March 2015

The turnaround is ahead of schedule, says BlackBerry CEO John Chen

“We are a little ahead of our two-year turnaround and strategy,” said BlackBerry CEO John Chen at a briefing outside Mobile World Congress. “The company financially is stabilizing. We made a little bit of money last quarter. We’re going to be making more money. We’re going to be generating more cash.” AT&T and Verizon are carrying BlackBerry devices again, and Chen says that the positive results from the previous quarter is a sign of things to come.

One of the ways in which they plan to generate more cash is to sell more devices, of which they’re planning to release 4 this year. The one they showed off yesterday was the BlackBerry Leap, which is expected to be released this spring and sell for $275 unlocked. Aimed at the “young career builder”, this BlackBerry is an all-touch device, runs apps from BlackBerry World and Android apps from the Amazon Appstore, and boasts a battery life of 25 hours (“based on a heavy usage scenario on a power user profile”). It’s the phone aimed at getting ambitious twentysomethings back into the BlackBerry fold.

BlackBerry plan to introduce three other devices, all of which feature the physical keyboards that are their mark in trade. One of these is a curved-screen device with a slide-out physical keyboard, and will be released “as soon as it’s done,” in Chen’s own words.

There are other ways in which BlackBerry is working on making more money:

• For starters, there’s a focus on software, most notably the “BlackBerry Experience”, a set of packages to improve security and communications for government and business customers, and “Work Life” which makes it possible to separate billing and communications on employee-liable devices into “work” and “personal” categories.
• Patent licensing is another avenue for money-making. BlackBerry has 45,000 patents, and Chen isn’t afraid to share for a price. “I’m not a believer in holding on to your secret sauces,” he said.
•  Chen also remarked that he’d be open to releasing another tablet, saying “It’s not in the works, but on my mind.”

Goodies from SanDisk

SanDisk have introduced a number of goodies, the most notable of which is a 200GB microSD card that boasts a 90MBs data-transfer speed. Simply put, it’s holds a lot of data, and can move it about quickly. It doesn’t come cheap, though: it’s priced at US$400 and becomes available in the second quarter.

Their new 64GB card doesn’t have as impressive an amount of storage, but it makes up for it in durability. Most flash cards are made for intermittent use, and not meant to be accessed continuously, which means that often-used video cameras such as those for car dashboards and security systems can overtax them. SanDisk’s new high-endurance cards can take this sort of use. The 64GB version will sell for $150, and a 32GB version will sell for $85.

And finally, there are the new Dual Drive and iXpand flash drives for boosting your mobile devices’ storage capabilities. The Dual Drive features 2 USB 3.0 connectors and provides 32GB of pluggable storage for your Android phone or tablet. The iXpand drive has Lightning and USB connectors for bringing an addition 128GB to your iOS device.

See us at MWC!

We’re in Barcelona to see what’s new at MWC, and to talk to people! In attendance are:

• Dan Goorno, our Vice President, Strategic Alliances,
• Bob Herzich, our Director of Business Development, and
• Bob Goulet, our Director of Channel Sales.

Want to meet up with us while we’re there? Drop us a line at info@gsgtelco.com.

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Zuckerberg’s MWC keynote: friendly overtures for the carriers, boredom for the audience

In his keynote panel at Mobile World Congress, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg changed his approach and made friendly overtures to carriers. Their relationship with his company has been a strained one, thanks to free messaging services, WhatsApp and Messenger, which are displacing SMS, and their Internet.org project, which aims to provide free wireless internet to people who would otherwise not have it. It seems that one of the points that Zuckerberg wanted to convey in this appearance was that Facebook was a boon to them, not a threat.

Referring to Android head Sundar Pinchai’s earlier keynote presentation, in which he talked about Google’s Loon and Titan projects, whose goals are to create balloon- and drone-based cellular networks to bring the internet to underserved people, Zuckerberg reassured carriers by saying that they, and not these projects, will actually do the job. “People like talking about that stuff because it’s sexy,” he said, “That’s at the fringe of the real work that’s going on. Ninety percent of the people in the world already live within range of the network. “Going forward the face of Internet.org needs to be the companies doing the work, laying the fiber in the ground, building the infrastructure that’s actually connecting people in the world.”

While Facebook’s free messaging apps are said to eat intro carrier revenue and be detrimental to customer-carrier relationships, Zuckerberg argues that Facebook’s continued growth and Internet.org will be good news for carriers: “The feedback from partners is not only do more people start adopting data, but people use more voice and SMS and pay for that even more. We’ve seen a lot of cases where ARPU [average revenue per user] goes up.”

More reading:

• CNet — Zuckerberg: Carriers will connect the world, not sci-fi
• Re/code — Mark Zuckerberg to Mobile Carriers: Facebook Is Good for Your Business
• Gigaom — Zuckerberg’s Internet.org feels the love (and fear) from carriers
• New York Times — Mark Zuckerberg Goes on Charm Offensive for Internet.org

Some observers noted on Twitter that the exchanges between Zuckerberg and carrier representatives looked like a love-in…

Now the operators are on stage with Zuckerberg and are being all lovey-dovey #yawn pic.twitter.com/HCUL4KSoMD

— Rory Cellan-Jones (@ruskin147) March 2, 2015

…while others thought it was a snoozefest: 

Here is another pic of people sleeping and empty seats at this Zuckerberg “keynote” #MWC15 http://t.co/y1YQipJlaE pic.twitter.com/1FLuO6XTlH — Lisa Fleisher (@lisafleisher) March 2, 2015

Huawei’s watch

There’s a lot of buzz about wearables at MWC, and especially about Huawei’s watch. Described by The Verge as “the most watch-like Android smartwatch yet”, it’s been getting a lot of praise from many quarters. Here’s The Verge’s hands-on with the watch:

See us at MWC!

We’re in Barcelona to see what’s new at MWC, and to talk to people! In attendance are:

• Dan Goorno, our Vice President, Strategic Alliances,
• Bob Herzich, our Director of Business Development, and
• Bob Goulet, our Director of Channel Sales.

Want to meet up with us while we’re there? Drop us a line at info@gsgtelco.com.

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The mobile world’s attention is turning to Barcelona this week, as it’s time once again for the annual Mobile World Congress, where the world’s mobile device and wireless service vendors parade their latest wares to nearly 80,000 attendees who come from all over the world. This week, we’ll keep you up to date on the developments at MWC, so be sure to check this blog daily!

Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge unveiled at MWC

As expected, Samsung unveiled their newest flagship phones at MWC, the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge, which show the mobile giant switching to an all metal-and-glass body. The Edge is notable for a curved screen that wraps around the phone’s left and right edges, which allows for some interesting user interface ideas, including a mode that lets you read it from the side (very useful, if like me, you use your phone as your bedside alarm clock):

A number of early reviews have already been posted at Ars Technica, BGR, CNet, Forbes, TechRadar, and The Verge. For those of you wondering whether to get the S6 or S6 Edge, Gotta Be Mobile has put together a list of the six key differences between the two models.

Ars Technica notes that some of the more technical users aren’t all that pleased with two things that Samsung took out of their latest flagships: the removable battery and the MicroSD slot.

Android head Sundar Pinchai’s keynote at MWC

The Verge liveblogged the keynote of Sundar Pinchai, Google’s head of Android, Chrome, and Google Apps, and whom Brad Stone of Bloomberg Businessweek called “the most powerful man in mobile”. He talked about:

• Google’s take on mobile: “We don’t just see phones, we see powerful computing devices. They are devices that connect to the cloud, which is where Google comes in.”
• Google Translate on mobile. “We serve over one billion translations a day.”
• Mobile, in general: “People spend more than 10 million hours on their phones a month. On Black Friday, 40% of transactions were done on mobile.”
• Android, of course. 8 out of 10 phones shipped run Android, which he owes to its serving “an entire spectrum, all the way from entry level to high end.”
• More than just phones: “We’re working on Android beyond phones and tablets, watches, televisions, cars. VR is going to be a hugely important area that’s using Android as its foundation.”
• Extending the cloud: “There are 4 billion people in the world that don’t have access to connectivity. We want to do better with this.” He talked about three Google projects that aim to solve the connectivity problem:
  • Fiber: Municipal broadband internet and TV
  • Loon: A balloon-based network to create a mesh of flying cellular towers
  • Titan: A network of solar-powered drone aircraft to create an even more ambitious mesh of flying cellular towers

For more, see The Verge’s liveblog.

Lenovo showcases new tablets

Lenovo used their time at MWC to showcase their upcoming Ideated Miix 300, an 8-inch Windows tablet with slightly better screen resolution than an iPad Mini that’s expected to retail for about US$150. It currently runs Windows 8, has 2GB of RAM, 64GB of storage that can be extended with a MicroSD card, and is said to have 7 hours of battery life.

See us at MWC!

We’re in Barcelona to see what’s new at MWC, and to talk to people! In attendance are:

• Dan Goorno, our Vice President, Strategic Alliances,
• Bob Herzich, our Director of Business Development, and
• Bob Goulet, our Director of Channel Sales.

Want to meet up with us while we’re there? Drop us a line at info@gsgtelco.com.

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