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Garmin's Nuvifone: Why I Don't Expect It to Gain Much Traction

Garmin has good brand awareness and is small enough that they don't need to be a major player in the handset business. My belief is that Garmin will vy for the niche logistics, highend recreational and transportation add on markets. The combination could give them 5 to 10 million annual units at an OEM cost of $400. That's a $2 to $4 billion business with greater than 50% GM. They could also pick up another 1 or 2 million units from the broader smartphone market in some select geographic areas. This business doesn't have to compete directly with the Nokias or Apples of the world to be successful to Garmin. What's wrong with high margin niche markets? Nothing.

Apple: Great Company with Lofty Valuation - Due for Pullback

Exactly why should anyone listen to your prognostications. Anyone whose invested in Apple over the past 2 years know that P/E ratios for valuating Apple doesn't reflect its true earnings.

By your writing style, you're not an uninformed person. So what's your reason for writing such an uninformed piece?

I see a lot of these short side biased blogs on Apple that just boggles my mine. I finded it intreging to here someone write such a negative piece on a company that is accellerating cash flow by 35%+ per annum and will top out near $40Billion within a year. With such a matrix, who cares about less than 0.1% stock price dilution.

Come on, be honest for once and tell us the real reason for this useless piece.

Research In Motion's 3G Counteroffensive: The Smartphone Arms Race Escalates

Wow... Thanks for the chart. This chart clearly shows that Apple was taking share from Palm and stalled RIMMs advance. What's not shown is after the 3G launch which will clearly show that Apple is now taking market share from all smart phone OEMs including RIMM.

However, one could tell Apple has captured a significant portion of the smart phone market by its SP performance. This is all shaping up to become a short for RIMM and a long play for Apple. By Christmas, RIMM will be punch drunk from Apple's reported sells and the analyst will have to take notice of the iphones contribution to Apples top and bottom line.

Big money was betting on RIMM and they have clearly choosen the wrong race horse. These low tech investment gurus have provided a great opportunity for small investors to benefit from Apples rise to mobile phone prominence. RIMM should go down by 1Q09. Nokia will take some time--perhaps another year. Motorola is dead in the water and neither are prepared for the next iphone platform that will catapult Apple market share of all mobiles above 10%. These are great times for the retail investor. Big money will not be able to ignor a 12 million plus 4Q08 iphone 3g sales.

The iPhone-BlackBerry Showdown Continues

Unless RIM's new thunder phone comes with more NVM (nand) it will not compete with the new or the present Iphone as a mobile computer. The RIM BOLD missed the point and I suspect limited success of that phone given its under minded NVM capacity. RIM's at a advantage but old habbits are hard to break. Equipping the BOLD with only 1GB of embedded memory was a calloso mistake and the poultry 8GM max SD slot wont cut it. Surfacing the web requires storage. People will want to store video, music, photos, data, video clips, SW apps, gaming etc. 8GB is a joke.

RIMM's reliance on email will be their down fall. Email is not as compelling for a smart phone as the media makes out. If that were so, palm and others will be viable and RIMM wouldn't be afraid of lossing market share to Apple.

The evidence is so overwhelming from the Apples first launch of iphone that they had to discontinue the 4GB model an standardize on the 8GB as a minimum. Iphone currently has two models 8 and 16GB and I suspect they will add an additional 24GB or 32GB models this year if not in June. And don't forget the ipod-touch which already has a 32GB model and is selling in the top 10 best selling ipods on Amazon.

From this canadian analysis own admission, Apple is expected to double iphone sales in 2009 to a tune of 20 million and I've heard estimates upwards of 43 million. If the latter turn out to be the case, RIMM is in deep trouble. But they have until next year to release a phone with adequate NVM and a compelling user experience. Relying on the QWERTY keypad and email is a mistake of huge proportions. Consumers will abandon RIMM in droves if they fail to heed what the masses desire--more NVM. Its the memory stupid.

What's Better: BlackBerry or iPhone?

Too much attention is given to business class and the key board for mobile use. My disappointment with the BB bold is it missed having sufficient memory, the OS was inferior and the LCD is not competitive with the iphone. However, this is a good start and I suspect RIMM will have additional releases that will be more competitive. The bold is not the answer to the iphone let alone the 3G version.

Lastly, its clear that Apple is not building iphones to compete with RIMM or any other cell phone OEM. What is clear to me that Apple is building an interconnected multimedia ecosystem. The iphone is one of two devices that will spear head this interconnectivity multimedia rich experience--the ipod-touch and to a lesser degree the iTV products. Follow the announcements and you'll see that browsing the web, viewing TV, viewing motion picture releases, listening to music, and reviewing pictures are all coming together in the ipod-touch and iphone. The PC, laptop, DVD,phone, TV and jukebox are morphing into smaller mobile devices and Apple is leading the way. All other discussion is superpulous. Now ask yourself why would you buy any other product than the Apple mobile platforms when you can get all of this in one product as opposed to just business class email.