Our mobile phone and tablet teams are blogging daily from the show floor at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain, between Sunday 24th to Thursday 28th February, 2013.

The Day 1 (Sunday) and Day 2 (Monday) blogs, from our Wireless Device Strategies (WDS) service, can be read here.

Three announcements stood out from Day 3 (Tuesday):

1. LG Buys webOS: LG purchased most of the webOS assets from HP this week. LG indicates the OS and UI knowhow will be implemented in smart TVs in 2014. Some mobile geeks hope the webOS platform will eventually make a full comeback in smartphones or tablets. This is unlikely, as webOS is a tarnished sub-brand. Instead, we think elements of the UI, such as card-stacking, could well find their way into LG's future software roadmaps.

2. Samsung & Visa: Following on from our recent analysis that NFC is everywhere at MWC this year, Samsung and Visa announced they will deepen their NFC-payment partnership. Visa's payWave wallet will soon be preloaded on most Samsung NFC smartphones. This is a good win for both firms. However, whether influential US mega-carriers, like Verizon Wireless and ISIS, will be willing to adopt the "SamVisa" solution remains to be seen.

3. Fujitsu Stylistic S01: Fujitsu is re-expanding into Western Europe this year. Its first new product will be a niche seniors phone -- the Stylistic -- at Orange France from Q2 2013. We trialed the Android device today and found it to be user-friendly, with a crisp, proprietary UI supported partly by targeted healthcare services. The S01 should resonate relatively well with mature consumers in the 40 to 75 age bracket. To my mind, the Stylistic may well be the best seniors phone on the European market today. Doro, Emporia and others will be looking anxiously over their shoulders.

See you tomorrow (Wednesday) for Day 4.

Our mobile phone and tablet teams are blogging daily from the show floor at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain, between Sunday 24th to Thursday 28th February, 2013.

The Day 1 (Sunday) blog can be read here.

This is the Day 2 blog (Monday), from our Wireless Device Strategies (WDS) service.

Three announcements stood out from Day 2:

1. Nokia 105 / 301: Nokia is the king of feature phones. It is the clear number one player worldwide. The launch of the new 105 and 301 feature phones will help to strengthen its leadership. The Nokia 105 will be priced at an estimated US$15 wholesale -- that is impressive. It will be available in ChIndia and elsewhere from Q1 2013. The 105 will ship tens of millions of units globally this year. Arguably, one slight negative for Nokia is that profits at such a low price-point are likely to be modest.

2. NFC Everywhere: Most smartphones from Nokia, Sony and other big brands are now launching with NFC technology. Companies like G&D, Visa and MasterCard are clearly interested in this trend. However, one major player is absent from this trend -- Apple. We await their next move in this space with the new iPads and iPhones later this year...

3. Sony Xperia Z Tablet: This is one of the world's slimmest tablets, measuring 7mm thin. It has a 10-inch screen and employs Android OS. It is waterproof, so the tablet can be used by adults or children in the kitchen, garage, bathroom or living room. It will be available in Europe from Q2 2013. Retail pricing will be set at iPad-like levels, which may cap volumes. Sony has so far struggled to gain traction in the tablet market, but the Xperia Z Tablet is a desirable product that will give Apple and Samsung pause for thought this year. The XZT wins my informal "Device of the Day" award.

See you tomorrow (Tuesday) for Day 3.

PS. The rumored Samsung Galaxy S4 launch-date has been set for New York, US, on March 14th, 2013. Can the S4 recapture the title of "world's best-selling smartphone", recently taken by Apple's popular iPhone 5? We shall see. Pricing, screen size and supporting LTE features / services will be among key factors to monitor.

Our mobile phone and tablet teams will be blogging daily from the show floor at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain, between Sunday 24th to Thursday 28th February, 2013.

This is the Day 1 blog (Sunday) from our Wireless Device Strategies (WDS) service.

We arrived at Barcelona airport on Sunday morning. The weather is sunny but chilly. An overcoat is needed. The checkin process to obtain our MWC badges at midday was efficient and painless.

Several presentations and meetings took place on Sunday afternoon. Three announcements stood out from Day 1:

1. Firefox OS & Firefox Marketplace: There are 18 operators, 4 device makers and 1 chipset vendor onboard worldwide. This is a good start for phase 1 of the launch. Huawei, LG, Qualcomm, TCL-Alcatel and ZTE are the five main hardware partners. Mozilla is gunning hard to attack the entry-level Android smartphone market with its low-cost HTML5 framework. However, Firefox will need to gain more support from giants Samsung or Nokia if it wants to really make a mega impact.

2. Huawei Ascend P2: This new flagship LTE model is being hyped as, perhaps, the world's fastest smartphone. The P2 was launched alongside a fresh "Make It Possible" promotional campaign. Huawei, the world's 3rd largest smartphone vendor, is clearly aiming to deliver higher-end products with more-emotional marketing campaigns at competitive price-points. However, its predecessor, the Ascend P1, was not a global hit last year, so Huawei still has some work to do in its attempt to become a credible premium player.

3. HP Slate 7: This is HP's first Android tablet. It is for consumer users. It will retail for around US$170 in the US from Q2 2013. It has a 7-inch screen and uses Android Jelly Bean. However, HP has so far failed to gain traction in the tablet market, and this low-cost-but-ho-hum offering is unlikely to change that trend in the near-term.

See you tomorrow (Monday) for Day 2.

Nokia, Sony Mobile and ZTE will be among the big press conferences to watch.

Strategy Analytics forecasts worldwide HTML5 phone sales will surge from 336 million units in 2011 to 1 billion units in 2013. HTML5 has quickly become a hyper-growth technology that will help smartphones, feature phones, tablets, notebooks, desktop PCs, televisions and vehicles to converge through cloud services.

We forecast worldwide HTML5 phone sales to hit 1 billion units per year in 2013. Growth for HTML5 phones is being driven by robust demand from multiple hardware vendors and software developers in North America, Europe and Asia who want to develop rich media services across multiple platforms, including companies like Adobe, Apple, Google and Microsoft. We define an HTML5 phone as a mobile handset with partial or full support for HTML5 technology in the browser, such as the Apple iPhone 4S.

We believe HTML5 will help smartphones, feature phones, tablets, notebooks, desktop PCs, televisions and vehicles to converge in the future. HTML5 will be a pivotal technology in the growth of a multi-screen, 4G LTE cloud that is emerging for mobile operators, device makers, car manufacturers, component vendors and Web app developers. With its potential to transcend some of the barriers faced by native apps, such as cross-platform usability, HTML5 is a market that no mobile stakeholder can afford to ignore.

However, despite surging growth of HTML5 phone sales, we caution that HTML5 is still a relatively immature technology. HTML5 currently has limited APIs and feature-sets to include compared with native apps on platforms such as Android or Apple iOS. It will require several years of further development and standards-setting before HTML5 can fully mature to reach its potential as a unified, multi-platform content-enabler.

The full report, Global HTML5 Handset Sales Forecast, is published by our Wireless Device Strategies (WDS) service, details of which can be found at this link: http://www.strategyanalytics.com/default.aspx?mod=reportabstractviewer&a0=6901.

In a recent report from our Wireless Device Strategies (WDS) service, we published that superphones will be the world's fastest growing sub-category of wireless handsets this year. Global superphone sales will grow 200 percent in 2011, driven by popular models such as the Samsung Galaxy S2 and HTC Sensation, increasing fifteen times faster than the overall handset market's growth rate of 13 percent.

Superphones are a relatively new sub-category of wireless handsets that first appeared on the global market in 2009, initially leveraging the now-obsolete Microsoft Windows Mobile platform. Superphones today integrate high-level operating systems like Google Android and Microsoft Windows Phone with supersized displays of at least 4 inches and superfast processors of at least 1GHz.

Superphones are driving super growth in the handset market. Consumers and operators like the richer experience of larger screens and faster processing speeds that can be delivered by superphones, for applications like Web browsing, gaming, and watching HD video. Samsung is currently the world's leading superphone vendor due to the success of its Android-powered Galaxy S2 model, and Samsung has been aggressively leveraging this leadership to attack rivals with much weaker superphone portfolios such as Nokia, Blackberry and even Apple.

Alex Spektor
Wireless Device Strategies

• T-Mobile launched the first Android phone in the world in late 2008.
• It took approximately one year for Verizon Wireless and Sprint to bring to market their own models, in time for the 2009 holiday season.
• AT&T began selling its first Android handset quite recently: in March 2010.

• Catering to consumer tastes. Despite what Apple might tell you, not everyone wants an iPhone. Consumers looking for alternative features, such as a bigger screen, memory expansion, a more customizable UI, HDMI, etc., can find them among Android handsets.
• Lower subsidy levels. Now that AT&T has lowered its monthly data plan rates, there is less revenue to offset the subsidy burden. Paying $200-$300 subsidy for an Android handset seems more attractive than Apple’s $400+ subsidy.
• End of iPhone exclusivity? The Internet is always abuzz with rumors, and AT&T shifting its focus to other platforms is yet another sign that a Verizon Wireless iPhone is potentially in the works. The carrier may be strengthening its portfolio to offset potential losses once the exclusivity ends.

The inevitable movement to tiered pricing which started with Verizon Wireless acknowledging its plans to do so for LTE and has been accelerated with the much anticipated data plan announcement by AT&T this week.  So, what next?

• Will we see significant priced based competition for mobile data among the top US operators?
• Will we see significant movement in share of adds for AT&T as iPhone wannabees are tempted by a plan of only $15?
• What impact will lower data plans for smartphones have on AT&T’s Quick Messaging Devices and Verizon Wireless equivalent?
• How long before we see family data plans and shared usage across multiple devices?

The move by AT&T is a smart play to extend the smartphone momentum as the low hanging fruit of Apple aficionados, multimedia techies and style seekers willing to pay top dollar has been significantly penetrated.

There is no doubt that the iPhone remains the coolest device on the marketplace and the end to end user experience remains easily the best in class. So, reducing the TCO to attract the next 20% of customers to a paid data plans while educating customers about data usage levels and managing the traffic risk is very smart business in my opinion.

The lower price points will help AT&T maintain its current leading share of smartphone users and may be attractive to casual social networkers

• Although the 50 photos allowance is not exactly generous! For casual messenger, and social network status checking and moderate email the new DataPlus plan is quite attractive overall and will likely attract a portion of customers who would otherwise opt for a Quick Messaging Device from AT&T or a competitive offering from Verizon Wireless.

I do expect to see some modest price competition among the big operators

• with T-Mobile most likely to drive prices lower given their need for scale and to protect their predominantly youth centric customer base. but also expect an increasingly strong Verizon Wireless handset line up to compete strongly.

The impact on Quick Messaging Devices is in my opinion likely to be modest

• as a traditional qwerty remains overwhelmingly the input of choice for heavy messengers in the US although there is definitely room for lowering the $10 mandatory data plan on featurephones

Family data plans and data plans which allow access across multiple devices are in the pipeline

• but will probably not make an appearance until 2012+ as part of LTE offerings.

From a device vendor perspective, the move to lower priced iPhone plans is likely to put further pressure on vendors like LG who have yet to make a credible offer in this space as well as RIM who will find more competition in the consumer space.

The lower pricing on data plans will be music to the ears of ambitious new entrants like Huawei, ZTE who plan to bring mass market priced devices to the US & Europe. The lower TCO of smartphones as a result of downward pressure on service prices boost their addressable market.

After months of industry-wide speculation about Microsoft’s “Project Pink,” the software giant recently unveiled two phones: Kin One and Kin Two. Manufactured by Sharp (the maker of most T-Mobile Sidekick phones, in partnership with Danger, whom Microsoft purchased in late 2008), the phones will ship with specs found on many of today’s smartphones: capacitive touchscreens, QWERTY, high-megapixel cameras, gigabytes of flash memory, Bluetooth, GPS, accelerometers – the list goes on. Yet, the Kins are not true smartphones, as there is no application support. Rather, the Kin family of products consists of cleverly targeted feature phones.

While the smartphone segment is growing steadily, the wireless industry is certainly not done with feature phones, which we expect to account for approximately two-thirds of handsets sold in North America this year. Earlier this year, AT&T announced intentions to give significant attention to the mid-range, messaging-centric feature phone category, which the operator calls Quick Messaging Devices (QMD).

At Verizon Wireless (who, along with Vodafone in Europe, will soon carry the Microsoft phones), the Kin will make an interesting replacement to aging handsets like LG’s enV series. In a way, the Kin family is part of VZW’s answer to AT&T’s QMD category. Expect VZW and Microsoft to back a heavy advertising campaign when the phones come out, promoting the novel user experience and social networking functions. With a low retail price and some innovation on data plan pricing (see the Nokia Nuron smartphone, which requires just US$10/month for unlimited data at T-Mobile USA), the two Kin models could drive strong volumes for the carrier.

For Microsoft, who recently painted themselves into a high-end corner with hefty hardware requirements on Windows Phone 7, the Kin family represents an interesting platform framework to get closer to the youth segment.

The high-tier Windows Phone 7 will be a natural handset upgrade path for today’s Kin user, as both platforms are forming common elements. While the short-term goal with the Kin family is to expand the addressable market by bringing messaging/social networking services through a robust framework, the long term goal is to own the consumer by highlighting the Microsoft value proposition to him/her early on.

Either way, Kin provides an interesting glimpse into Microsoft’s understanding of the future handset market, where feature phones will rely heavily on the cloud. (Like its Sidekick predecessors, the Kins store user data and content on company servers.) Add to that Windows Live service and Zune content integration, and Microsoft can be seen as gradually ramping up its strength on the multi-screen index.

-Alex Spektor

Returning from CTIA in Las Vegas last week and with only 2 days before going off on vacation to Florida, I found myself reflecting that two of the most interesting meetings I had at the show were with mobile operators.

During CTIA I spent some time with AT&T emerging devices and T-Mobile M2M teams and was impressed with how both these units had managed to cut (or at least untie) the cord to the mother ship and avoid having innovation stifled by the Borg up at Corporate.

• AT&T’s efforts to encourage a broad range of new applications and devices has definitely paid dividends with Mr. Lurie and his team adding an impressive 1M users in Q409 as a result of new device categories (mostly PND and EBR).
• T-Mobile revealed a somewhat unheralded pedigree in M2M.

Partnership is the order of the day.

AT&T highlighted partner applications ranging from location enabled pet collars (Apisphere) to glow cap bottles to aid compliance with medication schedules (Vitality) to a very cool new tablet from Openpeak which is very different to the announced but apparently supply side challenged iPad.  Verizon Wireless and Sprint are of course also praying at the alter of open development but perhaps with less public presence.

When I think of enterprise mobility, AT&T and Verizon Wireless are top of mind but T-Mobile has in fact quietly been developing strong competency in the M2M space over the last 7-8 years.

T-Mobile offers four different SIM form factors to suit specific applications and have enjoyed triple digit growth for the last four years. T-Mobile US has quietly activated “hundreds” of different device types on its network with only a handful of devices being rejected or pulled due to network unfriendly characteristics. These devices span Telematics, Connected Energy, Telemedicine and several other applications.

So what is the common DNA of two very different operators that has allowed them to innovate and focus on new opportunities? Separation and operational autonomy to facilitate and open funnel approach to partners and speed of execution not normally associated with US carriers.

In the case of AT&T, the Emerging Devices group was chartered with developing a new space and freed from the legacy of voice & data consumer tariffs and prepaid/postpaid categories which just don’t cut it in the new connected reality where users will have multiple devices connected but used in very different ways. Mr. Lurie and his team have been able to streamline device certification and experiment across the spectrum of business models for new connected applications.

For T-Mobile, speed of certification (days not months) and the independence of being a self-contained unit (own engineers, own sales although linked to broader enterprise group) reporting to Finance & Strategy have allowed them to pursue their “easiest to do business with” approach to the M2M markets.

So, the takeaway? Innovation is alive and well at US operators but separation from the collective corporate mind is essential.

David Kerr