promote apps similar to or confusing with the AppStore, and no Flurry services will be affected,” wrote Peter Farago, Flurry’s VP of marketing, in an email.

Apple rejects apps for a variety of reasons. Much of the language in the App Store Review Guidelines is intentionally vague which gives Apple a lot of leeway to cite certain clauses for rejecting any variety of applications or services. In its introduction to the App Store Review Guidelines, Apple describes how it handles the review process with a succinct statement on how it views behavior and content in the App Store:

“We will reject Apps for any content or behavior that we believe is over the line. What line, you ask? Well, as a Supreme Court Justice once said, ‘I'll know it when I see it’. And we think that you will also know it when you cross it.”

With this statement in mind, app marketers and developers should approach clause 2.25 with the mindset that anything that takes might compete or otherwise control an aspect of the App Store experience away from Apple will not be tolerated. Fair or not, Apple makes the rules. The App Store is not a democracy and Apple has every right to enforce its own standards to protect the App Store experience, and its botton line. 

It has been a little less than a year since Google officially announced Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. The first device to roll out with version 4.0, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, hit store shelves in December. Since then, 4.0 has reached 23.7% of all Android devices - with 4.1, a.k.a. Jelly Bean, waiting in the wings. What is the holdup?

Android 4.0's penetration has been slow, even by Android standards. But if top manufacturers are to be believed, updates for many devices should be available before the end of the year.

The problem is that it is difficult to trust the manufacturers. For instance, Motorola said it would upgrade any devices capable of receiving 4.1 Jelly Bean by the end of the year. Throughout its product portfolio, other devices were supposed to receive updates as well, such as smartphones running 2.3 Gingerbread through 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. On Monday, Motorola updated its upgrade list to show that many devices scheduled to receive 4.0, such as the original Atrix, would not be getting new software. Overall, version 2.3 will remain on 13 of Motorola’s 23 smartphones that have been released in the U.S. over the last couple of years. 

Samsung is notoriously slow in rolling out Android updates and HTC is not much better. The top manufacturers would much rather sell a new smartphone running the latest software than perform extensive (and expensive) updates to phones that already have been bought and paid for. The carriers share some of this blame, as the data for the updates goes over their pipes and they drag their feet right along with the device makers. 

When it come to 4.0, we are about to hit an inflection point where the majority of new users and many existing users will see Android 4.0 as their default version of the operating system. Almost all new phones from top Android manufacturers are now shipping with either 4.0 or 4.1, and Samsung and HTC have promised the 4.1 upgrade by the end of the year. Motorola even promised during the announcement of its new Droid Razr devices that if an old device was not upgradeable to 4.1, then Motorola would give consumers a $100 credit toward a new Motorola device. 

The number of Android devices are running 4.0 a year after its release seems absurd, but that is the nature of the Android territory. The first 4.0 devices outside of the Galaxy Nexus were not widely available in the U.S. until April and May 2012, six months after the official release. Most manufacturers were not ready to issue updates to 4.0 for older devices until that time as well.

The way Google has managed the announcement of new Android versions and the time it has taken for its manufacturing partners to launch new devices has lagged by four to six months since Android began rising in popularity. The official Google announcement is akin to a soft launch where a product is announced but does not actually hit the market until months down the line. Microsoft is notorious for the soft launch, showing off its newest Windows versions as much as a year ahead of the official release date. 

Google wants to close the gap between announcement and arrival of new versions of Android for top devices as well as upgrades to existing devices. That it why it announced its so-called platform developer kit at Google I/O in June. The PDK is supposed to help manufacturers create updates earlier and release new smartphones with the new operating system on accelerated timelines.

It appears to be working. 

Since the 4.1 Jelly Bean announcement at Google I/O, manufacturers have announced and began rolling out updates to top devices. Both the HTC One X and Samsung Galaxy S III will receive 4.1 by the end of October. New devices will ship with it, such as the Samsung Galaxy Note II and HTC One X+. 

As of now, only 1.8% of Android devices are running 4.1. That is primarily due to devices like the Nexus 7 tablet, Galaxy Nexus and Motorola Xoom that have already received the upgrade. It will be interesting to see how quickly 4.1 grows against the sea of devices that will not be upgraded from earlier versions in the coming months. 

Device upgrades are one of the biggest pain points for Android users, and Google can do only so much to force the manufacturers and carriers to issue timely updates. It looks as though upgrades will come quicker than they have in the past, but the desire to sell more devices with the newest Android version will always outweigh consumers' pleas for updates for their older devices. 

When Amazon announced its Appstore for Android last year, a lot of people were left scratching their heads. Despite the seeming strangeness of Amazon running an Android Appstore, mobile app developers were cautiously optimistic. The Android Market (now Google Play) at the time was a disorganized and difficult-to-monetize quagmire. A curated, third-party app store with the might of Amazon behind seemed to offer a unique opportunity. But the e-commerce giant had to learn to navigate the world of mobile apps just like everybody else.

App Of The Day And Gaming Nightmares

From the beginning, it was not all roses between Amazon and developers. Upon launch of the Appstore, it became evident fairly quickly that Amazon did not know how to handle the mobile developer community. Shortly after launch in March 2011, the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) issued a warning for mobile game developers to steer clear of the Appstore. The group's concerns were over pricing, promotion and distribution - isssues that Amazon’s developer agreement made confusing and opaque: 

"The IGDA has significant concerns about Amazon's current Appstore distribution terms and the negative impact they may have on the game development community... we are not aware of any other retailer having a formal policy of paying a supplier just 20% of the supplier’s minimum list price without the supplier’s permission,” the IDGA said in a letter to its developers in April 2011.

This response was a big concern for Amazon because games continue to be the most popular single category of mobile apps. 

Later in 2011, Amazon had a different mess on its hands, again tied to distribution and developer compensation. An independent app developer had agreed to be part of Amazon’s popular “free app of the day” program. The agreement between Amazon and developers held that even though the app was free for the day, publishers would still make 20% of the list price on downloads of their apps. The developer, Shifty Jelly, found that not to be the case. 

“That’s right, Amazon gave away 101,491 copies of our app! At this point, we had a few seconds of excitement as well, had we mis-read the email and really earned $54,800 in one day? We would have done if our public agreement was in place, but we can now confirm that thanks to Amazon’s secret back-door deals, we made $0 on that day. That’s right, over 100,000 apps given away, $0 made,” the company wrote at the time.

Not surprisingly, Shifty Jelly terminated its Amazon Appstore developer account. 

Problems, Solutions And The Kindle Fire

Organizational problems between Amazon and developers were relatively common in the early days. Developers noted that review times for apps (Amazon pre-approves apps on its Appstore, just like Apple does for the iOS App Store) were lengthy, apps were not filtered for different screen sizes and it was difficult for customers to contact developers with problems. 

“We definitely didn’t have everything buttoned up appropriately,” acknowledged Aaron Rubenson, the director of the Amazon Appstore, in an interview with ReadWriteWeb. “We’ve learned a lot.”

In October 2011, Amazon announced the Kindle Fire, its first full-featured, Android-based tablet. All of a sudden, the Amazon Appstore for Android made a whole lot more sense. The e-commerce King could funnel Fire tablet users to its own curated app repository and make money off of it. Fire users were blocked from accessing Google’s Android Market, even from the browser. 

Perhaps just as important, Amazon started refining its developer experience. 

The Appstore team has grown significantly (and Amazon is still actively hiring Android developers, managers and engineers) and the company has expanded the program to include more layers of developer support. That means extra app testing and more marketing experts to help developers spread awareness an increase distribution. For the App of the Day, the terms are clearer and there are more people involved to help create an integrated campaign for the developers and help prepare them for the deluge of downloads associated with the sale. 

Amazon has also redesigned its developer portal for the Appstore and added a new tools and software developer kits. The biggest addition came in April with Amazon’s in-app purchase SDK that allows for integration of the company’s “1-Click” purchasing for in-app goods. 

Easing that process can mean big bucks for app makers. “The average in-app purchase is two-times that of a paid app,” Rubenson noted. 

With the newly announced Kindle Fires, Amazon also released a new maps SDK, powered by Nokia’s navigation suite. Games have also been given a higher priority in the new Kindle Fires, with a dedicated menu icon to the games section in the Appstore.

Developers Respond

To Amazon’s credit, there have not been any significant developer flare ups in 2012. 

“We are really pleased with our overall relationship with Amazon,” said David Tyler, director of product development at NatureShare, in an email. “Working with our contact there has been great. He was always quick to respond and took a genuine interest in our apps. Amazon promoted our app when it was first released and our Audubon Birds app was even featured in an email.”

Yet, Amazon remains the underdog. Developers go where the eyeballs are - and the overwhelming majority of eyeballs are on non-Kindle Android and iOS devices. Android’s Google Play store has 675,000 apps, Apple’s App Store has 700,000. The Amazon Appstore has 51,000. Android’s installed base is near 500 million while Apple has activated 400 million iPhones. The Kindle Fire cannot come close to matching those types of numbers. 

“Many of the mobile game developers on our network report higher ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) on Amazon's Kindle Fire devices than on either iOS or Android devices,” said Maria Alegre, CEO of Chartboost in an email. “However, there is simply a much higher volume of iOS and Android devices on the market than Kindle Fire devices. So mobile game developers and publishers, while they can make more money per Kindle user, are making more money overall on the more popular iOS and Android platforms. It's a volume issue for Amazon, and we're interested to see how the new Kindle Fire HD line of devices changes the landscape."

It is almost safe to say that Amazon has finally solved its developer issues. Amazon’s team is now bigger, more efficient and more receptive to mobile developers and their needs. Developers know what to expect from Amazon and its services so they shouldn't see more of the types of surprises that rocked Shifty Jelly in 2011. 

The trick for Amazon now is to figure out how to get out from under the thumb of Google and Apple. The release of two new Kindle Fires is a good start, but far from enough. An Amazon smartphone has long been rumored to be in the works, but would an Amazon-branded smartphone sell in big enough numbers to make a difference?

But give Amazon its props. The company may have stumbled when it first entered the mobile app space - and it took plenty of lumps along the way. But now Amazon looks like it has found its stride. 

Apple sold 5 million iPhone 5s in its first weekend - a company record. But some people expected more, and now have to explain why Apple didn't top their predictions. In reality, this isn't that big a deal. The rest of the year matters a lot more.

Compared to last year's iPhone 4S launch, when Apple sold 4 million phones, 25% growth may seem disappointing. This is Apple, after all, and Wall Street is used to seeing the company blow past expectations, not come up short. (The iPhone 4S launch, if you recall, was more than twice as big as the iPhone 4 launch.) This number isn’t 10 million or even 8 million or 6 million, so some are saying that it’s “WORSE THAN EXPECTED” or “very disappointing”.

So, yes, 5 million sales is below some estimates. But that really doesn’t mean much in the long run. Why not?

First, for the real story, you need to think about supply and demand, and once again, demand surpassed supply. Apple stopped taking launch weekend pre-orders after only a short period of time, and many stores were sold out of various iPhone models throughout the weekend. We still don’t know how many iPhones Apple could have sold over the first weekend if it had unlimited supply, and we may never.

Next, mobile is a complicated industry, where 2-year contracts often dictate purchase decisions. Apple sold almost twice as many phones over the past four quarters than it did the four quarters before that. Few of those people are already eligible to buy an iPhone 5 at a subsidized rate -- it'll be months before they can justify buying iPhone 5s. Anecdotally, I’ve also seen mentions that AT&T was being stingier about early upgrades this year than last year.

Further, first-weekend sales just aren’t that important relative to an iPhone’s lifetime sales. For example, the 4 million iPhone 4Ss Apple sold on launch weekend last year represent just 3.5% of all iPhone shipments over the past four quarters. The 1.7 million iPhone 4s Apple sold opening weekend represented just 2.2% of the phones it would sell over five quarters before launching the iPhone 4S. It's nice for Apple to sell 5 million iPhones in a weekend, but it'll be more impressive if it can sell 200 million phones over the next year.

Long story short: It’s a fun press release to see from Apple every year, but the iPhone 5’s real sales performance will be measured in months, quarters, and maybe even years, not weekends. It’s still crucial for Apple to sell a lot of them, but late-December sales will be a lot more important than mid-September sales.

iPhone 5 line photo (cc) Blake Patterson via Flickr. Portions of this article were originally posted at SplatF.

Microprocessor vendors have begun moving away from describing their chips with the sort of nerdy “speeds and feeds” metrics that have dominated computing for few decades. It’s part of a dramatic sea change in how PCs, tablets and smartphones are evaluated, bought and sold.

In fact, the notion of computer “performance” is being completely redefined. Instead of chip vendors worrying about tweaking their processor and graphics performance to eke out a few more frames per second on the latest games, they’re worrying about how to make trackpads more responsive and how to make a laptop start up faster after being shut down.

Tablets and phones are equally dependent on microprocessors, but they’ve never really been sold on the basis of chip benchmarks - or even what chips are in them!

A New Look At Power

This week, Intel hosted thousands of developers at its Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, discussing everything from software-defined radios to touch and voice control to the evolution of the data center.

And - oh yes - there was “Haswell,” Intel’s fourth-generation of what it calls the Core chips for desktop PCs.

Normally, the Haswell presentation would have been packed with roadmap slides, celebrations of clock speeds, a picture of the processor die and the “wafer shot,” where an Intel executive would triumphantly hold aloft the first circular wafer containing the bare processor dice. A year ago, Intel touted a level-3 cache, memory and string performance enhancements, and a dedicated random number generator within its new “Ivy Bridge” chips (the third-generation Core chips, out now).

Forget that. This week, Intel’s technical braggadocio boiled down to offering the same performance as Ivy Bridge, at half the power. There were no clock speeds, no cache sizes or instruction accelerators. Instead, Intel executives positioned Haswell as the foundation, not the focus. “Delivering a processor is not enough; at the end of the day, it’s about the software,” said Dadi Perlmutter, the head of Intel’s chip group.

Redefining Performance

A few blocks away, executives at AMD were saying similar things. There, Leslie Sobon, AMD’s corporate vice-president of marketing and head of product, quickly flipped through a presentation on the company’s APUs (accelerated processing units), which integrate a microprocessor with graphics processing. Instead, she was eager to talk about how much of the world, with the exception of the U.S., Japan, and Germany, is moving away from worrying about whether or not a chip runs at 2.8GHz or 2.9GHz.

“Low power - that’s good performance,” Sobon said. “Good battery life - that’s now considered performance.”

At the same time, also in San Francisco, Apple was launching its iPhone 5. And what do we know of its processor, the A6 - except that it’s better than than the A5 iPhone 4S? Very little, according to Apple, the new A6 promises “up to” two times the CPU and graphics performance; the A6 is 22% smaller than the A5; and the battery life of the new iPhone is slightly better than the battery life of the 4S (how much of that is due to changes in the battery is unclear#). Not a hard spec to be seen.

Designing For Consumers, Not Engineers

A key reason for the change is the attempt to market devices in ways that are meaningful to consumers. When everyone was running productivity software on PCs - there were common benchmarks that did a decent job of explaining how fast a machine would perform common tasks.

Today, there are so many different applications running on so many different platforms, that most benchmarks don’t make much sense anymore. (The possible exception - PCs for gamers, who have very specific needs around graphic peformance.)

So it’s a new world in the computer market, described in the more abstract language of “experiences,” rather than in bar charts and graphs.

“I think that people’s performance expectations are different than what the computer market is selling,” said Mike Feibus, principal analyst at TechKnowledge Strategies. “And they were slapped in the face with this with the iPad in 2010. This is how people perceive performance: if [the system] comes up right away, if things move quickly.”

Basically, the message is this: chip clock speed doesn’t matter. Power usage matters. How fast a computer boots up matters. The responsiveness of a user’s touchpad matters. For the majority of users, just about any computer can run all the software that a user needs at an adequate performance level. That’s “good-enough” computing, and it’s evolved from the desktop to find a home on all kinds of devices.

“That’s not to say raw [processor] performance isn’t important; it still is,” Feibus said, especially with applications like photo editing or voice recognition. But the industry needs new ways to sell the traditional “good, better, best” comparison, he said.

This goes beyond mere marketing. Intel internally believes that the company may have hit a plateau in processing needs, which means that its engineers have no choice but to focus on lowering power and other aspects of the computing experience. The company’s internal market researchers have produced data that shows potential customers will start to issue poorer ratings to a notebook whose trackpad’s latency, or “lag,” goes beyond 250 milliseconds, a source at the company said.

So Intel has rethought its design approach. “For a long time, we worked from the inside out,” the Intel source said. “We developed the best [microprocessor] engine we could and said, here you go. We don’t know what you’re going to do with it, but go party. Now, we recognize that if you don’t work from the outside in - if you’re not thinking about experience from, well, the first moment, you’re setting yourself up to, well, possibly to fail.”

Fortunately for chip makers, the same forces that pushed them to faster and faster clock speeds also help them lower power consumption. That would be the famous Moore’s Law, which technically states that the number of transistors on a given chip doubles about every 18 months. In reality, Moore’s Law gives chip designers a range of choices: improve the chip’s computational performance, lower the power, or some combination of the two.

Burying “Intel Inside”

Intel made that shift a couple of years ago, rebranding its Core line into the Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 lines. And then there’s the Atom, an X86 chip that can fit inside smartphones, tablets or netbooks. But Intel’s “i” designations still hide a great degree of variation between the individual processors within each family.

Years ago, PC makers trumpeted exactly what chip was powering each PC, even going so far as to disclose details like the memory speed. The race to 1-gigahertz chips was a major event. With today’s ultrabooks and tablets hardware makers seem reluctant to divulge details beyond just the processor family.

Buyers still have to know the difference between an x86 chip and an ARM processor, although the line is blurring with the launch of Windows RT, which runs on the cheaper, lower-power ARM chips, and Windows 8, which uses x86 silicon. But it’s increasingly doubtful that consumers will give a hoot about the differences between a dual-core Core i5 3470-T and a quad-core i5 3330.

Device makers seem perfectly happy about that. Phone and tablet makers instead choose to focus on qualities like screen size, talk time, battery life and operating system. And even PC builders are following suit. Two years ago AMD’s “Fusion” program, Sobon’s brainchild, pulled off the AMD-branded stickers attached to most PCs and let the manufacturer sell the product. This week, at an behind-the-scenes look at one big PC maker’s Windows 8 tablets and ultrabooks, there were no “Intel Inside” stickers to be seen.

The Future Of Chips?

What does this mean for the future? At this point, we just don’t know. PC manufacturers are reluctant to talk about how they plan to price or market their new products before launch.

But one thing seems clear: “Intel Inside” may not go away entirely, but it’s likely to get harder and harder to find out which processor powers the a particular product. A decade ago, PC buyers bought the best collection of parts. Now, the new era of tablets, ultrabooks and convertibles is making individual components - including processors and their specs - increasingly irrelevant.

After all, if chip vendors don’t want to talk in terms of gigahertz, who does?

The Net neutrality regulations adopted by the FCC on a party-line vote just before Christmas 2010 represented the administration's attempt to find middle ground. Chairman Julius Genachowski had floated an idea variously called "The Third Way" or "Title II Lite." His plan proposed a historic, black-and-white reclassification of broadband Internet service as a telecommunications service under the Communications Act of 1934, but with caveats: the FCC would "forebear" on using all the regulatory muscle that it generally holds over common carriers, like the ability to impose sharing requirements. But Genachowski, facing a tsunami of industry disapproval, retreated to a far more modest jurisdiction over broadband. That's what Verizon now dismisses in court as the FCC's attempt to "conjure a role for itself."

Genachowski's Net neutrality rules were a tenuous play from the start, considering the Comcast v. FCC decision on BitTorrent throttling some months earlier, which challenged the commission's "ancillary authority" to regulate broadband. Verizon said it would go to court. It has.

Meanwhile, AT&T responded in public with a what's done is done air. In a hearing last March, a company executive quietly seconded a member of Congress who suggested the rules would "require no change in the business plans of AT&T." We're beginning to see why. In the run up to this week's expected release of iOS 6, AT&T has said that it will disable FaceTime, the iPhone's video chat feature, over its cellular networks except for subscribers to its pricey Mobile Share plans. Why? An uncertainty about data load, the company said. And if the FCC can make up the rules as it goes along, AT&T seems to be arguing, then so can we.

Blocking FaceTime doesn't violate Net neutrality regs, a company rep wrote, because the app is "preloaded." That's a distinction not found within the four corners of the FCC's neutrality rules. But it buys the company a little wiggle room.

Genachowski's Christmas surprise earned him the ire of critics, some of whom see an inevitability to today's challenges. "This is a mess of the commission's own making," said Derek Turner, research director of Free Press, a vociferous proponent of net neutrality regulations. Congress, it's worth noting, wasn't able to craft the FCC any clearer authority. But rather than establishing that the Internet is both the digital bits that make up its content and the (highly regulable) pipes that those bits travel along, Genachowski tried to make do with a far less coherent jurisdiction. And prodded by industry, he carved out exemptions for mobile Internet, which is exactly how more and more Americans are going online. Companies can't block competitive applications, and they have to be transparent about what they do do. But that leaves gaps big enough for AT&T to drive its FaceTime policy through.

That the FCC would claim jurisdiction over broadband, today's dominant communications medium, scares the bejeebus out of some people. Same goes for the idea that it wouldn't. The agency tried to calm roiling waters with a tempered approach to Net neutrality. But that produced only a momentary peace. Verizon is challenging it in court. AT&T is challenging it in the marketplace. What is the government's role in regulating broadband networks? More unsettled than ever. And that doesn't benefit much of anyone.

Samsung has called mid-2011 through mid-2012 its “year of innovation.” The five flagship Android smartphones introduced during that year have given competitors like Apple, HTC, Nokia and Motorola a run for their money, and have placed Samsung atop the global list of mobile makers. Samsung believes it can continue the trend, taking all of its new devices and features and combining them into one gigantic smartphone/tablet hybrid, the Galaxy Note 2.

When Samsung refers to its year of innovation it specifically is looking at five flagship devices in its Galaxy series:

• Galaxy S 2
• Galaxy Nexus
• Galaxy Note
• Galaxy S 3
• Galaxy Note 2

The Galaxy Note 2 is … interesting. It is bigger than its predecessor (5.55 inches over 5.3) and runs Samsung’s TouchWiz specifically designed to function with Samsung’s stylus, the S Pen. It will ship with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. What sets the Note 2 apart are its size and the S Pen. Without those two features, the Note 2 would essentially just be a big Galaxy S 3.

I have not been particularly kind to the notion of a smartphone stylus nor the S Pen. If Samsung really wants to differentiate itself from Apple’s iPad and iPhone, I have felt, it needs more than a stylus, smart or otherwise.

Perhaps I was harsh. According to Samsung, the original Galaxy Note shipped 10 million units worldwide. Not as robust as the 20 million Galaxy S III devices shipped since the smartphone’s launch earlier this year, but not a number to dismiss either, especially for a device that is neither smartphone nor tablet (Samsung calls it a “phablet”).

After some hands-on time with the Note 2 last week, I am ready to admit that the S Pen has more merit than I had originally thought. Samsung is focused on creating different types of interfaces and inputs, and the S Pen, while still a bit of a gimmick, has its merits.

For one, it changes the dynamics of how you interface with a touch-screen device. On a desktop, you hover over drop-down icons with the mouse to reveal more information. Hovering on touh screens has been a problem for developers.

The S Pen, through a feature called AirView, functions more like a mouse than a finger on a touch screen. Without touching the screen, the S Pen will create a cursor on the Note 2 that can interact with the screen. AirView is much improved from the original Note, nearly doubling the maximum distance (to about 10 milimeters) of the S Pen’s tip from the screen. The S Pen is much more responsive and provices a smoother experience than the original version.

The S Pen feature is a software-and-hardware design unique to Samsung. The stylus itself (which slides neatly into the case of the device) is nothing but plastic. No batteries or transmitters. All interaction with the device from the stylus originates from the Note 2.

There are about 50 apps that are specifically built for the S Pen. Samsung is targeting high-end developers like Adobe to create functionality for the stylus but any developer that wishes to can build for the S Pen through Samsung’s open software developer kit.

The rest of the Note 2 is part of the evolution of Samsung devices in its year of innovation. When the device comes to market, Samsung will heavily market its AllShare features, which enable you to share media among smarpthones along with new camera features such as a burst mode that takes several pictures quickly and picks the best one for your archives. There will also be a new group-shot burst mode for photos of groups of people. 

The Note 2 has been announced globally but details the U.S. version, like hardware specs and telecom carriers, have not been revealed.

Does that mean that the Note 2 is the epic culmination of the year of innovation? If you are on Samsung’s marketing team, it does.

Yet, outside of the quirk that is the S Pen, other companies are creating similar features for sharing and photographing, especially HTC and Nokia.

"Year of innovation” reeks of a desperate attempt to show that Samsung is different and better than the competition, specifically Apple, which won a patent-infringement case against Samsung last month.

The Note 2 is the pinnacle of Samsung’s innovation thus far. But is it a device that stands above anything else coming to the market? The answer is a definitive no. 

Amazon did not unveil a smartphone Thursday, despite speculation to the contrary. But its new Kindle Fire tablets give us some clues about an Amazon phone, reportedly in the pipeline. We see a $200 (almost) loss leader that makes buying anything from or through Amazon beyond easy.

An All-Amazon-Controlled Experience

The idea that Amazon will put a few of its apps on a generic Android phone and call it a day is misplaced. Amazon will control every aspect of its phone, from the way the home screen looks to the way it ties into Amazon's Kindle bookstore, video-streaming service and music cloud locker.

Why?

Speaking Thursday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said, "People don't want gadgets anymore. They want services. They want services that improve over time."

Bezos explainted, "Kindle Fire is a service. What does it mean for a hardware device to be a service? It greets you by name. It comes out of the box with your content preloaded. You can choose from 22 million different items. It makes recommendations for you. [...] A hardware device as a service. That's what people want."

Amazon is all about the experience, front to back -- much like Apple. Expect total Amazon control over any phone it makes.

Aggressive Prices So Amazon And Its Customers Win

Mobile pricing and profit models for mobile devices set Amazon and Apple apart. Apple makes money selling iPhones at tremendous profit and breaks even on media and app sales. Amazon prices its hardware closer to breakeven and hopes to profit on media sales.

Bezos gave some context to Amazon's strategy this week, after introducing the moderately priced $299 large-screen Kindle Fire HD.

"Above all else, align with customers. Win when they win. Win only when they win," he said.

How does this apply to hardware pricing?

"We want to make money when people use our devices, not when they buy our devices," Bezos said. "If someone buys one of our devices and puts it in a desk drawer and never uses it, we don't deserve to make any money."

Jumping from there to a phone, Amazon is probably preparing one that's inexpensive by industry standards, one that's designed so that buyers will keep using it to buy Amazon media, products and services.

Depending on how Amazon distributes its phone — directly or through telcos — Amazon could offer a no-contract phone for $200 or a carrier's standard contract phone for free.

Expect Amazon to use some of its Kindle Fire tricks, too, such as ad-supported subsidies from its special-offers program.

The Boldest Move: Going Around The Carriers?

One of Amazon's interesting announcements Thursday was a 4G LTE wireless version of the Kindle Fire HD, with a special (low!) price for data service. Unlike other tablets -- including the iPad -- which require a relationship with a wireless carrier, Amazon seems to be stepping in front of the carriers here, billing customers directly for 4G service -- at least for the basic package, which includes 250 MB of monthly service for a $50 annual fee. ("Customers can also choose to upgrade to 3 GB or 5 GB data plans from AT&T directly from the device," notes Amazon.)

It would be an especially bold move for Amazon to apply this model to phones: Bypassing the typical carrier service-plan requirements, buying wholesale data capacity directly from AT&T (as it's doing here, and as it does for the 3G Kindle), and charging a lot less for an entry-level smartphone plan than its competition.

Imagine, for instance, an Amazon phone with no monthly voice-plan requirement, fair pricing on data plans and unlimited text messaging. It could conceivably cost half what an iPhone does per month, running on the same AT&T LTE network. And this would help Amazon win with its customers and turn gadgets into services.

But: This would be risky and challenging, even for Amazon. And Bezos may decide that the distribution power that carriers have -- especially domestically -- is too great to fight. (That's the lesson Google learned with the Nexus One.) Perhaps a halfway-there, hybrid approach?

Then again, don't put anything past Jeff Bezos: If any company is ballsy enough to try an end run on the carriers, it's Amazon. 

Either way, if this week's Kindle Fire announcement is any lesson, expect aggressive, ad-subsidized pricing and a service-focused approach with an Amazon phone. And maybe -- just maybe -- a bold move to disintermediate the phone companies.

Also: The Real Reason AT&T And Verizon Are Pushing New "Shared" Data Plans

For the first time since Motorola became a division of Google, the smartphone manufacturer released new devices yesterday at an event in New York City. It seemed like a typical device launch at first. A band (Aussie transplants “The Kin”) warmed up a crowd of bored-looking tech journalists who had trudged across Manhattan from Nokia’s Lumia 920 launch. Then Google chairmen and former CEO Erik Schmidt stepped to the stage, and it became clear that this was the start of a new era.

Schmidt: "To play in this ecosystem, we had to buy Motorola."

Schmidt proved to be the real warm-up act. He declared that smartphones have gone beyond phones and computers. To Schmidt, today’s smartphones are pocket-size supercomputers. And their core is Android.

1.3 million Android devices come online every day. Nearly 70,000 of them are tablets, an area that Schmidt admitted Android fell behind in relation to the competition (Apple’s iPad, which he did not mention by name). The installed base of Android devices is pushing 500 million, with 480 million active Androids in circulation. It is an ecosystem, Schmidt said, that went beyond anything Google had ever imagined. 

Numbers and rhetoric are not a surprising mix coming from Schmidt, whose job description requires him to be one of the biggest Android cheerleaders on the planet. But he was not talking in circles. Android had become so big, he explained, that in order to be a legitimate contender, Google had to buy Motorola. 

New Razrs

Motorola announced three new devices at the event. The Droid Razr HD, the Droid Razr Maxx HD and the Droid Razr M. If you are familiar with the Razr and the Maxx, you won't find much to be surprised about in the new devices except increased battery life, screen resolution, and several software improvements. The phones look the same, have Kevlar back plates and are generally kind of dull. Even the Razr M, which probably has the highest ceiling in terms of market share, is ordinary. It is a compact phone with a screen that extends all the way to the edges of the device, so it feels the size of an iPhone 4S but has a larger 4.3-inch screen. The Razr M is available for pre-order today and will cost $99 on contract through Verizon next week. 

There is nothing groundbreaking about the three Razr devices. They are a refresh for the holiday season, something Motorola likely already had in the works before the Google acquisition became official earlier this year. The Razr M is designed to conquer the top of the mid-level smartphone market and battle Apple’s iPhone when it is announced next week. With a long screen and a 1.5 GHz processor and 2000 mAh (milliampere-hour) battery, it can hold its own from a specifications perspective.

The New Motorola?

Dennis Woodside, the manufacturer's new Google-chosen CEO, said multiple times during the presentation, “the new Motorola starts today.” In some ways that is true. In several ways it is not. 

The “new” Motorola cannot really start with these Razr phones. They are too much like what the company released last year, the same phones that faded away behind products from HTC, Samsung and Apple. The real story will begin with the next series of devices the company releases, likely early- to mid-2013, when Google and its R&D team will have had a chance to dig into Motorola’s technology and try to pull out something truly innovative.

Woodside made three distinct points about Motorola and Google’s objectives that bear on the company's future:

Speed

Google is obsessed with speed. It has always held the belief that the faster people can navigate the Web, the more money it will be able to make from its core advertising placements. This translates to smartphones in several ways. Foremost, 4G LTE is significantly faster than 3G, and Verizon is known to have the broadest LTE rollout in the U.S. Woodside showed several slides showing that people use their smartphones more on LTE than 3G networks, stating that a LTE smartphone is just more useful than a 3G one. That is not hyperbole. When a device proves itself fast and reliable, it becomes a bigger aspect of a person’s life. Google’s job is to outfit its own mobile services (such as maps, YouTube, Gmail, Google+, Talk and the Play store) to take advantage of that speed. 

Power Management

The Droid Razr Maxx has a 2500mAh battery. (Nokia patted itself on the back with the Lumia 920 for having a 2000mAh battery.) Better battery life also speaks to Google’s core plans. The longer a smartphone lasts without the need to charge, the more people will use it and the more likely they will use the services Google has built into Android. Speed and battery life might appear to be purely technical matters, but they play a role in changing consumer behavior. Through Motorola (and Android), Google is trying to effect behavioral shifts that will benefit its other divisions.

Android

We are only just beginning to glimpse Google's plans for Motorola and Android. All Motorola phones that can be upgraded to the latest version of Android (version 4.1 Jelly Bean) will get the update by the end of 2012. If a Motorola Android user’s device cannot be upgraded, Google will supply a $100 coupon to buy a new Motorola device. 

But updates are only part of the story. The Razr devices will be the first smartphones to ship with the Chrome For Android browser. Chrome is what ties together much of the Android mobile experience, and it will become smarter the more people use it. Marty Cooper, the Motorola engineer that created the first cellphone back in the early 1970s, said after the event that smartphones will move toward what he said are called “smart actions.” That is, devices will be tailored to the needs, wants and habits of particular users. The ability to sign into Chrome and have one Web presence across a PC, tablet and smartphone is the beginning of smart actions and a direction that Google will continue to push with Android. 

Overall, Google has the opportunity to mold Motorola into the mobile hardware arm of its Web-based properties. For the last couple of years, Google has been trying to create one unique identity for people on the Web, through Google+ and its profiles, as well as its variety of services. The new Razr smartphones represent the beginning of that mission, and while this new crop of devices may not inspire, they sow the seeds of something deeper and more influential. 

If there’s one thing the DeathWatch knows, it’s that all things must come to an end. So we’re pausing to review the fortunes of our first 13 unlucky inductees. The fates of some of them may surprise you.

In reverse chronological order, here’s a look at the initial baker’s dozen and what they’ve been up to since joining the DeathWatch over the last three months (updated October 6, 2012).

Zynga

It’s only been a week since the casual gaming company hit the DeathWatch on August 27th, but Zynga shares have dropped again on news that Chief Creative Officer Mike Verdu was leaving his post, along with other high-profile execs. This kind of churn is probably inevitable among staffers looking for a quick upside, since most Zynga stock options will be underwater for some time, but it should eventually level off.

On the upside, Zynga’s first Partners for Mobile game just shipped, and it’s completely different than any other Zynga title. Mobile gaming control options still kind of suck for first-person games, so the gameplay suffers, but that should get better over time. If Zynga can become the go-to software development platform for mobile gaming, it has a shot at reinventing the company and reversing its fortunes.

Motorola Mobility

It’s official. Google is selling off Motorola’s Home Division. That’s good news for Google in the short term, but it could really hamstring plans for expansion into the market for TV set-top boxes.

Despite the loss of potential toys, Motorola keeps on working with what’s available. New since August 20th, it looks like Motorola will be making a push with a new device line in September. The rumor mill seems pretty confident that the devices will include a Medfield-powered unit with rip-roaring specs, and marketing copy about “taking it to the edge” implies an edge-to-edge display. With a decent form factor and battery, the phone could put Moto back in contention for #4 in the handset market. But is #4 really good enough for the long term?

Best Buy

After Best Buy hired CEO Hubert Joly to reject the Schulze buyout and swing the axe of austerity, investor confidence plummeted and the dreaded stock downgrade arrived. Investor hopes (and the stock price) got a bit of a bounce as the Schulze buyout got another chance, but experts think it’s unlikely to go through. As the Wall Street Journal asked last week, the bigger question is Can Electronics Stores Survive?

Electronic Arts

After laying off staff in its newly acquired PopCap unit, EA has readjusted its Free-to-Play focus, venturing away from Facebook and attempting to cast a broader, multi-device net. It’s a good and necessary goal, but we’ll have to see how well EA can execute. Meanwhile, Madden 13 has the footall franchise back on the map with excellent reviews and record sales. It seems EA has bought some more time to figure out its social strategy. It will need it, as the company’s overall challenges haven’t softened since August 6th.

Netflix

Netflix hasn’t made any major blunders or advances since joining the DeathWatch on July 30th, but the rest of the industry hasn’t stood still. HBO fired a shot across the bow with HBO Nordic a streaming movie service available only in Scandinavia. 
Despite the abrupt exit of Blockboster from the space, more direct competition is inevitable, so Netflix may have to do something bold. Perhaps acquiring what’s left of OnLive to leapfrog GameFly?

T-Mobile USA

Since being inducted into the DeathWatch on July 23rd, T-Mobile has done nothing to stop the bleeding. Earlier this month, it lost more than a half million conract-based subscribers. If Deutsche Telekom’s infrastructure investments really happen, the company could be a technical competitor, but without subscribers, all that capacity could prove a liability. Here’s hoping that the all-hands announcement scheduled for the day everyone else gets the iPhone 5 is a game changer.

Groupon

Since July 16th, a Barclay’s downgrade and a patent infringement lawsuit have damaged Groupon’s stock pretty substantially, but many experts still think the company remains overvalued. If Groupon has any shot at long term success, it has to move beyond traditional daily deals. There are some early signs that it may be doing just that with its move toward lower-margin but more sustainable retailing of physical goods. Better late than never.

Sony

Changing the course of a behemoth as large as Sony takes more than the couple of months that have passed since the company was inducted into the DeathWatch on July 6th. So far, the best thing to happen to Sony has been the OnLive debacle, which makes Sony’s unrelated decision to jettison the service in favor of its own on-demand game competitor look downright brilliant. Product releases have been a mixed bag, including ho-hum smartphones, a respectable consumer camera, an affordable streaming music service, and a gutsy new lap-pad that shows Sony might be willing to take some risks. What’s missing? A convincing living-room attack plan. The PS4 needs to be the crux of any recovery strategy, so DeathWatch is withholding judgement on any turnaround until we see a demo.

Barnes & Noble

Barnes & Noble - inducted June 29th - is making a necessary and aggressive push for the Nook overseas. The company is starting with the UK, but it’s not alone. Building sales channels is half the battle. The rest involves filling that channel with the best possible hardware and content. To that end, the DeathWatch is waiting for something big to emerge from Barnes & Noble’s Microsoft deal before predicting a reversal of fortune. In the meantime, profits remain out of reach.

38 Studios

In early August - just over a month after 38 Studios joined the DeathWatch on June 22 - the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation officially took hold of 38 Studios assets, including the games Kingdom of Amalur and the remains of Project Copernicus. All that’s left now is to see whether some of that amazing intellectual property winds up in the hands of another publisher (DeathWatch is betting on EA). Until then, while we mourn the loss of a lot of good work, we’re grabbing some popcorn and waiting for the latest round of It’s Not My Fault.

Nokia

Samsung has just beat Nokia to the punch with a Windows 8 smartphone. On the surface, it’s not a huge deal, but it showcases Nokia’s weakness. Windows is Nokia’s only gig going forward, but Microsoft isn’t throwing the Finnish phone-maker any bones. Nokia’s stock bump from the Samsung / Apple verdict was short-lived. If Nokia hopes to lose its junk status, it will have to crawl out of that hole on its own – one smartphone at a time. That’s going to take a lot more than price cuts. Things are arguably worse now for Nokia than they were on June 15th when it became a DeathWatch victim.

HP

HP remains committed to the PC and server markets, even as it those businesses wither on the vine. Still, while there’s still cash on hand and customers who answer the phone, there’s hope. A new tablet division looks like no more than a shot in the dark, but at least it displays a willingness to push the envelope a little. The new Envy X2 hybrid device shows some interest in redefining “PC,” as well. But as promising as these developments seem, baby steps aren’t going to turn around decades-old thinking for a company the size of HP that recently suffered a disastrous earnings report that included an $8 billion writedown of its Enterprise Services Business and the biggest quarterly loss in the company’s history. And regardless of new products, Whitman will have to win back investors hearts and minds, after they met her last announcement of weak earnings with a 13% drop in value.

Research in Motion

When DeathWatch premiered on June 1st, Research in Motion was an easy choice. Today, the company is still reeling from missed numbers and massive layoffs. Sure, RIM has a slate of new phones and a brand-new operating system it hopes will turn things around. The only problem? They’re still months from being ready to ship. Plus, it seems that even previously strong overseas markets may be weakening. Even with the Blackberry 10 operating system and shiny new hardware to run it, the best RIM can hope for is retaining existing customers while it eyes a sale.

So there you have it. A comprehensive update on the first 13 ReadWriteWeb DeathWatch victims. Stay tuned in upcoming weeks for some interesting new twists in the DeathWatch!

According to The Verge, Apple is requesting injunctions against sales of eight Samsung devicess (see the court document here). Apple is going after some of Samsung’s most popular 2011 products. 

Apple’s list includes iterations of the Galaxy S II, which was widely considered to be the best Android smartphone of 2011. The S II came in a variety of flavors as Samsung tweaked the device for U.S. mobile carriers. 

According to The Verge, the list includes:

• Galaxy S 4G
• Galaxy S2 (AT&T)
• Galaxy S2 (Skyrocket)
• Galaxy S2 (T-Mobile)
• Galaxy S2 Epic 4G
• Galaxy S Showcase
• Droid Charge
• Galaxy Prevail

In the just-adjourned patent-infringement suit, 25 Samsung devices were found to infringe on one or more of Apple's patents. Many of those devices are older or generate marginal sales (such as the original Galaxy S, Fascinate and Captivate). But, the S II is a popular phone globally. In June, Samsung said it had sold 28 million S II's worldwide. (Note: Samsung says sales but it is actually units shipped.) Overall, 50 million Galaxy S and S II units had been sold as of June. 

See: A Brief History of the Samsung Galaxy

Apple's patent suit did not challenge Samsung products launched after the case was filed, models including the Galaxy S III, Galaxy Note and others. Apple’s main target with the injunction is the profitable long tail of Samsung’s mobile-product line. Every Galaxy S II sold is one fewer iPhone sold. 

As much as Apple and Samsung want everybody to believe that one is on the side of good while the other is completely evil, the reality is that that is just not true. It is possible to not be right while not precisely being wrong. 

Apple’s “Values”

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook called the victory a triumph of values. 

“For us this lawsuit has always been about something much more important than patents or money. It’s about values. We value originality and innovation and pour our lives into making the best products on earth. And we do this to delight our customers, not for competitors to flagrantly copy,” Cook wrote in a memo leaked to 9to5 Mac.  

Cook is not wrong, but he is not correct. Apple is right to defend itself against copying. But, it is not like Apple was defending the invention of fire. It was defending design patents based on the size and shape of the iPad and iPhone as well as utility patents used in iOS.

None of the patents that Apple fought tooth and nail over in the name of values are particularly innovative.

The utility patents may have some functions specific to iOS, but the Android manufacturers have already figured a way around most of those because it was not the function that Apple patented so much as how the function is performed. Companies like HTC, Samsung and Motorola have been working on ways to circumvent those patents through design and functional updates to their devices, and Apple will have little grounds in court to sue the Android manufacturers over these same functions again.

The patents themselves are just weapons against Samsung and other Android manufacturers.

The settlement money is also of no concern to Apple. This is a company that is one of the most valuable in the history of the world, sitting on a $100 billion in liquid assets. But taking a billion dollars from Samsung was a reward in itself.

Cook’s comments about values is public relations. Most journalists, analysts and tech enthusiasts have a better understanding of Apple’s motivations under the surface. Apple's two biggest motivations were to set a precedent for all its upcoming patent cases and to slow the Android ecosystem's growth. The more Apple can hobble Android, the more iPhones and iPads it can sell. With Apple’s extraordinarily high margins, there is a lot of money on the table.

The effect on Samsung is marginal in the short term. This case was mostly about Samsung’s long product tail, with devices that had been on the market a year or more running software that has been completely overhauled to avoid these specific Apple patents. 

Samsung will likely appeal the judgment, mostly to avoid the precedent that the case sets. This is not the last time these two companies will meet in court over patents. Apple’s win makes it more likely that its similar patent cases against Samsung and other Android manufacturers will result in injunctions against Android devices. Samsung needs to negate that precedent.

Samsung: “Loss for the American Consumer”

After the announcement of the verdict, Samsung issued a statement:

“Today’s verdict should not be viewed as a win for Apple, but as a loss for the American consumer. It will lead to fewer choices, less innovation, and potentially higher prices. It is unfortunate that patent law can be manipulated to give one company a monopoly over rectangles with rounded corners, or technology that is being improved every day by Samsung and other companies.”

It is difficult to believe both companies. Samsung says that Apple’s win is bad for innovation. Apple said it is good for innovation. Again, neither company is right, but neither is wrong.

When Apple speaks of innovation, it is not talking about the broad scope of technology innovation. Apple is talking about its own innovation. Innovation that has been called into question many times over the years. Apple is seen as a company that makes technologies better and sexier and prices its devices higher than the competition to pad its margins. 

Samsung is essentially saying that Apple’s designs and its legal claims are frivolous. It is implying that if Apple can improve on technologies and not be found guilty of copying, then so can we.

Samsung certainly has a high opinion of itself. By calling the verdict “a loss for the American consumer” it is saying that its products are so good that the U.S. consumer will suffer for the loss. It is the same tactic that Samsung has used in most of its court cases against Apple across the world. “This bully is bad for us, bad for you, bad for everybody.” 

Samsung itself is a bit of a bully. It has the manufacturing might to flood the mobile market with so many devices at so many price points that it is squeezing not just Apple, but the other Android manufacturers. Motorola’s market presence is almost non-existent at this point and HTC is flailing. Samsung, not Apple, is the biggest culprit behind Nokia’s fall from grace. Samsung’s shotgun strategy works and cannot (or, cannot without great difficulty) be replicated by any other Android manufacturer. 

Samsung’s own rhetoric is as hypocritical as Apple’s. While Samsung claims it did not copy Apple in the slightest way (and it has a case for that, despite the jury’s verdict), there is no question that some of Samsung’s smartphones do look very similar to the iPhone. 

The Winner? Nobody

In the end, the outcome was predictable. Can anyone say that Samsung could win a case with a Californian jury in the shadow of Cupertino? Samsung never really stood a chance. 

The battle of rhetoric does neither company justice. Apple comes off with a morality play that is almost laughable. Samsung sounds like a whining, arrogant twit that insists it did nothing wrong. With this decision, all Android manufacturers lose, not just Samsung. In the end, that is how the American consumer loses too.

That means Google loses, too, right? That's not necessarily the whole story. Apple could be doing Google a favor with its courtroom war. 

Gogo's in-flight Wi-Fi service was installed on 1,565 planes at the end of June and available to about 65.5 million passengers in the June quarter. Both of those stats have grown around one-third in the past year. 

That growth has allowed Gogo's revenue and number of wi-fi sessions to increase, even as the percentage of passengers who pay for service (known as take rate) and the amount of money people spend on service have remained flattish. 

Some 5.3% of potential Gogo passengers connected during the June quarter. That's up significantly from 4% take rate a year ago, but down a bit from 5.6% in the March quarter and 5.5% in the December quarter. 

Take rates vary by airline and flight, of course, and air travel is a seasonal business. In April, Virgin America's CEO boasted Gogo usage rates in the low- to mid-20s, including generally passing 50% on its San Francisco-to-Boston route. But not every airline is Virgin America, and not every flight is so full of techies.

Still, Gogo's filing suggests that the company powered about 3.5 million Wi-Fi sessions in the June quarter, up about 75% from last year and up more than 10% from the March quarter.

That's pretty solid growth, and faster than Gogo's overall sales, which grew 51% year-over-year during the June quarter. Operating loss fell to $4.9 million in the June quarter from $7.1 million a year ago. And a $135 million credit line, announced in late June, will keep things moving.

The filing notes that Gogo has contracts to install the service on another 415 aircraft, mostly before the end of next year. That could provide roughly 25% more capacity. Take rate will almost certainly increase as more people bring aboard iPads and smartphones and as they become accustomed to paying for in-flight connectivity. And Gogo just started its international expansion efforts this year. (It also generates almost half its revenue from the "business aviation" market, serving private planes.)

But Gogo faces hurdles, too. Network capacity, for example: It's already frequently slow to connect, and Gogo warns that it must upgrade many planes to new technology to meet capacity demands. Satellite-based competitors could win deals, too. And then there's the overall instability of the airline industry: American Airlines, whose customers generated 23% of Gogo's commercial-aviation revenue in the first half of the year, filed for bankruptcy and may shed planes or lose control to another airline.

Still, for many passengers, Wi-Fi has become a crucial part of flying. It looks like Gogo has plenty of runway left for growth.

The company’s new Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet has everything. Front and back cameras, a removable memory slot and even a digital stylus. The tablet is supposed to go head to head with Apple’s iPad over the holiday season. But it will not win.

There is only one way to battle Apple in tablets and Samsung has completely missed the mark.

When I reviewed Samsung’s the Galaxy S III smartphone, I took the company to task for the plethora of “S” apps that it stuffed into the device. Sadly, these S apps, Samsung's versions of common functions, are clogging up the Galaxy Note 10.1, too.

S Memo, MediaHub, S Calendar. Samsung probably thinks it is doing consumers a favor by creating all of these apps. But it is just bloatware. Google built almost all of the same apps into Android -- the tablet's operating system -- and virtually all are simpler and superior to Samsung's.

The marketing for the Galaxy Note 10.1 will be predictable. Samsung will put what it thinks are super cool features (especially the stylus) into 30-second TV commercials while implying that the iPad is boring and inferior. 

But Samsung cannot win at that game.

Of course, Apple has its boilerplate features like Notes, Calendar, FaceTime, iMessage and iCloud, and it is anyone's guess whose are best. It is the third-party application ecosystem of iOS, with Apple’s marketing support behind it, that negates anything Samsung can offer 

Samsung cannot compare a Galaxy Note 10.1 (or, really, any other Galaxy tablet) to an iPad, feature for feature, and convince people that it has the superior product. 

The Galaxy Note 10.1 is important to Samsung’s strategy for the rest of the year. It will push on back-to-school shopping crowds, and, of course it will hawk it relentlessly for the holidays. If Samsung hopes to take a bite out of Apple’s tablet revenue, the Note 10.1 is its best bet. 

So, does Samsung have a play here? Yes.

As we have seen over the last year, Apple tablets can be beaten on price. No Android tablet released since mid-2011 gained critical market share unless it significantly undercut the iPad. The two primary examples are Amazon’s Kindle Fire and the new ASUS-made Nexus 7 from Google. 

The wi-fi-only 16GB Galaxy Note 10.1, will sell for $499. With 32GB of memory, the price will be $549. These prices are comparable to similar iPad models. 

If Samsung really wants to stick it Apple, slashing prices is the way to go.

Comparing the Note 10.1 and the iPad, consumers would likely lean toward the Galaxy Note 10.1 if it cost $100 to $150 less. Samsung might lose money on each sale but taking market share from Apple would likely be worth it to Samsung, whose long-term strategy includes harming the iPad maker any way possible.

How do you compete with an adversary that is willing to take a loss just to hurt you?

As it stands now, the Galaxy Note 10.1 is a bloated, feature-packed device with a nifty stylus, destined to be an also-ran. Apple will take one look at the Note 10.1 … and laugh all the way to the bank. 

Sizing up BlackBerry in the Smartphone Ecosystem

To understand what companies might license BlackBerry 10, it is important to understand the dynamics of the smartphone ecosystem. Specifically, where does the operating system that runs your smartphone come from?

Apple designs its iPhone and iPad and the operating system that runs it - iOS - in-house. The devices are assembled at factories in China (you may have heard of Foxconn) and shipped to destinations across the world. Historically, this was the model RIM followed. For all intents and purposes, RIM alone designed the hardware and software and managed the manufacturing of BlackBerry devices. 

In-house design and production used to be the standard throughout the cellphone industry. Motorola, Samsung, Nokia and Palm either made or still make their own operating systems. Yet, that approach is no longer the default. Internal production takes a wealth of resources and expertise. If a company aims for the top of the market and its OS falls flat, it can be set back several years and risk its livelihood in the process. This happened to both RIM and Nokia in recent years as they fell behind the market leaders in iOS and Android. 

Google and Microsoft do not follow the internal-design-and-build model. Instead, they build the operating system (Android for Google, Windows Mobile CE and, more recently, Windows Phone for Microsoft) and license it to manufacturers that wish to build their own variations. Their approaches are not identical, however. Microsoft charges a fee for a Windows Phone license, while Google provides Android to manufacturers for free (with stipulations if Google services are used). 

This strategy explains why Android and Windows Phone devices are available from a variety of manufacturers including LG, Sony and HTC. Microsoft has employed the same strategy in the PC market for decades. 

Research In Motion cannot give away BlackBerry 10 in the way that Google does Android. That avenue would essentially lead to the end of the company. It will have to employ the same strategy that Microsoft does with Windows Phone and charge manufacturers per license. 

Possible BlackBerry Partners

There is one obvious company RIM could turn to manufacture BlackBerry 10 devices: Samsung.

The South Korean manufacturer is the perfect candidate to build BlackBerry devices. It is the world’s largest smartphone maker and does not seem to discriminate in what it builds. Essentially, Samsung will try just about anything to see if it catches fire. Its primary revenue driver is Android and its Galaxy series smartphones. But Samsung also builds devices for Microsoft’s Windows Phone (though they do not sell particularly well) and builds its own low-end operating system called Bada. Samsung is also linked to Tizen, the bastard child of the OS that was once called MeeGo. The company will likely produce a Tizen device once that platform is ready for the market. 

Samsung is such an obvious choice to build BlackBerry devices that, if for some reason it declines, RIM may be in serious trouble. Few other manufacturers are poised to take on new operating systems right now. Samsung and Apple have squeezed the smartphone and tablet market so tightly (between the two, they take up about 90% of mobile hardware revenues) that almost all other manufacturers are just trying to keep their heads above water. 

HTC is having a down year despite critical success with its Android-based One series devices. The company does not have its own operating system, and it has made Windows Phone devices in the past. As Samsung’s little sister in the smartphone ecosystem, HTC is the next logical choice, but only if the company can put together the resources for a new product launch.

The same applies to other second- and third-tier device manufacturers. Sony Ericsson has never been able to make a serious dent in the market with Android, and LG is performing much better in the waning feature-phone market than with any of its smartphones or tablets. Chinese manufacturers like ZTE and Huawei might be interested in BlackBerry 10 if the price is right. Both companies have an expanding footprint in international markets that RIM would love to reclaim. 

The problem is that all these manufacturers are doing just fine with Android. Android is free and manufacturers can do just about anything they want with it. The design of Windows Phone is inflexible in comparison and it costs manufacturers money to license. If RIM is to follow Microsoft’s Windows Phone plan, it will have trouble convincing these manufacturers to play its game.

In addition, partnering with RIM would constitute an alliance with a competitor. RIM is not like Google and Microsoft, which do not make their own devices (overlooking Google's Nexus and Microsoft's Surface). RIM will build its own BlackBerry 10 smartphones and tablets, devices that will be on store shelves next to any partner's offerings. 

Reaching Beyond Smartphone and Tablets

One area of potential growth for BlackBerry 10 is in devices that aren't smartphones and tablets. BlackBerry 10 is built using a system called QNX that the company acquired in April 2010. QNX was a platform that ran many different kinds of computers, such as those found in airplanes and cars. RIM will definitely be looking to non-traditional partners to license BlackBerry 10. 

Looking beyond the smartphone could be RIM's best bet. At the company’s BlackBerry Jam in Orlando in May, CEO Thorsten Heins showed off a car that had BlackBerry 10 integrated into almost every aspect of its computing system. RIM could also push its new operating system into other infrastructure-based industries such as healthcare and utilities (electric and water systems, for instance). 

All this boils down to one simple fact: If BlackBerry 10 fails, so does RIM. We will know by this time next year if any strategy RIM pursues pays off or if it's time to write the obituary of a once-great technology company. 

What can you do with a ubiquitous metropolitan gigabit Ethernet connection? Google has recently gotten lots of attention with the metro fiber network that it is beginning to build in Kansas City. Welcome to Chattanooga, Tenn. The city has laid its fiber network just about everywhere, and is beginning to reap the rewards of ultra-fast Internet service. What lessons can Google and others learn from the experience?

Chattanooga's gigabit fiber network wasn't installed in the name of civic progress, or as a calling card to attract IT-related entrepreneurs, or to improve city services or to encourage telecommuting - all things that are happening as a result of the network.

Instead, it began as a project from the municipal electric utility, EPB, to improve power delivery to its customers. Chattanooga suffers many violent storms that can knock out its power grid for hours or days. The utility wanted to increase the reliability of its operations through having a smarter grid that could minimize these outages.

As part of the effort, EPB automated 1,200 power switches and added technology capable of anticipating potential transformer overloads by measuring power flows every 15 minutes using the fiber network. This smarter grid has cut the number of power outages by more than 40%. The utility says it has also saved money.

But the same infrastructure that provides the control network for the utility can also be used to deliver Internet connectivity, and once the fiber network was in place, the utility became a fast Internet service provider.

Take Me To The (Digital) River

Chattanooga Mayor Ron Littlefield says, "Think of what we did as putting in place a digital equivalent of the Tennessee River." That's an apt analogy for the city.

Chattanooga has always leveraged the Tennessee to its advantage. Back in the early 1900s, for example, it used its place on the Tennessee River to attract the first bottling plant for Coca-Cola as well as smokestack industries. The fiber network is just a different kind of river.

The utility's smart-grid efforts have made the area more of an employment magnet and given it new ways to attract talent. The city's IT department, for example, has filled its past 10 jobs with out-of-towners, a post-fiber development. Major employers are encouraging telecommuting.

"We now have a very balanced economy between industrial and clean jobs," said Littlefield. "We have something no one else in North America has, and something that will sustain our future development."

New Uses for Fast Internet

The city has continued to build on its gigabit fiber network. For example, it put together a series of initiatives to monitor and control downtown areas. At one downtown park, the police can adjust the lighting to discourage flash mobs from gathering, as well as scan license plates on cars that are parked in the lot. This helps increase the perception of safety, not to mention discourage potential criminals. "People now know not to park in the park if they have a stolen car," says the mayor.

Speaking of street lighting, city engineers are in the process of replacing the 28,000 traditional halogen lights with LED lights and sensors that adjust their output based on ambient light. And traffic signals can be controlled by the police or first responders to move emergency vehicles through the city.

In the works is the installation of more than 400 different wireless road sensors. In the past, the city needed to send out construction crews to dig up the road and install the common wire loops that are seen across cities around the world. The newer battery powered sensors are the size of hockey pucks and take just minutes to bury.

All told, the city has built more than 50 apps to use the fiber connections, and more are on the way. "Fiber makes bring-your-own-device strategies possible," says Mark Keil, the city's CIO. "We will have three times more devices on our network next year than before we had the fiber, and we have made it easier to monitor and manage them, too."

Gigabit Takeaways

Here are five lessons to be learned from the gigabit experience of Chattanooga:

• Don't build a fiber network just for Internet connections. What made Chattanooga's gigabit fiber network work was the backing of its electric utility. Once this physical plant was in place, the utility was able to offer gigabit service for $350 a month to residential and business customers.
• Symmetrical service is key. Having both a gigabit up and download speed is important for a variety of applications that rely on user-generated content to receive the same benefit as downloaded Web pages. A local group of radiologists built their own app so that doctors could view digitized scans whenever and wherever. That wouldn't have been possible without a symmetrical network.
• Focus on both big and small employers. The region was able to attract a new Volkswagen auto assembly plant and an Amazon.com distribution warehouse, but these success stories were matched with smaller firms. The mayor is effusive in his support for the various entrepreneurial efforts around the region in bringing in smart, tech-savvy people. City CIO Keil mentions that the city asked for some programming help from several Google developers from Atlanta. By the time the project was finished, at least one of them was packing up to move to Chattanooga because of the gigabit network. And this summer several private companies put together the city's first Demo Day to feature eight tech companies who agreed to move to the city in exchange for a chance to win a $100,000 grant. One of them moved from Ireland to participate in the program. Banyan, the ultimate winner, provides integrated productivity tools.
• Find or create a university-based commercialization partner. Chattanooga was fortunate in having a branch of the University of Tennessee, and was able to establish a supercomputing center and a non-profit commercialization entity to help license the technologies developed by academia. Several of their apps are being used in disaster management and large-scale urban planning simulations, for example.
• Finally, don't rule out many unexpected benefits. "We got into robotics and energy development when they were popular many years ago. But our fiber network is like having the first city that discovered fire," says Littlefield. The city is just beginning to see lots of new apps on its network and is still discovering new uses for the universal connectivity. 

The eyes of the technology world are focused on the epic patent struggle between Apple and Samsung - the latest iteration of Apple’s frantic legal battle against everything Android. The iPhone maker has also brought suits against Android device manufacturers HTC and Motorola. Apple has faced criticism for its endless lawsuits designed to stunt competition from Google's Android, but a quick look at Android device shipments in the second quarter of 2012 reveals a key number that suggest Apple is right to worry.

That number is 68.

According to research firm IDC, Android devices made up a whopping 68.1% of all smartphone shipments in Q2 2012. That calculates to 104.8 million of the 154 million smartphones that left manufacturers plants in the quarter. By comparison, Apple shipped 26 million iPhones in the quarter, good for 16.9% of the market. Together,  iOS and Android made up 85% of all smartphones shipped. 

IDC notes that Samsung was responsible for 44% of all Android devices shipped. That equates to 46.11 million devices, or about 20 million more than the iPhone. Apple shipped 5.6 million more iPhones (up from 20.4 million) in Q2 2012 than it did in the same quarter of 2011 but still saw its share of the smartphone market fall from 18.8% last year. 

It has been well documented that Apple shipments often decrease in the middle second and third quarters of recent years. Consumers appear to be waiting for the next iPhone to be released (in this case, presumably the iPhone 5 rumored to be announced in mid-September). Though Apple took a hit in overall market share this year, it still shipped more iPhones than in any other second quarter since the first iteration of the device was released in 2007. 

Chasing the Android Freight Train

So Apple is doing fine on its own terms. The problem is that Android has become a runaway freight train on the global smartphone market, with Samsung as the engine. Much of Android’s growth is coming in emerging markets with floods of low-priced Android smartphones coming from Asian manufacturers like Huawei and ZTE. Mid-level Android manufacturers like HTC, LG and Motorola also have several different variations of devices in all corners of the world. Apple is fighting not just Samsung’s wide variety of Galaxy devices, but a many-sided war.

This trend is not new. Last year was definitely “The Year of Android” as Google's mobile operating system first eclipsed all comers in the smartphone market to take the overall lead in devices shipped. Apple closed the gap over the holidays and early in the year, but its one-device-per-year approach (with older devices dropping in price at the same time) can't seem to up with new Android devices developed and shipped seemingly every week.

The unrelenting flood of Android devices is one reason that Apple has turned to its legal department for help. Apple knows that it cannot match the Android ecosystem in sales and shipments, but hopes to force Android manufacturers into settlements over patents and design issues that will lead to time-consuming redesigns and functionality changes. Any time that an Android device is taken off the market or delayed to retail shelves because of an Apple patent victory, it leaves open a window for Apple to sell a consumer an iPhone. 

Legal Challenges Are Effective

Apple’s tactics may or may not prove fruitful in its battle against Samsung - Apple already achieved a temporary injunction, now lifted, against the Galaxy Nexus. But the company's legal tactics have already been proven effective. HTC, for example, released its One X phone to AT&T in early May - only to have to remove it from shelves a few weeks later because of Apple patent challenges. HTC, a company that designs high-quality devices, had one of its worst quarters in recent memory leading some to question how long it can continue to compete in the smartphone market. 

Apple is taking every route it can it can to slow Android’s momentum. Lawsuits, such as the current one against Samsung, are one avenue. Another is accelerating the iPhone release schedule. The new iPhone is rumored to be announced on September 12th and to ship shortly thereafter. Clocking in some 11 months after the release of the iPhone 4S in October 2011, that would be significantly faster than the 15 months between the releases of the iPhone 4 and the 4S. No matter what the outcome of its patent maneuvers, the sooner Apple can get the newest iPhone on the market, the more chances it will have to stand firm against the Android armies. 

Number image courtesy of Shutterstock.