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January 11, 2012

Yesterday at CES 2012 in Vegas, the first Intel-based smartphone has been launched, but it won't be available at AT&T, Verizon, or T-Mobile.

Instead, the Lenovo 800-K will start shipping in the second quarter of this year, but only initially in China, so you'll have to get yours from China Unicom.

"I'm thrilled to announce that the best of Intel's knowhow and resources is now coming to smartphones," Intel CEO Paul Otellini told his CES keynote audience late yesterday.

He added "It's coming first to China, the largest market for smartphones in the world, with 100 million users and growing rapidly."

Liu Jun, president of Lenovo's company's mobile internet and digital home group, joined Otellini on the keynote stage for the announcement. "It is my great honor today to introduce to you the world's first Intel architecture–based smartphone, the Lenovo Smartphone K-800," said Jun.

"Overall, we are transforming Lenovo from a leading personal computer maker to an internet device company," Liu added.

Liu described the K-800 as simple, stylish, and feature-packed. Among the features are a 4.5-inch display, 720p video, HDMI-out, near-field communication (NFC), and Intel wireless display technology to stream video to a compatible HD TV. More details are sure to emerge in the run-up to its release.

Otellini claimed that Intel's new 32nm Medfield Atom processor provides significantly better JavaScript and browser-rendering performance than its ARM-based competition, and Liu promised that the K-800's battery life is comparable to other smartphones in its class despite the increased performance.

Intel has been trying for some years now to cut down on its chips' power consumption sufficiently to prompt a smartphone maker to include Chipzilla's devices in mobile handsets. Now, with the Lenovo K-800, they've succeeded what Intel had set out to do.

Lenovo's Liu may have been the only manufacturer who could wave an about-to-ship Intel-based smartphone at CES, but Sanjay Jha, chairman and CEO of Motorola Mobility, joined Otellini to tell show visitors that his company isn't far behind, and that it has the full support of its new owner, Google.

"I am especially proud to announce today that Motorola and Intel have entered into a multi-year, multi-device strategic partnership around mobile devices and smartphones," he said.

Jha added that Motorola Mobility also plans to have devices in wireless carrier validation by June 2012, with commercial launch shortly after that. "Stay tuned for the details in coming months," he added.

So ARM-based smartphones finally have real competition, although exactly how much is still a question to be answered only after mobile users get their hands on Intel-based phones in the coming months.

In other mobile news

It looks like Apple could easily double its potential iPhone subscriber base in China, since there is a new regulatory approval process that it negotiated and secured in China earlier this week, paving the way to double its sales of the iPhone and the iPad.

Apple now has official permission from the China Radio Management Office to offer a mobile handset and a tablet that operates on the CDMA-2000 network standard, which is used by the third-largest Chinese carrier, China Telecom. The news is positive for Apple, and should help it surpass its sales forecast in Asia.

China Telecom would be the second iPhone carrier in China, joining the country’s second-largest network provider China Unicom.

China Telecom would add a potential buying audience of almost 33.5 million mobile subscribers to China Unicom’s network of 36.5 million users.

All that remains is that Apple secure a license from China’s Telecommunications Equipment and Certification Center prior to offering the iPhones and iPads for sale in that country.

And Apple wouldn’t need to do much to offer the right phones for the network-- China Telecom uses a 3G CDMA-2000 network, based on the same standard as Verizon’s mobile 3G network in the United States.

Adding the wireless carrier officially would not only expand Apple’s reach, but also help it win back more legitimate channel sales from the gray market.

Wireless industry analyst Sandy Shen over at Gartner Market Research says that as authorized sales outlets become more widespread, gray market sales drop.

But Apple may soon face some entirely different issues in China, especially if it rapidly scales its potential iOS user base in that country.

Recent reports indicate that Apple is currently being sued by a group of Chinese writers over allegations that pirated books are being offered for sale on the App Store. The group has asked Apple to remove the books, but so far, the company has refused.

The group plans to file another lawsuit on behalf of more authors next week, and says the issue is rapidly escalating.

The group is only seeking around US $1.2 million in damages for this first suit, but moving forward, Apple could alienate content providers located in China, and invite continued legal issues by ignoring the problem.

As China becomes more central to the long-term future of Apple’s iPhone and iPad market, the company will likely have to come up with new ways to address these and other unique issues.

We’ve already determined that localization is key when it comes to making mobile apps successful in Asian App Stores, so it would make sense that Apple may eventually want to set up more local operations and stores for dealing with Chinese App Store content as well, especially given the recent move to make the Chinese App Store open to payments using local currency.

In other mobile news

Yesterday at CES 2012, Huawei unveiled two new high-end Android smartphones, including one that it claims is the world's slimmest phone. The Huawei Ascend P1-S and the Ascend P1, runs Android's version 4.0 OS, dubbed Ice Cream Sandwich. Both devices are powered by a dual-core Texas Instruments OMAP 4460 Cortex-A9 processor running at 1.5 GHz, joined by an SGX 540 graphics engine.

Both mobile handsets have a 4.3-inch, 960-by-540 Super OLED qHD display protected by Corning's hardened Gorilla Glass (just like the iPhone), and the PS 1 manages to stuff that display into a body that's just 6.48 mm wide. At that width, the metal-frame bezel on the right and left of the display is exceptionally thin.

Both smartphones provide a broad range of UMTS/GSM 3G and HSPA+ 4G connectivity capabilites, and Huawei chairman Richard Yu promised his audience at the phone's rollout at the Consumer Electronics Show that his company's 20 years-plus experience in mobile infrastructure gives them a leg up in providing quick, clear connections. "We know the network," Yu noted, modestly.

Yu also claimed that the new handsets' 1670 mAh and 1800 mAh batteries will provide about a 30 percent increase in battery life over competing smartphones, and that their OMAP processors make the devices the fastest in their class.

The devices are also equipped with Dolby Mobile 3.0 Plus 5.1 surround sound. "Now you can take your home theater music system away with you, a fantastic user experience," Yu boasted.

Also notable is the software provided along with the phones' 8-megapixel, 1080p HD video–capable, rear-facing camera (a 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera supports video calls). Among other features, the software also offers face-distortion fun similar to Apple's Photo Booth, panoramic image-stitching, in-camera image editing, low-light enhancement, and improved close-up images.

One feature of the camera and its accompanying software that we found especially intriguing is the ability to automatically take five shots of a group of people and have the phone's face-recognition technology choose which image includes the best shot of each subject in the five-photo group and combine them into a single image.

Other specs include a 4 GB ROM (read only memory) and a 1 GB RAM (expandable to 8 GB with a microSD card), Bluetooth 3.0 HS, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, HDMI, dual-microphone noise reduction, PDF and PowerPoint editing, dual LEDs for its rear-facing camera, and the near-ubiquitous compass, accelerometer, and gyroscope. The new devices come in black, white, or cherry red.

Yu didn't announce any wireless carrier partners as of yet, but he did say that the Ascend P1 and P1-S would be available in April. Although carrier-subsidy deals have yet to be made, he estimated that the phones would likely be priced at around $400.

Both phones will be available in China, Europe, Asia-Pacific, North America, Australia, and the Middle East at launch.

It seems that Huawei is jumping into the high-end smartphone market with both feet, and landing in a quite attractive location. The phones are solid, sleek and sexy. It will be interesting to see how Apple responds to this in the next couple of weeks...

In other mobile industry news

Apple expects to sell no less than $10 billion worth of iPads and about $9 to $10 billion of Macs to business and enterprise customers this year, according to Forrester’s latest Global Tech Market Outlook.

Those are 68 percent and 55 percent increases, respectively, over last year's numbers, and this is blowing away even the most optimistic sales forecast set forth no less than just three months ago. And in 2013, spending on iPads and Macs could hit $17 billion and $13 billion respectively. Slowly but surely, Apple is making inroads into the enterprise IT segment, a sector traditionally dominated by Microsoft and IBM.

And, as Forrester notes, that is somewhat totally unexpected. “The biggest disruptive force in the computer equipment market right now is Apple,” the research firm says in its report. “This is a surprise, because Apple has not and does not directly address the corporate market, while turning a wide variety of consumer technology markets upside-down."

"But its rapid growth in the corporate market has been the big surprise of 2011, and it will be even more of a factor in 2012,” continued Forrester.

As Forrester explains, “The Apple assault on the corporate market has so far taken place without much formal Apple support, and probably without Apple itself understanding its full extent and the near-term impact this will have on its sales. That’s simply because corporate adoption of Apple products has been largely non-existant so far, but this is rapidly changing.”

But here's the question on everyone's mind-- if Apple isn't aggressively pushing its hardware into the enterprise market, how is it getting there? Well, employees of Fortune 500 companies and also of smaller businesses are buying iPhones and iPads, and sometimes even MacBooks, as well, and most of the time with their own money.

And their employers are increasingly supporting them on the back end as well. Sometimes, employers are even subsidizing them for their use. This is the “consumerization of IT” we’re hearing so much about these days, and clearly it’s working very much in Apple’s favor.

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Source: Lenovo.

    This article was featured on Business 5.0 and on Tech Blog.