Smartphones: Is It Game Over?

Smartphones: Is It Game Over?
by Paul McLellan on 08-08-2012 at 4:18 pm

The Q2 numbers for smartphones are now all in and the basic story is that Google is now registering an incredible million Android phones per day, half of them made by Samsung. That’s 85% of all the smartphones shipped last quarter. Android has (per IDC) 68% market share of all smartphones out there.

Apple grew by double digit… Read More


Nokia: the Epic Version

Nokia: the Epic Version
by Paul McLellan on 07-12-2012 at 2:00 pm

Whenever I write about the handset industry, lots of people seem to be interested. As I’ve said before, my go to person for the industry but especially for Nokia, is Tomi Ahonen. He has written a long (and I mean long, it is nearly 30,000 words) indictment of Elop’s tenure at Nokia and how he has destroyed one of the most … Read More


Crushed Blackberry

Crushed Blackberry
by Paul McLellan on 07-02-2012 at 12:00 am

I wasn’t going to write about the cell phone business again for some time. After all, this is a site about semiconductor and EDA primarily. But the cell-phone business in all its facets is a huge semiconductor consumer and continues to grow fast (despite my morbid focus on those companies that do anything but).

But Research… Read More


Microsoft Messes Up Mobile Even More…and Already Went Thermonuclear

Microsoft Messes Up Mobile Even More…and Already Went Thermonuclear
by Paul McLellan on 06-25-2012 at 11:01 pm

Ed wrote recently about Microsoft going thermonuclear. I think that they already did. Ed wrote about Microsoft’s tablet announcement. The second announcement is a sort of follow up to my blog on what will happen to Nokia.

Two big announcements, the first one is that Microsoft is going to produce its own tablet computers (MiPads … Read More


What Will Happen to Nokia?

What Will Happen to Nokia?
by Paul McLellan on 06-15-2012 at 3:06 pm

News today is that Moody’s has downgraded Nokia to junk status. They also announced that they will lay off 10,000 people (including about 1 in 4 of the people they employ in Finland, where Nokia is headquartered).

For those of you who don’t know all the inside-baseball stuff about Nokia, here is a recent little history.… Read More


Handsets, what’s up?

Handsets, what’s up?
by Paul McLellan on 04-13-2012 at 3:02 pm

So who’s in and who’s out these days in handsets?

It looks as if Samsung has finally achieved a long-held goal to be the largest handset vendor, taking over from Nokia which has been the market leader for 14 years since 1998 when it passed Motorola. Nokia hasn’t reported yet but they cut their forecast. Samsung … Read More


Who is winning the cell-phone wars?

Who is winning the cell-phone wars?
by Paul McLellan on 11-15-2011 at 2:17 pm

Answer: it depends how you count. Units, market share, revenue, profit.

According to Gartner, Android has doubled its market share and now run just over half of the world’s smartphones. Android handset sales actually tripled during the year, selling 61 million last quarter, not that far off a million a day.

iPhone sales … Read More


Battle of the Patents

Battle of the Patents
by Paul McLellan on 09-27-2011 at 5:01 pm

What’s going on in all these wireless patent battles? And why?

The first thing to understand is that implementing most (all?) wireless standards involves infringing on certain “essential patents.” The word “essential” means that if you meet the standard, you infringe the patent, there is no way around it. You can’t build a CDMA… Read More


Cadence VIP Enables Users to be First-to-Market with Mobile Devices Leveraging Latest MIPI, LPDDR3 and USB 3.0 OTG Standards

Cadence VIP Enables Users to be First-to-Market with Mobile Devices Leveraging Latest MIPI, LPDDR3 and USB 3.0 OTG Standards
by Eric Esteve on 09-27-2011 at 1:56 am

The mobile devices market is simply exploding, with smartphones shipmentgoing up to the sky, tabletsemerging so fast that some people think it will replace PC (but this is still to be confirmed…). This lead mobile SoC designs to integrate increasingly more features, to support customer needs for more computing power and sophisticated… Read More


Smartphones shipments, Sky is the limit…

Smartphones shipments, Sky is the limit…
by Eric Esteve on 08-08-2011 at 8:50 am

…or a global recession, but that’s not the purpose of this blog. As everybody knows, Apple is designing and selling smartphones, only. Does it mean that only smartphones are generating profit in the mobile industry? As we have seen recently in Semiwiki, Apple makes 2/3 of profit of entire mobile industry.

Let’s have a look (below)… Read More