Dell, Apple look to compete in Chinese smartphone market

[AppleInsider]

Dell unveiled Monday a prototype of its upcoming cell phone in China, as both it and Apple hope to launch competing smartphones in the nation very soon.

The Dell Mini 3i is a capacitive touchscreen device with a 3.5-inch screen. It has a 360x640 pixel display and runs a version of Android known as the Open Mobile System. While the GSM device lacks Wi-Fi, has no physical keyboard, and has only 2G data speeds, it also sports a 3-megapixel camera, Bluetooth, and an expandable microSD slot. The first images of Dell's new hardware were captured by the Chinese Web site mobile.163.com. While the new device shown is only a prototype, Dell has confirmed that it is developing mobile devices for China Mobile, the largest wireless carrier in the country.

When the device is launched, it is expected to include downloadable content, including music and games. The Dell Mini 3i was shown as part of a new applications store for China Mobile.

The news comes as Apple has been pushing hard to begin selling the iPhone in the country of over one billion. Though it has been falsely reported numerous times that a deal has been reached, Apple and China Unicom, the second-largest carrier, are currently in negotiations to bring the handset into the country. A WCDMA model of the iPhone, without Wi-Fi, has already been granted regulatory approval by the Chinese Government. The new hardware reportedly opertes on the 900MHz, 1700MHz and 1900MHz bands, includes Bluetooth, and has been certified for use in China for the next five years.

Early this year, Dell was strongly rumored to be entering the cell phone market in the near future. Then, in March, U.S. carriers reportedly saw a prototype of the device, only to reject it.



While Dell is the world's second-largest PC maker, it is interested in entering the smartphone market, which carries much higher margins than computers. Dell previously sold PDAs under the Axim brand, but this would be the hardware-maker's first foray into the cell phone world.

[ View this article at AppleInsider.com ]

[freeny]

"U.S. carriers reportedly saw a prototype of the device, only to reject it."

reason?...

[15inchbrich]

Originally Posted by freeny

"U.S. carriers reportedly saw a prototype of the device, only to reject it."

reason?...

There was a link: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles..._too_dull.html

[al_bundy]

can Dell really make a device as good as the iphone at a cheaper price?

and one reason why i like the iphone is it's easy to find apps for it. with winmo and other phones you first have to figure out your model and then see what games run on it. sucks if you buy the wrong model since no one thinks about that when they first buy it

[Maestro64]

Anyone taking bets on this being successful....

[Maestro64]

Originally Posted by al_bundy

can Dell really make a device as good as the iphone at a cheaper price?

and one reason why i like the iphone is it's easy to find apps for it. with winmo and other phones you first have to figure out your model and then see what games run on it. sucks if you buy the wrong model since no one thinks about that when they first buy it

Of course they can make it cheaper since apple does not worry about every penny in their products since they know how to create value and people are willing to pay that value. As we know Apple is not interesting in getting 100% of any markets at any cost.

People will buy, just like people buy other products which are not the best or has real value to them. Dell sold some Jukeboxes, but it did not return enough to keep the people employed who supported the product.

[Quadra 610]

Originally Posted by al_bundy

can Dell really make a device as good as the iphone at a cheaper price?

LOL, no.

Palm couldn't do it, using Apple talent.

[al_bundy]

webOS needs some work, but the CPU and graphics in the Pre are the same as the iphone. The Pre is like the original iPhone, but people were expecting something to compete with the 3G S

the Pre owners are checking the app list everyday hoping a new one comes out

[OC4Theo]

Because it is a piece of junk.... Sell first to the crowd who cannot complain too much first. It is like testing your product before it is ready for the prime market. What a sorry state of marketing!

[Mike Eggleston]

Did anyone notice how close their icons were to the same style and shape of the iPhone's icons?? Can this get to be any more of a blatant rip-off... Or should Dell just call it a dPhone for the final insult??

[vachi]

the pic shows some app selection window, and the icons seem very like the apple icons
and above that it seems like sms or some notifications, nevertheless why are the icons like apple's poor texans could not come up with a different size?

[Logisticaldron]

Originally Posted by al_bundy

webOS needs some work, but the CPU and graphics in the Pre are the same as the iphone. The Pre is like the original iPhone, but people were expecting something to compete with the 3G S

the Pre owners are checking the app list everyday hoping a new one comes out

There is talk that the Pre’s CPU has been clocked down to save on power, that the iPhone’s GPU may actually be slightly better, not worse, than the Pre’s, and that the Flash in the iPhone is faster which accounts for why the iPhone still bests it on many tests. I don’t think any of those have proven or disproven at this point.

WebOS does do some things really well. I hope Apple adopts the WebOS and Android for notifications. The iPhone is just too limited, especially now that I have several apps using the PNS.


PS: if the link is up to date, there are 55 apps for the Pre, and they look really bad.

http://palm.preapplications.net/

[Logisticaldron]

Originally Posted by Mike Eggleston

Did anyone notice how close their icons were to the same style and shape of the iPhone's icons?? Can this get to be any more of a blatant rip-off... Or should Dell just call it a dPhone for the final insult??

Originally Posted by vachi

the pic shows some app selection window, and the icons seem very like the apple icons
and above that it seems like sms or some notifications, nevertheless why are the icons like apple's poor texans could not come up with a different size?

Ripping off some things is actually good for Apple’s business because most people are not tech savvy and many will see the same look of the home screen as meaning they are the same thing, but if they have used the iPhone and then will quickly find out that fast hardware and nice initial UI does not make for a fast experience, nice transitions or a nice interface once you get past the initial screen. Dell can copy some icons easily but recreating OS X will not happen.

PS: Any word on what web browser they will be using in the device? WebKit, Fennec (Firefox Mobile), Opera?

[Morky]

Originally Posted by Logisticaldron

PS: Any word on what web browser they will be using in the device? WebKit, Fennec (Firefox Mobile), Opera?

My bet is on Lynx.

Screenshot: http://images.apple.com/downloads/ma...0309123248.jpg

[Robin Huber]

No smartphone looked like an iPhone until there was an iPhone. Now they all do. Looks like Dell took an iPhone to a belt sander and further ground off the corners, gave it a tacky pink metalic shell, and cloned iPhone OS the desktop icons. Apple's competitors have no shame. They seem to be wanting to communicate: "See, it's just like an iPhone, but it's cheap."

[Logisticaldron]

Originally Posted by Robin Huber

No smartphone looked like an iPhone until there was an iPhone. Now they all do. Looks like Dell took an iPhone to a belt sander and further ground off the corners, gave it a tacky pink metalic shell, and cloned iPhone OS the desktop icons. Apple's competitors have no shame.

That isn’t completely accurate. The LG Prada was announced before the original iPhone and it had a similar physical design and similar UI elements. The icons sized for fingers were bound to come as touchscreens became more common. That is not to say that others haven’t taken many cues from the iPhone, but the foundation of many of these similar traits do seem to me to be natural.

[Robin Huber]

Originally Posted by Logisticaldron

That isn’t completely accurate. The LG Prada was announced before the original iPhone and it had a similar physical design and similar UI elements. The icons sized for fingers were bound to come as touchscreens became more common. That is not to say that others haven’t taken many cues from the iPhone, but the foundation of many of these similar traits do seem to me to be natural.

Fair enough. But how much before the iPhone was it announced, and how much in advance did it ship? I would not expect that Apple reverse engineered it from LG. I presume the Apple design was already set before they got a look at the Prada. As for form following function on touchscreen icons I don't buy that entirely. Apple's rounded squares are no more finger-centric than an oval or a circle, or even a freeform image of finger tip size. That looks like a rip off to me.

[al_bundy]

Originally Posted by Logisticaldron

There is talk that the Pre’s CPU has been clocked down to save on power, that the iPhone’s GPU may actually be slightly better, not worse, than the Pre’s, and that the Flash in the iPhone is faster which accounts for why the iPhone still bests it on many tests. I don’t think any of those have proven or disproven at this point.

WebOS does do some things really well. I hope Apple adopts the WebOS and Android for notifications. The iPhone is just too limited, especially now that I have several apps using the PNS.


PS: if the link is up to date, there are 55 apps for the Pre, and they look really bad.



http://palm.preapplications.net/

I hear the nice thing about the pre is that you can do things like listen to pandora and surf the web or check email at the same time.

They both use the same arm CPI core but from different manufacturers

[Logisticaldron]

Originally Posted by Robin Huber

Fair enough. But how much before the iPhone was it announced, and how much in advance did it ship? I would not expect that Apple reverse engineered it from LG. I presume the Apple design was already set before they got a look at the Prada. As for form following function on touchscreen icons I don't buy that entirely. Apple's rounded squares are no more finger-centric than an oval or a circle, or even a freeform image of finger tip size. That looks like a rip off to me.

The LG Prada was announced very close to the iPhone’s announcement. The iPhone was annoucned on January 9th, 2007, whilst the LG Prada wasunoffically announced (I think) on December 15th, 2006. I think the official announcement came a week or two after the iPhone was announced. I don’t know if there were any screenshots of the Prada’s homescreen’s back in December. Unless one company has spies in the other’s camp there is no way that either copied the HW or UI of the other.

Form following function is only one aspect. There is also certain aesthetics that tend to evolve in a natural way. Rounding corners is not uncommon with finished products of all types. If we have the exact same size icon and the same arching for the corners one could form a argument saying that they did steal it as it would be improbable that Dell just happened to make an identical icon on their own. Again, that is not to say that Dell didn’t take Apple’s actual icon design as a template, but to say that the icon has beveled edges and is square is proof that they did steal it is a fallacy.

[JeffDM]

Originally Posted by Logisticaldron

The LG Prada was announced very close to the iPhone’s announcement. The iPhone was annoucned on January 9th, 2007, whilst the LG Prada wasunoffically announced (I think) on December 15th, 2006. I think the official announcement came a week or two after the iPhone was announced. I don’t know if there were any screenshots of the Prada’s homescreen’s back in December. Unless one company has spies in the other’s camp there is no way that either copied the HW or UI of the other.

I agree. What I recall is that I wasn't able to find found any pictures that were released more than a couple days before the iPhone. One thing I just found that I didn't realize then was that it's a side slider with a physical landscape keyboard. There are a lot of details that simply aren't similar at all, the people that claim copying there weren't paying attention to the time line and aren't paying attention to the numerous physical design differences. It looks like it was never made available in the Western Hemisphere either.

[hill60]

At least that site does something unlike the China Mobile version of the App store.

http://www.mmarket.com/

Originally Posted by Logisticaldron

PS: if the link is up to date, there are 55 apps for the Pre, and they look really bad.

http://palm.preapplications.net/

[Logisticaldron]

Originally Posted by al_bundy

I hear the nice thing about the pre is that you can do things like listen to pandora and surf the web or check email at the same time.

I use my iPod while surfing the web and reading mail, all at the same time. The iPod works in the background while my mail gets pushed to me in the background and webpages load in the background if I leave Safari. And of course my SMS and phone is still working in the background, too.

I don’t use Pandora, but I know people that do. For all the screaming for background apps on the iPhone, music streaming is the only one I hear mentioned. Too bad Apple doesn’t allow the iTunes music streaming to work from the iPod app. That would seem to alleviate the biggest gripe for not having 3rd-party apps run in the background.

I’ve also see the Palm Pre and G1 slow down considerably with background apps running. I think that —not the battery— is the primary reason Apple doesn’t allow 3rd-party apps to run wild. The 3GS now has plenty of spare memory and the processing power seems more than sufficient for them to allow a select number of background apps, but this is a tricky, logistical issue, as well as a coding issue. They can’t just make all apps you access start running in the background. My 3GS loads all my normal apps faster than when i had 5 apps running on a Pre.

This is a lot like copy/paste on the iPhone. This takes time and coding to make this work right. People seem to want it so every app opens up and stays open and then have Windows-like Task Manager to kill them. The Pre is set up to have the apps easily closed when you are in them, but the iPhone uses the Home Button while “smartly”choosing which apps need to maintain processes and which don’t. They’d need to devise a way that you turn select apps on to run in the background. Perhaps from a Preferences list like you choose which apps will run Push Notifications. Would this require an approval process and changes in the SDK for developers to optimize for this feature so that resources are minimized somewhat while running in the background? Would there have to limits set to number of apps running in the background or how much RAM they can use so that your foreground app is not negatively affected?

The guy that wrote Box Office blogged about coding his app for Android is more difficult because of the background app. if your app is in the foreground and there is a background app stealing your resources you need to adjust a lot in your app to make to run sufficiently. Even then, people may think your app is just crappy or that the phone is crap because they don’t consider what they can’t see.

[Quadra 610]

http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/2...ed-until-2010/

Not looking to good for Palm.

In mid-July less than 250,000 Pres were active.

Pre sales fell from 200,000 units in June to 100,000 in July. Looks like they'll slide even further thsi month. And should this occur, we'll see more price cuts and Palm can say goodbye to its margins.

Palm is sucking wind right now. I wonder if they'll make it to 2010. No new phone for Christmas, their apps suck and there are hardly any. Where are all the WebOS developers?

[digitalclips]

Originally Posted by Maestro64

Anyone taking bets on this being successful....

Not me! 'Smart' and 'Dell' don't seem to fit in the same sentence somehow.

[SpamSandwich]

Originally Posted by Quadra 610

Palm is sucking wind right now. I wonder if they'll make it to 2010. No new phone for Christmas, their apps suck and there are hardly any. Where are all the WebOS developers?

They're all feverishly working on iPhone apps.

[Logisticaldron]

Originally Posted by SpamSandwich

They're all feverishly working on iPhone apps.

[retroneo]

Originally Posted by AppleInsider

The new hardware reportedly opertes on the 900MHz, 1700MHz and 1900MHz bands, includes Bluetooth

This isn't quite true. Listed in the original doc are the transmit frequencies of the phone, which correspond to GSM900, GSM1800 and UMTS2100.

The uplink of UMTS 2100 is in the 1900MHz range and the uplink of GSM1800 is in the 1700MHz range, which causes this confusion.

It's not a coincidence that China Unicom uses these three standards in its network (GSM900, GSM1800 and UMTS2100)

So don't get excited yet about a T-Mobile USA iPhone...

[mesomorphicman]

Originally Posted by AppleInsider

...only 2G data speeds...

I was recently in China and they have TV commercials and street signs promoting their own 3G phones... I don't think too many people there would want a go backwards and get 2G, when they have 3G phones. Just my thinking.

[Logisticaldron]

Originally Posted by mesomorphicman

I was recently in China and they have TV commercials and street signs promoting their own 3G phones... I don't think too many people there would want a go backwards and get 2G, when they have 3G phones. Just my thinking.

That is not how the mobile network market works. The US had one of the first commercial 3G networks in the world, although it was not widespread and while shortly thereafter some 3G-capable phones did filter in, people didn’t immediately jump to 3G devices. The original iPhone was EDGE while AT&T did have a 3G network in major cities. Even now, most people in the US are still using devices that are 2G capable only. Even when all US phones move to being 3G capable the majority of cell phone users won’t be paying for a data package, thus making the most important aspects of 3G moot.

China is no different, but it is on a larger scale. China Unicom and China Mobile, their largest network operator each received licenses at the beginning of this year for a 3G (UMTS) and 3G (TD-SCDMA) network, respectively. China has about 1,300M people, China Mobile has 480M subscribers, and yet they only have 1M 3G users as of 1.5 months ago. To put that into more perspective, China Mobile added over 7M subscribers in December alone.

3G will grow, but it takes time and money for implementing and then time for adoption to pick up. China is much like the US in there diverse mobile technology and by the shear number of towers to cover the country while also needing to support a great deal of users in congested cities. Many European countries just don’t have that logistical problem like these large countries with a spread out populace have.

Now that the 3G licenses have been granted and towers have been put in place in bustling areas the 3G phones will start selling more rapidly. Another perspective comparison is that AT&T was a much more developed with 3G when the original iPhone was first announced.

[SGSStateStudent]

Originally Posted by freeny

"U.S. carriers reportedly saw a prototype of the device, only to reject it."

reason?...

Too ugly and surely cannot beat the iPhone...

[SGSStateStudent]

Originally Posted by SpamSandwich

They're all feverishly working on iPhone apps.

LOL! Does this mean the Pre is a flop? I believe so. Look at the massive hype about da Pre that has died down.. The 3GS still commands that hype with 3 iPhone iterations..

[tawilson]

Originally Posted by al_bundy

webOS needs some work, but the CPU and graphics in the Pre are the same as the iphone.

The GPU in the Pre is not the same as in the iPhone 3GS.

3GS: SGX535 + VXD (28 million polygons/sec)
Pre: SGX530 (14 million polygons/sec)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerVR

The 3GS can render twice as many polygons per second than the Pre. It's a bit more than just the letters that matter. It's like just looking at the clock speed of a CPU, doesn't work anymore.

[bigpics]

Long-term, the most telling part of the article is that Dell wants in because of the "much higher margins' in the smart phone market.

Just like they used to be in the notebook market. Where Apple has reportedly cut margins because their making bank on the iPhone allows them to stay as profitable as they grow into these new areas.

However, with Android, Pre, etc., and lots of R&D sloshing around in the world-wide nascent mobile device market filled with many talented developers, unlike mp3 players, lots of "good enough" pocketable digital computer/communicators somewhat on a par with the 3GS are bound to emerge - turning these devices as well into tomorrow's commodity products with razor-thin returns to their makers.

Apple won't get hammered down to a 5% or less share again as they did with PC's - there's no behemoth like IBM many times their size to team up with some new would be MS to crush them for one thing, as Apple IS a monster itself now - but it seems reasonable that they'll face real competition sooner or later and depend somewhat similarly on remaining a premium, innovative maker one or ten steps ahead of the market to keep their momentum (as long as they have that SJ gene in their culture).

And on entering new markets where they'll be far ahead right out of the gate. Whether the "iPad" will be that device or another remains to be seen. I fell in love with the concept from the git-go, but the more I've cogitated on this tweener device, the less sure I am I'd personally buy one.

I visualize a 4G iPhone with a pocketable fold-out bluetooth keyboard (a little bigger than the one on my LG Voyager) as meeting my on-the-go, no bag needed computing needs and an MB Pro (or its next rev follow on) when I need more power.

Maybe the killer tech of the future will be flexible screens that put a 15" screen in your pocket or even Star Wars (the original) mini projection, holographic or otherwise......

Whatever, bring it on, Dell. No one's quaking in their boots in Cupertino over this one, but plenty of room in the pool still.

[anantksundaram]

Originally Posted by Mike Eggleston

Can this get to be any more of a blatant rip-off... Or should Dell just call it a dPhone for the final insult??

Nah, it will be called the diePhone....

[tekgeeek]

Has Apple even reached an agreement in China yet?? I keep hearing that the talks always end up stalling due to neither parties being able to reach a consensus. I hope Dell is prepared for a fight!