Uncle Miltie

Nokia: Profit Down While Aiming at Apple

Somehow, the economics of "Comes with Music" need to make sense for this to work for Nokia. And I'm not sure it does.

Assuming that Nokia receives a similar deal to the other on-line distributors, they will have to pay about 75 cents per song back to the music companies. Since downloads are unlimited, they might see a typical user download 250 or more songs a year - similar to the old Napster days. Since the user gets to keep those songs, Nokia will have to pay the entire royalty. That adds a significant cost to their music service that will eat into profits. Their hope then would be that users sign up for a second year of the download service, so they can recoup some of the cost (and of course users would keep downloading more songs which would have to be accounted for again).

I'm not sure how this can result in a profitable venture for Nokia, other than to possibly try to win marketshare. It will be interesting to see how this plays out...

iPhone Sales Drastically Surpass Q4 Consensus; Apple Reaches 10m Goal

Simple math...
+ AAPL has about $24 per share in cash.
+ It's currently trading at $89, and it has earnings of $5.11 per share.
+ Subtracting the cash out of the share price gives you $65 per share on the business.
+ Divide in the earnings and you get a P/E of 12.7.

For a company that is growing earnings at 30% plus, this represents a tremendous value...

9 Feature Comparisons: G1 vs. iPhone

Here's one serious mistake in the description of the G1 people are making - the hardware is NOT first generation. HTC has been making phones for years, mostly sold under trade names for other companies (see the ATT Tilt as a clear example of a similar handset to this TMob one).

What is first generation is the OS. And that's where Apple has a significant advantage. The iPhone runs a streamlined version of OS-X (basically the full version minus the features not needed for a phone). It's a mature OS with a very solid feature set. The G1 has a first generation of Android. How stable it is and how fast it's patched have yet to be seen. This is a major difference in the two phones.

And, of course, there is Android Market / Amazon as compared to iTunes / iTMS. We have no idea how Android market will look. We do know how Amazon looks - I happen to prefer iTunes over Amazon by a wide margin.

It will be interesting to see how this works. Even more interesting will be when we see Android on other hardware - some more powerful, some less, and undoubtedly with a lot of different feature sets. How well Android adapts to the additional hardware, and how dumbed down the apps have to be to work with the least capable hardware could potentially be an achilles heel for the platform.

It sure will be interesting to watch though...

Revisiting the iPhone's Browsing Market Share

Dig down a little into that report (page 4), and you'll see why this is meaningless. 4 of the top 6 devices are Motorola phones which have no web browsing capability - only a severly limited version of the mobile web. The top individual handset for market share? The Motorola RAZR V3.

Based on that flawed data, the report and this blog post are also meaningless...

6 Things Apple's Not Doing Right

This article reads like a High Cchool report on a company, with all of the information culled from Wikipedia. There are so many factual errors as to make it comical.

Seriously, if you want to learn about Apple before you write this kind of tripe, go read RoughlyDrafted.com. You may learn something.

Consumers Will Benefit From Smartphone Battle

The problem is that out of your 200 million Symbian phones, only a small portion can actually run applications due to a lack of memory and processing power. Add in the multiple different controller interfaces (keypad and buttons), different screen resolutions and different versions of Symbian, and it's a fragmented market at best. Newer devices will surely benefit from the newfound freedom, but unless they have a more common configuration, it's still a crapshoot.

What's Better: BlackBerry or iPhone?

Hi Wayne,

Here at my house, I have an iPhone, my wife has a CrackBerry. Here is our general impression of the two devices:

1) The blackberry is better for her e-mail and texting habits. Her fingernails make it easier for her to text on the crackberry - but not by much. I can text on my iPhone nearly as fast as she can on her crackberry, and I definitely have fat fingers.

2) As of today, my iPhone won't connect to my corporate Exchange server, but her blackberry will. It's already been announced that that will change by the end of June when iPhone software 2.0 is released - and all current iPhones will get that upgrade.

3) The iPhone is superior in every other function. Period. It's not even close. Whether it's internet, music or multimedia, the iPhone makes the blackberry look like it's still in the stone age.

4) Once you have the internet at hand as easily as you do on an iPhone, you will be AMAZED at how much more useful the iPhone is. There are things you had never even considered doing before that you can now do easily. Get a map to your next appointment, complete with traffic info? done. Check the weather forecast? simple. Search for info on a client from the web? piece of cake. Read the Times? fast. It really is a game changer.

5) I have no case on my iPhone, and it's hit the pavement several times with only minor scratching of the metal band.

6) you claim to have used an iPhone for a while in the comments, yet you seem to not understand how significant the mobile web is. To me, that's shocking.

The advantages of the iPhone so outweigh the blackberries lone advantage, that my wife will be switching the minute she can get the iPhone on her enterprise system. Simple as that.

Enjoy your blackberry. Just remember that iPhone is not all about Apple PR hype. It really is a game changer...

Even With Apple, Price Will Follow Value

"management’s consistent habit of playing guidance games has finally served to burn shareholders. Of course, the guidance games were never a problem when the stock was going up – as Todd Sullivan notes – so I have to disagree with Trader Mark that everything is alright."

Two problems with this argument:

1) Todd Sullivan is an idiot and has as much credibility on AAPL as the gum stuck on the bottom of my shoe.

2) Apple does not "play games with guidance". They provide very conservative guidance that they will meet, and do not give updates at any other time than during quarterly reports. The only games are the ones being played by analysts who speculate what the actual earnings will be.

(FYI, current guidance is for FY-Q2 for Apple - it's slower than Q1 every year, and somehow analysts are always suprised that Apple's sales are lower in the quarter after Christmas every year, but YoY sales are up significantly...)

AT&T's "Edge" Network Shatters iPhone Mobile Web Expectations

When I'm on EDGE, I use the mobile web, and pages like mobile.nytimes.com or m.usatoday.com load fast - under 2 seconds. On the other hand, if I try to load nytimes.com or usatoday.com they take forever.

The key to using EDGE on the iPhone is the mobile web. On other phones, it's painful because you can't display everything correctly, or it's too hard to navigate, or you spend too much time waiting for the page to scroll. On the iPhone, those shortcomings are not an issue.