David Wolf

China Mobile, Apple Butt Heads Over iPhone

mmii: you're spot on about the Unicom experience. But I suspect we'll be waiting a while for iPhones with CHL embossed on the back.

China Mobile, Apple Butt Heads Over iPhone

Boettger: Apple wage guerrilla warfare on the Chinese market? Oh, hell yes!

I saw an estimate yesterday that as many as 25% of all iPhones sold are hacked and never returned to the network that sold them. How many of those have made it into the hands of China's newly-prosperous?

Anybody want to bet on whether Apple will unlock the GSM/GPRS iPhones once they launch 3G devices?

China Mobile, Apple Butt Heads Over iPhone

jmmx: thanks for the post.

Methinks Mr. Jobs - he of the Great Reality Distortion Field - may well be downplaying what is likely an uncomfortable situation.

Here's my point - The iPhone does not need CHL right now, and CHL does not need the iPhone. As sad as that might be for all of us living here in the Middle Kingdom, them's the facts.

China Mobile, Apple Butt Heads Over iPhone

Reinharden: You're right that Unicom has a GSM network, and in fact they're well into rolling out their GPRS capability. All fine and good. The reason Apple would probably not be prepared to work with China Unicom is the user-experience factor.

See, if Unicom's GPRS network is so good, I wonder why my BlackBerry 8700 with an overseas SIM card can only find a GSM signal when it roams onto China Unicom's network here in Beijing and not a GPRS signal. I've had to force-select China Mobile on the device or lose all data services the second it gloms onto a China Unicom signal.

My wife's brand-spanking new RAZR2 V8 GPRS device - she's a China Unicom subscriber - is not getting onto a GPRS network at all anywhere in Beijing.

Does Unicom have GPRS? Maybe. But you wouldn't know it from OUR day-to-day user experiences in China's capital city, nor those of others who have commented on my blog or emailed me. Whether Unicom has the hardware or not is irrelevant if the network can't offer a consistent user experience on two GPRS devices from two major manufacturers.

Apple is going to be really sensitive about quality-of-service issues with carriers, a lesson it learned in going with AT&T in the United States. Unicom is in no position to truthfully offer a lot of comfort in that area, a sad legacy of its dual-network (GSM/CDMA) heritage.

How about them odorless feces?

Nokia the iPod Killer? I Think Not

Hi Lauri,

Thanks for your input. You quite accurately echo Nokia's world view of the consumer electronics field. Unfortunately, I'm not entirely certain that, as expressed, the "convergence" model is necessarily accurate, for several reasons.

First, I am inherently suspicious of any rhetoric that is universalist in nature. All consumers will want a single device? Doesn't that make a rather bold assumption that all consumers want the same thing?

Second, the model assumes that standalone devices offer no significant advantage over converged devices. For some devices this is true, and you mention several - an alarm clock, a pocket calculator. But to this point I find phone-based calendars and PIMs - even in Treos and iPaqs - to be far inferior in utility than the PIM/CRM on my laptop, or even in a paper-based DayTimer. I find the same is true for dictionaries.

For the future, a GPS device? Absolutely. But a dive computer? No way.

A digital camera? Maybe as a replacement for a disposable point-and-shoot. But don't even begin to suggest that a mobile phone will, in the next 3-4 years, displace the function of my Canon digital SLR camera. Don't get me wrong - photography is not my hobby - I'm going to get one shot at great pictures, and I want a system that delivers. Mobile phones are a long way from that stage, and it is not merely a matter of a higher-resolution CCD or more storage that makes it so.

An e-mail device? Possibly. But I've got big hands, and I want to use a keyboard that's large enough so I'm not hitting two keys by accident. I'd also like to be able to talk on the phone while doing e-mail, and I'm sure I'm not alone. Frankly, I don't want to heft a heavy device just to chat on the phone - I want something light and sleek with a decent wireless headset.

A music player? You're right. Apple has got to give up on the standalone music player, and I think they will. But it's no longer about music alone, is it? It's about video, which takes up immense storage space, and about podcasts, and about our photo collections, and recordings of lectures or conversations, and games, and books, and all of the media we carry around in our lives.

My bet is that Sony is dead in the water with a standalone book reader, but I'm not going to read an e-book on a screen that will fit next to my ear. Nor will I play games on such a screen. The ignominious end of the N-gage certainly proved the latter.

So there are a lot of ways a media player can still converge before it can practically get sucked into a phone.

I could go on, and we're STILL only talking about the device problem, Lauri. We still haven't addressed three important problems:

1. JUICE - As much as I only want to carry one adapter, I also don't want to shlep extra batteries. But if you put all of this stuff into a single device with adequate storage, pray, where is all of the juice going to come from? I, like many people, absolutely rely on my mobile phone being available at all times. I own a business and I have a family. I can afford to let my camera, my media player, my Blackberry, and even my laptop run out of juice. NOT my phone. I want 72 hours of talk time and two weeks of standby, because on some trips I don't slow down long enough for days to plug in - and sometimes I just plain forget. That won't happen with a "converged" device, and the more you "converge" the more you tax current battery technology.

2. Content - Until Nokia integrates its devices into a system that provides users with a superior selection of content and fairly compensates (and protects the rights of) artists, authors, labels, studios, and publishing houses, at best Nokia's media devices will fail to gain traction. At worst, they will become vectors for piracy.

3. Experience - Just because you can stick it all into 300 grams of plastic, glass, and silicon doesn't mean the experience of any of this is going to get better. The experience is about much more than cramming more features into a single device - it's about a complete ecosystem to deliver on those experiences.
> Camera? Sure. Now how do I manipulate, store, print, share and archive those precious memories? The device doesn't provide the whole answer.
> Video? How do I transfer that video to my 42" flatscreen or burn it to a DVD- and what will it look like when I do? How do I get it to YouTube - and how do I edit and add credits before I do so?
> Email? How do I view an e-mail attachment - especially if it is an important document - and make changes, then store it?
> FM Radio? What about satellite? Does anyone really want to pay for FM anymore?
> Portable TV? How do I record for later viewing? For viewing on another device? You need a service for that, don't you?

But you get my point. Nokia remains of the conviction that the device should be sufficient to deliver a superior experience. Despite the introduction of increasingly converged, feature-laden devices, all Nokia does is prove that the device is no longer sufficient. There must be more.

Whether that "more" comes from a single-provider (a la Apple) or from a system of specialist providers will be determined in each major market in the world. But until Nokia really gets their arms around the "more" and what it will take to deliver it for increasingly picky consumers, the most converged devices in the world will fail to live up to their promises.

The ghost of N-gage calls as the wind blows through the trees around the glass house in Espoo. The question is - is anyone listening?

Many thanks,

David