Monthly Archives: September 2010

The two pie charts below tell you everything you need to know about how the profit splits in the smartphone industry (with the exception of RIM whom I presume to be in the ‘other’ category). To sum up, Apple sells 17 million phones and takes 39% of the money while Nokia, LG and Samsung sell 400 million phones and take 32% of the pot.

So what does this tell us? Most likely it demonstrates that the real money is in the high-end of the market (where Apple sells) and that the profit margins on the lower end phones are extremely low. Nokia, Samsung and LG try to service every market and I will look deeper into this to see how much profit is made on every level of mobile phone- I can’t believe that the costs to produce a high-end Nokia or Samsung are that much different than the iPhone so the money must be draining from the bottom.

The ‘One App For All’ idea is to make apps that will work on any smartphone, regardless of the OS they are running, and to take the idea further and let the apps run on any internet connected device. It is a noble idea and one I would love to see work, but the consequences could be bad for the consumer. Let’s say that everything went perfectly (which it won’t) and that we ended up with thousands of apps that could work on any device- competition would soon dry up and we would be left battling it out on the hardware side alone which would slow all development down to a snails pace. There are some upsides such as easy movement from device to device and the ability to use a particular app anywhere, but ultimately it will prove extremely difficult to sort it to a point that it will be as usable as the ultimate goal suggests.

From the BBC- “The idea would enable a given app to work, for example, on a web-ready television, in a car and on a mobile, no matter the makers of the devices.

“That’s what we want to address – to provide a system that runs on all these platforms and domains, where the developer comes up with one application for one platform and lets you run it on all these devices – mobiles, automotive, gaming, and so on.”

Marvell has announced a 1.5HGz Tri-Core processor for mobile and smartphones which can deliver dual stream 1080p 3D video and 3D graphics performance with quad unified shaders for 200 million triangles per second delivered on ultra-low-power. The low power bit intrigues me and I hope that proves to be true when it reaches high-end smartphones.

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Sept. 23 /PRNewswire/ — Marvell (Nasdaq: MRVL), a worldwide leader in integrated silicon solutions, today introduced the world’s first 1.5 GHz tri-core application processor, the Marvell® ARMADA™ 628. This product incorporates a full System-on-a-Chip design (SoC) with three high performance Marvell-designed, ARM-compliant CPU cores operating as the world’s first commercially available heterogeneous, multi-core, applications processor.

The architecture is analogous to a hybrid muscle car. The ARMADA 628 is intended to perform like a race car engine on demand, while still delivering the frugal gas-mileage of a hybrid automobile. In real world terms, this enables the ARMADA 628 to play more than 10 hours of full 1080p HD video or 140 hours of music on a single charge while still providing 3 GHz of raw computational horsepower.