Dell buoys Windows Phone 7 as it drops BlackBerry

On November 11, 2010, in Dell Venue, News, by
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win7-dell-venueRIM suffered a massive blow as one of the world’s biggest computer manufacturers, Dell, has just shifted 25,000 of its employees off BlackBerry phones over to Dell handsets sporting the new Windows Phone 7 mobile OS platform.

Venue Pro over BlackBerry

Dell will shift 25,000 employees – about one quarter of the people it employs – onto its own Venue Pro handset powered by Windows Phone 7, and expects the move will slash the company’s mobile communications costs by 25 per cent. Not only is this good from a cost-savings perspective, it will also give Dell staffers some insight on their own products’ strengths and shortcomings since they will be eating their own ‘dog food’, so to speak.

As for those 25,000 used BlackBerry’s? Dell CFO Brian Gladden says that: ‘We actually had a conversation last night around creating a site on eBay where we can actually sell these BlackBerry devices.’ Ouch.

Cracking at the seams or just strategy?

This is definitely a major blow for BlackBerry to lose that many customers at once, particularly in such a high profile organisation, but it may also just be a strategic play to boost Dell’s smartphone ambitions. In this respect, it may be premature to say RIM is losing its touch with its core customer base – the enterprise space – but this does not bode well for the company.

Major Phone 7 boost

Furthermore this is a massive boost for the Windows Phone 7 mobile OS platform. Sure, 25,000 subscribers is a mere drop in the ocean when compared to the tens of millions of Android handsets shipping and the 14 million iPhones shipped in this last quarter, but it’s that particular customer base that matters. Having that many concentrated users sharing professional networks could be a massive seed and a catalyst for growth in the enterprise space.

And for Microsoft and the Windows Phone 7 mobile OS platform, any growth potential is good, especially with the all-out assault Apple and Google have launched.

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Boom in smartphones. Is their room for new players such as Dell?

On March 11, 2010, in Uncategorized, by rohit
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Smartphones are growing at a rapid speed in the mobile handset market. There are few evidences to back this statement.

The report of IDC says that the converged mobile device market has seen a growth of about 30 percent in 2009. The report also mentions that this growth momentum will continue even this year.
smartphones
Paul Jacobs, the CEO of Qualcomm, believes that the market for smartphones will split into high-end segment and low-end segment. He says that this is a trend that is speedly eroding the feature phones market.
The Yankee Group’s survey of 2009 had found about 43 percent of consumers of US plans to take smartphones their next mobile device.

Well, one question arises. Is is that all these reports is a gesture to smartphone market for new vendors?

If you look at the recent news of Palm and Garmin, it indicates that the market of smartphones is in fact not profit panacea that one would expect. According to Palm, the manufacturers is now expecting a full-year revenue going below what it had estimated earlier of $1.6 billion to $1.8 billion. The reports of Garmin is also similar. The company is till date “disappointed” with its nuvifone products sale. These can also give a jerk to new players in the market such as Dell, LG, Acer and other.

Ramon Llamas, analyst of IDC’s smartphone, said: “Instead of, ‘If you build it, they will come,’ it’s turned into, ‘If you build it, will they come?”

Lamas further mentioned that the two, Garmin and Palm, faced unique challenges. So far the marketing effort of Palm targeted the “Valentine’s Day” potential customers and not the traditional smartphone early adopters. He explained that Garmin suffered promotional scarcity and its ecosystem too much relied on interest in mapping and directions.

John Jackson, the CCS Insight analyst, said: “We knew that Palm would launch the Pre into the teeth of new flagship products (or revs of products in Apple’s case) from Apple, RIM, HTC and others.”

Jackson added further, “The same is true for Garmin, compounded by the issue of Google (and now Nokia) basically undermining the navigation proposition with freeware. Without a portfolio, a limited number of stock-keeping units (one in Garmin’s case and basically two in Palm’s case) are that much more likely to get lost in the mix. Apple is the exception, but that success story is well known at this point.”

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