LONDON: Taking a look back at the week’s news across the Android world, this week’s Android Circuit highlights a number of stories including why Amazon’s Fire phone failed, boring smartphones at CES, Motorola releases the Moto range in China, Xiaomi’s Redmi 2 will win market share, lessons from the Galaxy Alpha, BBM on Android Wear, Google TV is dead, and the viruses and bacteria that live on your phone.
Android Circuit is here to remind you of a few of the many things that have happened around Android over the last seven days (and you can read the weekly Apple news digest here).
Amazon’s Fire Phone. What Went Wrong?
Austin Carr has delivered a fantastic and forensic look at Amazon’s smartphone. The Fire Phone has been a huge misstep for Amazon, with Jeff Bezos’ company taking a $170 million write-down, giving the handset away free (well, free with a twenty-four month contract), and if it has sold more than fifty thousand units, the industry would be surprised.
In many ways, the Fire Phone is the perfect symbol of these opposing perceptions of Amazon. It represents everything proponents love about the company—the wild experimentation, the appetite for risk-taking—as well as everything that critics now deride: its huge expenditures, its blithe embrace of an imagined future where the big bets pay off, and its inability to create anything with real style.
Understanding Amazon’s journey to create a smartphone, and why it failed, is perhaps the best way to understand the company’s evolving mission and values as it struggles to unearth its next gusher of revenue. Because the Fire Phone, as with most big innovations inside Amazon, came straight from Bezos’s brain. As one founding team leader of the project puts it, “This was Jeff’s baby.”
Grab a coffee and settle in with Carr to find out more. Mark Rogowsky also offers some commentary here on Forbes.
In case you missed it, CES is coming to a close in Las Vegas. The Forbes Tech Team has been covering the event, but one thing that caught my eye was the promotion of the new smartphones. It’s not that there was anything ‘new’ on show, it’s just that smartphones have reached a point where every handset is functionally identical, and the differences are minimal.
Smartphones are becoming boring:
Yes there are new handsets, and individually there are a number that I would be eager to review and find out how they get on in the real world. But when you look at what manufacturers are pushing in these new handsets it comes down to a handful of factors: slightly better specifications, slightly more curves in the cases, and a slightly different way of doing things compared to the vanilla Android way.
Motorola Reaches China With The Latest Moto Handsets
The next frontier for smartphone sales is in the east, and the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) have a population ready to buy into a smartphone ecosystems, with very little saturation from existing brands.
Now owned by Lenovo, Motorola has discussed its plans for China in a blog post this week. The 2014 editions of the Moto X, the Moto G, and the Moto X Pro (essentially the Chinese version of the Nexus 6), will be available in China this year.
Motorola has a long history in China and we are pleased that smartphone fans there continue to be passionate about our brand and products. Chinese consumers have long been at the leading edge of smartphone use, blazing trails in mobile messaging, media and more. Motorola’s pure Android based devices will give them new choices in how they connect to the world.
The Moto X will be on sale during February, with the G and the X Pro following in the spring. I’d expect Lenovo to put a lot of marketing behind this effort to counter fashionable manufacturers such as Xiaomi. If Lenovo can win a moniker as the big and brutish ‘enterprise’ smartphone, that would make for a strong commercial base to continue expansion.
Death of the Alpha
JK Shin and Samsung have previously announced that Samsung Mobile would be rationalizing its product line in 2015 to reduce costs and provide a clearer marketing message. In light of Samsung’s Q4 estimates (profits down 37%) Shin is going to have to move fast, and precisely, to recapture the South Korean company’s momentum.
The first casualty will be the Galaxy Alpha, the mid-range specification handset with enough metal and design to (almost) justify a flagship price. Far from being a failure, the Galaxy Alpha has given Samsung a huge about of commercial and marketing data for 2015 and how to generate an impact with the Galaxy S6:
The primary lesson from the Galaxy Alpha is that specifications go hand-in-hand with cost. There should be a direct relationship between what consumers will pay for a handset, and the level of hardware they will have. Paying Galaxy S5 prices and receiving Galaxy S5 Mini specifications does not seem to have gone down well with the public.
The trade that Samsung offered purchasers was a mid-range handset in terms of power that looked like a King among Princes. The brushed steel construction, the metal chassis, the vibrant AMOLED screen, and the thin 6.7 mm body, all screamed “look at me, I’m fashionable!”
That wasn’t enough, and the reports say that the Galaxy Alpha production line will be wound down with the existing inventory of materials lasting until the middle of February.
