It's been a banner year for smartphones, tablets, and smartwatches of the turkey variety.
It may be cliché to highlight turkeys at Thanksgiving, but it's a good time of year to look back at what to give thanks for — and what to learn from as a new year approaches.With that in mind, it's been an extraordinary year for failed mobile products, smartphones, tablets, and more. I can't recall a larger gaggle of mobile turkeys. Let me carve them up for you!
Amazon Fire Phone
The Fire Phone isn't so much a smartphone but a portable product scanner and ordering device tied to a single vendor that also happens to make phone calls. Who on earth would want that? I'm all for mobile shopping, but I want to do it at more than one store. Any iPhone, Android, or Windows Phone can do that, thanks to store apps and QR code readers.
Real technology chops were required to create the Fire Phone's ability to take a picture of a product and find it on the Amazon store, but the advancements were ultimately wasted. It's like sequencing the human DNA to be able to create only blond children. Surely, there are more useful benefits than photographing objects in the world to order them from Amazon.
The Fire Phone also has all the shortcomings of Amazon's other Fire devices, its Kindle Fire tablet series, which are designed to conquer only Amazon content and provide a stripped-down, poor Android fork to ensure you can't do anything else on them. Worse, the Fire Phone requires you to buy a monthly data plan to essentially only shop with it. Even cutting its price to 99 cents with contract couldn't fool enough people to move the needle.
Samsung Galaxy S5
Soon after its launch came rumors that sales were dismal, and multiple market analysts said Apple's "failed" iPhone 5c was outselling it, as was the then-six-month-old iPhone 5s and, for a time, even Samsung's own S 4. (True numbers are impossible to come by, as Samsung does not report them, and its statements of what sells well don't always match what actually happens in the market.)
This fall, Samsung revealed its smartphone profits had dropped precipitously, before the iPhone 6 debuted to huge sales. Samsung managed to sink its flagship by neglecting it and assuming buyers wouldn't notice. They did, and they bought devices from Apple, HTC, and LG instead.
iPad Mini 3 and iPad Air 2
But it's time to take the iPad to a higher level, and Apple's hype-heavy iPad debut event — it spent more time on them than it had on the iPhone 6's debut — couldn't hide that fact. Apple shouldn't have pretended the new iPads were a big deal.
Android and Tizen smartwatches
Responding to rumors in the last couple years that Apple might have a smartwatch in the works, Samsung has delivered three failed incarnations of its Gear, an ugly, bulky watch that does very little useful. (Samsung should stop worrying about what Apple might do and figure out instead what it can be good at itself.)
LG and Motorola Mobility came up with their own. LG's G Watch R was clunky but more watchlike, and Motorola's Moto 360 was cool to look at but not very functional — its circular face is quite attractive, but the square display rendered by the underlying Android Wear OS exceeds the screen's boundaries, so only the middle line of alerts and so on are complete. Clearly, no one tested this before shipping it.
If you want a smartwatch today, get the one that is actually good: the Pebble. It may come from an upstart company and use an OS you never heard of, but unlike the Android and Tizen competitors, it works well.
There's a poult (look it up) in this category too: The new Microsoft Band fitness monitor that smartly runs with Android, iOS, and Windows Phone devices but is uncomfortable to wear — which it needs you to do all day, every day.
Samsung Galaxy Note Pro 12.2
Samsung Knox
But reports soon surfaced that the Knox technology didn't work as promised on the few Galaxy smartphones that supported it, and the product release date kept slipping. Although several mobile management vendors promised support for Knox, that backing didn't go much beyond press releases. Worse, potential customers balked at paying another $3 per user per month for Knox on top of the MDM fees for Galaxy users.
By the time Knox 2 — the real Knox — became available in spring 2014, Google decided to buy a competitor called Divide and incorporate it in Android 5.0 Lollipop. Samsung and Google made noises about some aspects of Knox being incorporated into Lollipop, but to this day they won't say what, if any, of Knox is in Lollipop.
Tellingly, when Google bought Divide, Samsung began discussions with BlackBerry to have BlackBerry's BES12 support Knox, which Samsung continues to make available for some of its Android devices. When I asked them, both Samsung and BlackBerry execs were vague about what specific capabilities the Knox tie-in with BES12 would bring, promising merely a strong partnership on future efforts. I can only wonder how much Samsung paid BlackBerry for this fig-leaf deal.
Tizen, Firefox OS, and Ubuntu Touch
None is new, but 2014 was supposed to be the year each got real, coming to market in multiple products. It didn't happen, and it likely won't ever at this point. (Remember the Tizen-powered Samsung Z that was supposed to ship first in Russia? It didn't.) Although they have intriguing aspects, the fact is they're all hugely inferior to Android and iOS, even to BlackBerry and Windows Phone. Why bother?
Tizen has no real mission other than to be a paper tiger Samsung can wave at Google when they fight over Android's direction. Firefox OS and Ubuntu Touch come from open source dreamers who believe that all a smartphone needs to be is a glorified Web browser. Google's been trying that for five years with Chrome OS, to marginal uptake at best (it might finally have cracked the 1 percent new-sales threshold this year).
Android's AOSP version and Microsoft's free phone licenses have taken away most of the cost factor advantage of a free open source mobile OS. You can still build cheaper Firefox OS and Ubuntu Touch phones than AOSP or Windows Phone devices, but not much cheaper — and you get phones that can do very little. People in poor countries may not have much money, but if they spend it on a smartphone, it has to handle sufficiently useful tasks to justify any price.
Google Docs for iOS and Android
The same can't be said for the sad suite that is Google Docs, a marginally capable office-productivity trio that will quickly convince you to save your work for when you get back to your desk and have a real word processor — or switch to Office or iWork on an iOS device. The Android version of Google Docs is slightly more capable than the iOS version, but not enough to prevent you from jumping to Office for Android when that finally ships, probably in early 2015.
Google keeps pushing its Docs suite on mobile devices and Apps suite (aka Google for Work) for the desktop Web as alternatives to Microsoft Office, but it keeps failing miserably on the mobile side of the equation — where all the computing growth is. It makes no sense.
Apple CarPlay
Sure, part of that is the slow pace of the automakers, most of whom still can't believe that people hate their horrible attempts at infotainment systems. (Ford, I'm talking to you!) Part of that is waiting for one of the kings of waitware, Google, to debut its CarPlay clone called Android Auto, so they're not beholden to only Apple.
But CarPlay's long hello is starting to feel like "Waiting for Godot" — without the intention to be so.
Turkeys that lived to see another year
You don't see BlackBerry or Windows Phone on my list of 2014's mobile turkeys — because they were 2013 turkeys that lived another year. Both are still struggling to hold onto their dismal market shares, but both are in the middle of plausible turnaround efforts that won't bear fruit for a good year.BlackBerry has its back-to-the-past BlackBerry Classic (basically, a BlackBerry Q10 in a BlackBerry Bold case) debuting in a couple weeks, but its real hopes are on its expanded set of management capabilities and apps powered by its new BES12 management server.
The perpetually pretty but dumb Windows Phone got a serious update this year — Windows Phone 8.1 — plus the Siri clone called Cortana, but the real make-or-break point for Windows Phone is at least a year away, after the debut of the unified Windows 10. If that fifth version of the Windows Phone fails to turn on customers, Windows Phone will head to the carving table.
Read More :- Techies | Update
Hello, my name is Mohd Azahar. I'm a self-employed Pivrate from the India.
No comments:
Post a Comment