ZTE in 2013: do smartphone designers dream of electric sheep?
Posted: February 1, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: blade runner, CES, china, Chinese new year, FBI, Grand S, hagen Fendler, HD, hong kong, huawei, Iran, shenzhen, smartphone, telecoms equipment, zte, ZTE Grand Memo Leave a comment
I popped down to ZTE’s pre-Chinese New Year lunch for journos in Hong Kong earlier this week to see what the world’s fifth largest smartphone maker had to say for itself.
It’s not been an easy year for it or Shenzhen rival Huawei, who were both named as a national security risk in a US congressional committee report released at the tail end of 2012 in the bi-partisan hubbub typical of pre-election months.
In addition, ZTE has been under lengthy investigation by the FBI on suspicion of selling embargoed US-made tech to Iran and then covering it up when found out. Then there were the false rumours of swingeing job cuts at the firm and a $5bn cash injection from the Chinese government.
Despite its problems, however, ZTE remains on the move in the smartphone space, an innovator in telecoms infrastructure with its LTE offerings and has plans to grow the enterprise business despite the kind of government roadblocks put up in Australia, the US and now India.
Head of handset strategy Lv Qian Hao battled manfully with the flu to show me the firm’s latest high-end handset, the 5.7in Grand Memo (no pics I’m afraid). It comes across as a smallish version of Huawei’s massive six-incher the Ascend Mate and probably benefits from not being quite as large – in other words I could just about use it as a phone without looking daft.
In the rapidly developing smartphone space, specs like 13 megapixel camera, quad core 1.7Ghz Snapdragon processor and a 720p screen – specs which might once have elicited gasps of awe from the assembled masses – are now pretty standard at the high-end.
This is no criticism of ZTE but it certainly makes its job of climbing up the smartphone rankings and a goal of 50 million shipments this year that bit harder.
So where can it differentiate? Well, with high-end specs almost commoditised now, design is obviously one key area. With the best will in the world ZTE is not know for its beautiful design, but it’s hoping to change that with Hagen Fendler on board.
Pinched from cross-town rival Huawei, Fendler’s appointment and a new design centre in Shanghai certainly serve to highlight the firm’s vaulting ambitions in this space.
Fendler explained that his job is to create a design DNA which can be seeded throughout the firm’s handsets to help create a brand identity. It got off to a flyer with the launch at CES of the Grand S, an HD handset which at 6.9mm is currently the world’s thinnest.
It won’t be an easy job creating handsets that are both beautiful and distinctively “ZTE” but with 400 staff working on design alone, they’ve as good a chance as any.
It can be a frustrating time for a journalist talking to a designer, because so many of the concepts they tend to reference are abstract, ethereal and emotive rather than the nuts and bolts practicalities of engineering.
However, Fendler did reveal that much of his design inspiration comes from outside the immediate environs of the smartphone space – from books, magazines and films.
1982 sci-fi classic Blade Runner was singled out for particular praise for sparking interesting ideas about “how humans interact with the technology around them”.
Just don’t expect to see the ZTE Blade Runner phone anytime soon. Actually, Google already got there with the Nexus, didn’t it?
Can fibre-based smart grids provide a solution to our superfast broadband problems?
Posted: January 16, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: AMI, AT&T, china, fibre broadband, fibre optic, japan, Ovum, Quocirca, SGCC, smart grid, smart meter, superfast broadband, triple play, verizon Leave a comment
Do you have superfast fibre optic broadband? The answer is probably not, because in the US, UK, Australia and elsewhere projects are riven by funding issues, political in-fighting and delays, delays, delays. The answer just might be right in front of our eyes.
Take this new report from Ovum on smart grids. Before you fall asleep, the smart grid pilot project it refers to in China is being undertaken by the SGCC, the largest utility in the world, so plenty of food for thought for utilities globally depending on what happens with it.
The crux of the Ovum piece is that the pilot – if it goes nationwide – is likely to offer a potential windfall of up to $2bn for international fibre infrastructure vendors. Yup, the project is basically running power alongside fibre to kill three birds with one stone – deliver power, run a smart grid (ie collect and monitor smart meters in customer homes) and potentially offer triple play services.
This hasn’t really been done with any great degree of success outside of Japan, where investments were made over a long period of time, report author Julie Kunstler told me. But if it works out in China, the big question is whether it could show US utilities a way forward – yes fibre is pretty costly but apply for a telco license or lease the lines to comms providers and they could fund such an investment.
It’s sorely needed, in the US and elsewhere, to manage that difficult last mile problem. As Kunstler told me, it solves this issue because power companies already shoot their cables right into the customers’ home, and are pretty much ubiquitous to boot.
In the end it’s still very early days, and although a technology supplier in China I spoke to said they were confident of this 80,000 home pilot going nationwide, even then, the unique political and economic conditions in the People’s Republic may make it the only country where such a huge project can work.
As Clive Longbottom of analyst Quocirca told me, “getting Verizon and AT&T to work together is like getting Democrats and Republicans to agree on a new fiscal package”.
This is where China has the edge – a basically homogenous, state-run set up where what the government says goes…a government, by the way, which has seemingly bottomless pockets and huge aspirations to lead the world in technology deployments, the bigger the better.
In the meantime, the citizens of the UK, US, Australia and elsewhere will continue to suffer from the kind of political indecision and selfish stakeholders which have thus far hampered any kind of coherent national superfast broadband strategy.
China 2013: What to expect from its tech giants in the Year of the Snake
Posted: January 3, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: big four, canalys, china, china US stock market, chinese tech innovation, diaoyu, google, huawei, lenovo, senkaku, sina weibo, TCL-alcatel, tencent, US, zte 1 Comment
Just finished an interesting piece on what to expect from Chinese tech firms in 2013 so thought I’d précis the key points below.
To be honest as with any year end predictions to an extent there’s always more-of-the-same than anything else, and to that point there’ll be greater international expansion on the mobile handset front by ZTE, Huawei, Lenovo, and potentially TCL-Alcatel.
Aside from the big names, Canalys analyst Nicole Peng told me there could also be attempts by feature phone vendors like Gionee and K-Touch to make it overseas, claiming that the technical and business support offered by chipset companies like Qualcomm and MediaTek is making it easier than ever to break into new smartphone markets.
But away from hardware, what about China’s growing raft of web companies?
It would be easy to write a story saying “the Chinese are coming, look out Facebook, Twitter et al!”, but the honest truth is that the likes of Tencent, Sina, Alibaba and others have become successful in China in part by copying their US rivals and in part thanks to local restrictions banning their rivals.
Where they have done well is in localising their platforms for the domestic user – something Alibaba and Baidu are doing now even for their mobile OS platforms – and innovating on top of what has gone before.
Aside from the odd service like Tencent’s WeChat which has managed to cross the Great Firewall to acceptance elsewhere, I’m sceptical that these firms will expand successfully in 2013, and to an extent, with less than half of the vast Chinese population online, there’s probably enough untapped growth left domestically to keep them busy for now.
Peng is slightly more optimistic, however.
“Many of the local mobile services/applications we have seen in China, such as Tencent Weixin, Sina Weibo provide great user experience and innovative features that we could not find from the international big name,” she told me.
“As long as they continue to innovate and own their IPs, I do not see Chinese internet companies having any major disadvantages in competing, as mobile services become device/OS agnostic in the future.”
Perhaps. But with local incumbents like Twitter, Facebook, Google et al, mature Western markets will certainly be too tough a nut to crack.
On top of this, Chinese tech firms will have to put up with increasingly hostile attitudes from various national governments.
National security concerns will continue to dog Huawei and ZTE on the telecoms infrastructure front, and there are signs that US regulators may soon begin the process of de-registering Chinese firms from US stock markets for failing to comply with domestic securities laws.
Oh, and there’s the small matter of a potential conflict over that bunch of barren rocks known as Diaoyu/Senkaku.
Plenty to look forward to, then, in 2013!
MediaTek and the battle of the budget quad cores
Posted: December 21, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 28nm chips, china, chips, huawei, LG, mediatek, mobile, MT6589, quad core, qualcomm, smartphones, SoC, Sony, Taiwan, US Leave a comment
Last week Asian chip giant MediaTek launched its latest System on a Chip design, the 28nm quad core MT6589. Before you click on to something more interesting, here’s why it should make anyone with a mobile phone sit up and take notice.
First, MediaTek. It’s probably the most ubiquitous chip company you’ve never heard of. Asia’s biggest and the fourth largest fabless chip company by revenue globally, it lists LG, Huawei, Sony and others among its clients. Until now the firm has largely been focused on the 2G feature phone market, especially in China where demand was huge until recently, but this announcement sees it really break out into the high end smartphone space.
The analysts I spoke to pretty unanimously agreed that MediaTek and arch rival Qualcomm between them are making a seriously disruptive play in the mobile space. Put simply, MediaTek is making quad core affordable by sticking CPU, GPU and wireless modem on the same SoC, which means the MT6589 will end up in plenty of cheap smartphones as well as some higher end ones.
The result? The big brands are going to have to differentiate on something other than quad core. In effect, as IDC analyst Teck-Zhung Wong told me, it’s going to kick off a whole new round of price competition, which is great for users and will spur the industry forward to keep on innovating, which is good for all stakeholders.
In the background there’s also the tussle between Qualcomm and MediaTek.
Qualcomm is doing amazing things this year and now sits third by revenue in IHS iSuppli’s new ranking of global chip companies. It has already produced a quad core aimed at the same market and has an advantage in its modem capabilities, which even MediaTek admitted to me. So it’s Taiwan versus the US in the battle of the budget quad cores. MediaTek historically has that huge customer base in China to tap and is likely to be faster to market but Qualcomm is catching up and apeing many of MediaTek’s technical advantages and customer relations strategies.
The jury’s out but it will be an interesting 12 months to see who the smartphone winners and losers will be.
China’s software revolution – fact or fiction?
Posted: December 10, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: china, china daily, exports, imports, software, trade deficit, trade surplus, US china relations Leave a comment
I’m not one to believe everything I read in the papers, especially if that paper happens to be one of China’s state run media outlets, but an interesting stat caught my eye in a recent article in China Daily.
The piece detailed how China – infamously a country which has a huge trade imbalance with the rest of the world, flogging it cheap exports – is actually importing more technology products than it exports.
The tech trade deficit apparently stands at $10bn – imports at $32bn and exports $21bn – which is a far cry from its huge overall trade surplus with the US which stood at around $300bn in 2011.
It is an interesting one because with China becoming an increasingly affluent and sizeable market in its own right it’s likely that more and more goods made in the country will not be exported but sold to its own consumers, so it’s hard to see how the government is going to be able to close this gap.
That aside though, the article pointed out that 89 per cent of China’s exports were in the sphere of “computer software”.
Really? The country famous for being the technology manufacturing centre of the world? Where the huge Taiwanese ODM/OEMs have plants the size of small towns, building everything from iPhones to children’s toys?
Yes, China has its successful web companies like Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba, but could its computer software industry really be that successful on the world stage?
Well, no is the short answer.
Gartner’s Matthew Cheung explained to me the likely reason for the unusually high figure is that they have counted revenue from a certain type of outsourced service in that figure.
Companies such as HiSoft, Beyondsoft and VanceInfo offer a raft of services to big name foreign companies looking to localise their own software products in China.
These services, Cheung said, have effectively been calculated as exports, as they are carried out on behalf of foreign companies, even though, aside from some work for the Japanese and Korean market, they are basically China-centric.
I have to say it’s a market I never knew existed but will be an interesting one to follow, because while China may not be the software centre of the world yet, it’s certainly an area where it could end up dominating if it decides to devote the full weight of its resources.
These companies are by no means minor players; some are NASDAQ listed, $10-$100m businesses and they’re already acquiring foreign rivals, said Cheung.
This could yet be the first stirrings of a Chinese software revolution to match that which propelled the country to become the pre-eminent tech manufacturing hub.
Nokia takes the wraps of the Lumia 920
Posted: November 27, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: asia pacific, computex, french window, hong kong, IFC, lumia 920, nokia, window phone 8 Leave a comment
I’d almost forgotten what product launch press conferences were like in Asia, but got a nice little reminder at Nokia’s grand unveiling of the Lumia 920 and 820 in Hong Kong last Thursday.
I have less than pleasant memories of the rugby scrum at Computex that formed after master showman, Asus chairman Jonney Shih, took the wraps of the Padfone.
“Is it a laptop? Is it a phone?” he teased, unaware that the vast majority of the audience couldn’t make an informed decision because of being unable to see anything past all the sweaty fanboys standing on their chairs.
It all came flooding back at the French Window, a swanky restaurant venue in the IFC Mall, on Thursday night. To describe the scene for you: lots of people talking over Nokia’s spokesperson and the over-exuberant local media star roped in to present the devices, no-body drinking.
After some barely audible back and forth and a play around with the new Windows 8 Phones, it was time for the money shot, namely the part when three attractive, scantily clad female models come on stage to hold the devices for the cameras … at perfect boob-height.
So does Nokia have much of a chance with the Lumias? Well I gave up trying to fight may way to the demo area, but smartphone fondlers in the media regard it as one of Nokia’s best for years: great build quality, blisteringly fast processor and superb camera, if a little bulky.
Wireless charging, which was demoed at the event, will also be a bonus and, of course, it comes with Windows Phone 8.
I like Nokia, I really do, and would love the European tech giant to get back on track with this one, it’s just that with so much competition, and with so many smartphones these days offering specs which are so similar, I wonder if it will be enough, especially in the hyper competitive China market.
If you’re a Windows Phone fan, happy days, if not, you may well be minded to stick with what you know.
Bruce Schneier: the internet is not doomed, but it is fragmenting
Posted: November 21, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: balkanisation, bruce schneier, BT, censorship, chief security technology officer, china, cryptography, great firewall, infosecurity, music industry, piracy Leave a comment
I had the pleasure of en evening with Bruce Schneier last night. Let me re-phrase that: I attended a BT event yesterday entitled “A Private Dinner with Bruce Schneier”.
Schneier, if you haven’t come across him, is BT’s chief security technology officer, author, cryptographer extraordinaire and philosopher-cum-infosecurity out-of-the-box-thinker.
Basically, what he says in info-security circles is usually listened to, although his propensity to tackle the subject more from a socio- or even biological perspective than a mere discussion of bits and bytes can make quotable extracts from a conversation with him pretty thin on the ground.
That said, Schneier was on form last night, focusing on the topic of trust and the notion that all systems, be they sociological, biological and so on, need co-operation to work. These systems also feature, inevitably, ‘defectors’, who don’t obey the rules and require security to keep their activities to manageable levels.
All fine and dandy, but what about the future? Does Schneier think we’re all doomed?
Well he certainly believes that the gap between the bad guys profiting from new technologies and the good guys catching up is greater than at any point in the past thanks to the sheer volume of new tech and the huge social change it is spurring, which is somewhat worrying.
However, there is hope that all is not lost. For one, he declared the bad stuff that happens online still a “tiny percentage” of the whole.
“I’m a short term pessimist but a long-term optimist,” he added.
As the older generation dies out things will gradually change too, he explained, as new norms around things like privacy come into play, and even the music industry is eventually be forced to change.
“The internet is the greatest generational gap since rock n roll,” he declared.
“People stealing music now are doing what will be normal in ten years’ time, they just figured it out first. The business model of scarcity doesn’t work.”
In less reassuring news, he argued that the balkanisation of the internet is likely to continue as national governments seek to establish their own controls – particularly appropriate given we were sitting in the Conrad Hong Kong, just a few miles from mainland China and the Great Firewall.
“It turns out the internet does have boundaries,” Schneier concluded. “Governments are enforcing their rules more and more and it makes for a less stable internet but it is the geopolitical future.”
Chinese OEMs still not auditing for labour rights abuses
Posted: November 9, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: apple, china, china labor watch, factory, foxconn, HEG electronics, IHS iSuppli, iPhone 5, labour abuses, labour right, ODM, OEM, samsung, technology, Vtech Leave a comment
China watchers will be well aware of the story by now. Most of the shiny tech kit we buy in the western world is produced in conditions ranging from ‘challenging’ to downright miserable. Apple provider Foxconn is often highlighted as a prime offender but the depressing truth is that it is one of the better employers. As long as labour rights abuses continue, though, they should continue to be reported.
The below is a piece I wrote up from my chat with IHS analyst Tom Dinges:
Half of China-based OEMs still don’t require third party audits of their manufacturing providers despite many high profile cases emerging this year involving serious breaches of labour laws and widespread strikes, according to market watcher IHS iSuppli.
The supply chain analyst revealed the news as part of a wider survey of the global technology industry.
Over the past year incidents at factories belonging to Apple supplier Foxconn, as well as plants run by contract manufacturer VTech and Samsung provider HEG Electronics, among others, have highlighted the poor level of compliance with local laws at many plants.
Although China has strict labour laws which prevent children under the age of 16 working, keep working hours and overtime to manageable levels and prohibit discrimination, they are poorly enforced.
Not-for-profit groups including China Labour Watch and Hong Kong-based SACOM have time and again uncovered incidents alleging such rules have been broken, with reports claiming physical violence, bullying and filthy living conditions are the norm in many factories.
Staff dissatisfaction comes to a boil periodically in the form of strikes or bouts of violence. In October it was claimed that thousands staged a walk out at Foxconn’s Zhengzhou factory where the iPhone 5 was being made, while a month earlier, scores of workers were hospitalised after a mass brawl at a managed dorm near Foxconn’s Taiyuan plant.
“There are aspects of the labour laws many firms turn a blind eye to for the sake of satisfying their customers and getting products out of the door,” IHS analyst Tom Dinges told me.
“Considering how much of the supply chain is embedded in China it’s too costly to move to another region so the issue is ‘what do we do to ensure our suppliers adhere to the local labour laws they’re supposed to?’.”
Dinges added that the ‘headline risk’ of bad publicity, especially as it filters down to middle America through regional media outlets, should be forcing change on this front.
Foxconn is one notable supplier which seems to be taking a lead on this, having agreed with Apple to on-going audits by the Fair Labor Association, although worrying cases of rights abuses continue to emerge at some of its plants.
China Labor Watch also claimed at a Congressional hearing in the summer that the audit process is flawed in many cases, with widespread bribery and collusion on the part of suppliers and auditing companies.
Dinges said that as the industry matures this situation should improve, with auditors taking their cue from financial investigators.
“These organisations will have to meet a certain expected level of authenticity, vigour and independence,” he added.
“We’re past the stage of hyper growth. Now a lot of what is produced there ends up staying in China. If that’s the case then the factory employee is also a customer and you want to be sure to treat your customers well.”
Chinese firm builds prototype Android e-ink smartphone
Posted: October 26, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: android, china, developer, display, e-ink, LCD, onyx international, smartphone Leave a commentHave been doing a bit of digging on an interesting new handset from Chinese e-reader firm Onyx International – what could be the world’s first Android-based smartphone with an e-ink display.
Frustratingly the only source we have for this is a brief demo of the prototype device on geek site armdevices.net.
What we can see, however, is it’s a pretty fully functioning smartphone, albeit running a slightly old version of Android, with web and email capabilities, a capacitive touchscreen and ARM Cortex-A5 processor.
The benefit of e-ink of course is that the screen is not made of glass and so is thinner and lighter, and not prone to cracking. It also makes the phone really easy to see in direct sunlight – something LCD displays singularly fail to do, especially under the glare of the summer Hong Kong sun.
It also slurps less battery, and so could apparently last on a single charge for around a week, and the lack of a glass display means it can really lighten the whole device – this one is said to be under 100g.
On the minus side, e-ink currently only really works in greyscale and screen refreshes take a lot longer than LCD displays – video is impossible and even basic tasks can take an age compared to what impatient smartphone fans are used to.
So what’s the ideal use case for this kind of smartphone? Well, the elderly perhaps, or emerging markets.
The problem E-ink, and indeed Onyx will have will be the budget Android smartphones from the likes of ZTE, Lenovo and others and indeed scores of lesser-known Chinese handset makers.
These vendors are increasingly targeting that sub-1000 yuan end of the market with LCD display devices which may be unreadable in direct light, but are a hell of a lot more responsive and, unlike e-ink, are the type of device Android is actually designed to work with.
One potential solution would be in re-architecting Android to largely deal with e-ink’s limitations – ie on-screen refreshes – but there is still the colour problem.
I’ve been so far frustrated in my attempts to find out exactly what kind of developer magic this would entail – and if it’s even feasible at all – but will update if I hear back.
My hunch is that it’s still at a very nascent stage development-wise and there’s only a limited amount of people working on it. For now at least, the best chance for e-ink to get onto a smartphone is for secondary displays on the rear of devices.
The Communist Party’s everywhere in China, even in foreign multinationals
Posted: October 12, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: china, communist party, Congress, house of representatives, huawe, ibm, intelligence committee, nokia siemens networks, standard chartered, zte 2 Comments
Today an interesting tale of ideology, back door deal making and hypocrisy as the worlds of government and hi-technology collide.
You’ve presumably all been made aware by now of the US lawmakers’ report into Huawei and ZTE which basically warns off all American firms and government bodies from purchasing their telecoms kit because of the national security risk they pose.
The key point is that the Chinese tech giants were unable to allay investigators’ concerns about the role of Communist Party committees within their firms.
The report has the following:
In essence, these Committees provide a shadow source of power and influence directing, even in subtle ways, the direction and movement of economic resources in China.
It is therefore suspicious that Huawei refuses to discuss or describe that Party Committee’s membership. Huawei similarly refuses to explain what decisions of the company are reviewed by the Party Committee, and how individuals are chosen to serve on the Party Committee.
All of which is fair enough, although virtually all Chinese companies are required to have a Communist Party committee on board, as Huawei argued to the lawmakers.
However, it has been mentioned since then that may foreign companies, including US ones, with outposts in China also have these committees. If true, it would seem to add weight to Huawei’s argument that the report reached a “pre-determined outcome”, and that its authors were unfairly harsh on the Chinese duo, even hypocritical given Party involvement in US firms in China.
Tea Leaf Nation, for example, pointed to articles claiming IBM, Nokia Siemens Networks, Standard Chartered and others all had communist bodies within them.
Now, I’ve heard back from NSN and IBM who both claimed their Chinese businesses don’t have Communist Party committees but that individual members of staff are free to join the Party if they wish.
However, I’ve yet to hear back from IBM on what this picture and article refers to, as it seems to indicate a party branch of IBM China members.
Most likely at play here is semantics. These firms are denying having an organised party committee within their organisation, but it seems (at least in IBM’s case) they do have self-organised groups of Party members therein.
Whether this amounts to the same thing is difficult to tell, because if it’s one thing the Party is pretty good at it’s secrecy.
It has become adept over the past several decades at hiding the orchestrating role it plays at all levels of Chinese society – a role so key that it is pretty obvious if a large MNC wants doors to open for it then it needs to acknowledge and engage with the Party.
phil muncaster 