The highly anticipated Samsung Galaxy S III will be unveiled later than expected, after reports emerged that the Korean consumer electronics maker would not use Mobile World Congress 2012 to show off their device.

Reveal after MWC, release before ‘summer’

The news comes courtesy of The Verge, who cited indications from ‘people familiar with the matter’ that the unveiling of the latest release of the best-selling Android device in the world by some margin would only happen after MWC 2012 in February. The source did, however, explain that the originally planned summer release window (between June and August) remains in tact.

Why the delay?

While a reason for the delay has not been given, it’s believed that Samsung was unhappy with the long gap between the Samsung Galaxy S II’s unveiling at MWC, and its eventual release in North America. Given how massive North America is as a smartphone market and the fact that the Galaxy S II is the best selling Android handset in the region, whatever Samsung can do to accelerate sales of the S III will be prudent.

What we can expect

A report in TechRadar on Tuesday suggested that the Samsung Galaxy S III would launch in the UK as soon as April, with an impressive tech spec sheet to boot. The handset will reportedly have a 12-megapixel camera, and will run on Ice Cream Sandwich from day one (unlike many as-yet unreleased handsets that will get an ICS sandwich as an update after release).

The gravity of anticipation

Just as Samsung has managed to become the second biggest smartphone manufacturer in the world behind only Apple, the Samsung Galaxy S III and its predecessors have shaped up to become the second most anticipated smartphone releases each year. I’d like to think the S III is a big enough deal that it should get its own press conference, and that MWC 2012 may be too crowded as is.

Thoughts? We’ll see how Samsung plays it.

Apple Inc, the biggest technology company in the world by market capitilization, posted blowout Q1 2012 revenue figures. The company posted record revenue, record profit, record iPhone, record iPad and record Mac sales figures in a quarterly performance that topped even the guidance of the most optimistic analysts.

About that revenue and profit

Apple revenue for Q1 2012 totaled $44.63 billion (£28.61bn), up 73 percent year-on-year. Apple’s profit for the quarter was $13.06 billion (£8.37bn), up 118 percent year-on-year. For perspective, Apple’s quarterly profit exceeded Google’s revenue of $10.6 billion over the same period. Further perspective still, CNN reports that this is the second most profitable quarter of any corporation ever. For even more perspective, Apple’s cash hoard now sits at $97.6 billion (£62.55bn), which is greater than the market capitilisation of 474 Fortune 500 companies. Crazy.

iPhone momentum unprecedented

That growth, of course, comes from two key device categories – the iPhone primarily, and the iPad secondly. Apple iPhone sales topped 37.04 million units, representing year-on-year growth of 128 percent. The sales figures also meant Apple reclaimed its position as the number one smartphone vendor in the world, eclipsing Samsung’s 35 million unit sales over the same period.

For perspective on the ridiculous amount of momentum Apple iPhone sales have had since the device’s introduction in 2007, consider what Matt Richman writes: ‘In 2009, Apple sold more iPhones than it did in 2007 and 2008 combined. In 2010, Apple sold more iPhones than it did in 2007, 2008, and 2009 combined. Last year, Apple sold 93.1 million iPhones, slightly more than it did in 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010 combined. The pattern continued.’

iPad and Mac extremely strong

Apple iPad sales totaled 15.43 million units in Q1 2012, representing year-on-year growth of 111 percent. Even though the PC industry is widely considered soft, with growth slowing to a crawl, the Mac has been, well, immune to that slowdown. Mac sales grew 26 percent year-on-year totaling 5.26 million units for the quarter.

Momentum

The mobile devices market is without doubt the most important competitive landscape in computing today and Apple, without doubt, is in the lead, in terms of unit sales per manufacturer, and in terms of revenue and profit. This is not to say that this will forever be the case, but the Cupertino giant is certainly sitting pretty at this point.

Early reports indicate that the Nokia Microsoft is paying dividends, with nearly half of all second-generation Windows Phone 7 handsets sold being by the Finnish handset manufacturer.

Unpacking the WP7 marketshare

The report comes courtesy of WMPoweruser, who used data gleaned from OccasionalGamer’s game collection. On Nokia, they write: ‘Even at this early stage the company already has 45 percent of the second generation handset market, with most of that being the Nokia Lumia 800 and some the more recently introduced Nokia Lumia 710.’ Next in line? HTC with 40 percent market share, but that is down quite drastically from the 55 percent market share the company had prior to Nokia’s arrival.’

How much is the base growing?

The fact that Nokia has managed to race to almost half of all sales of the second-generation handsets so quickly is notable, but there are a few important qualifiers to consider. If that growth is at the expense of other WP7 handset vendors, as opposed to growing the whole sales base of WP7 handsets, than this is not an ideal situation for the Nokia Microsoft partnership.

Why? Well, Microsoft wants to compete with Android and iOS, and for that to happen, the company’s mobile OS has to grow in volume. What each vendor has of a non- or slow-growing base of WP7 handsets is, for all intents, immaterial. Nokia, on the other hand, wants to compete with the likes of Apple, Samsung and HTC, and for that to happen, need consumer acceptance of Windows Phone 7 and overall sales of that mobile OS platform to explode.

What will follow?

Windows Phone 7 say that they ‘suspect if market acceptance for Windows Phone 7 increases it may be because it becomes strongly associated with Nokia, which may mean this percentage could easily increase to 60-70% or more,’ while some users comment that the market will grow because of Nokia, but other OEMs will become attracted to WP7 as a result. Whichever it is, the Nokia Microsoft partnership has very quickly become mission critical – as many suspected it would – if WP7 is to succeed in the long run.

Following a week of high drama where the future of the internet as we know it was hanging in the balance due to the controversial SOPA/PIPA anti-piracy bills in the US, Y Combinator has sent out a request for startups with a focus on the media industry and with the intent to ‘Kill Hollywood’.

Why Kill Hollywood?

Y Combinator, an incubator for web startups including mega-hits like Airbnb, Dropbox, and Heroku, issued its ninth request for startups, wherein it states that ‘SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying’. The startup incubator says that Hollywood won’t fade quietly like other declining industries do, because ‘The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down.’

The challenge

When asking the how and what part of the killing of Hollywood, Y Combinator says ‘What’s going to kill movies and TV is what’s already killing them: better ways to entertain people,’ and not filesharing, as Hollywood, SOPA, and PIPA seem to suggest. The incubator continues, saying: ‘So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?’

Parting thoughts

Y Combinator’s call to ouster Hollywood from its perch comes at a time when the film industry is facing ever-mounting challenges from other forms of entertainment competing for people’s time, as well as independent programming often times that of Hollywood quality being increasingly easier to access due largely to the internet. This request for startups to ‘Kill Hollywood’ would only serve to make the distribution and content creation platforms designed to compete with Hollywood only more numerous, and more effective, too.

Where SOPA/PIPA were seen as a way to protect Hollywood, they’ve only served as a rallying call to upend it, at least for a small sliver of highly influential entrepreneurs.

During their surprisingly weak earnings call – falling short of the street’s expectations – Google revealed that Android’s unreal momentum is showing no signs of slowing any time soon. The company announced that the mobile OS platform has been activated on a quarter of a billion devices, with the number of applications downloaded soaring, too. Of those device activations, 3.7 million were activated on Christmas day alone.

On iOS’ heels

For perspective on how significant the Android device activation figure is – as if 250 million is not ridiculous in and of itself – in October 2011 Apple revealed they had activated 250 million iOS devices. This, of course, included iPhones, iPads, and iPods. Android was released some two-years after Apple and has closed the gap almost exclusively with smartphone sales, since Android tablet PC sales are still relatively insignificant.

Apps market exploding

During the earnings call, Google CEO Larry Page also announced that over 11 billions apps had been downloaded from the Android market. Bank of the napkin maths reveals an average of about 44 apps per Android smartphone across the platforms lifetime.

What’s more, that application download number only accounts for what is on Google’s official app store, and precludes download stats from the Amazon Appstore, GetJar, direct app sales by publishers like EA, and other third party application marketplaces. Basically, the official apps number is certainly higher than just 11 billion. Once again, for perspective, over 18 billion iOS apps had been downloaded by October last year.

Where the influence lies

2012 is a significant year for the mobile OS team at Google. Maintaining and growing Android device activation will be a priority, as will finally kicking on in the tablet PC market, where Apple is still king and Amazon with its Kindle Fire has managed to sneak in and wedge itself into second place behind pure Android tablets.

In a fascinating email sent to PandoDaily, the new tech site started by former TechCrunch writer Sarah Lacey, an unnamed but highly knowledgeable publishing executive admitted that the Amazon Kindle team was in the process of slowly killing all of the big publishers. The retail platform was achieving this by slowly pushing to become the content distributor and publisher all at the same time, by putting a financial squeeze on the already-struggling book publishers.

Business model

The email to Lacey is lengthy – and well worth a read in entirety – and is packed with perhaps the best insight I’ve seen on the relationship between publishers and disruptive retail platform with significant clout, with Amazon being the example here.

Bidding war for big books

The anonymous executive writers: ‘Publishers like to pretend that we make our money from discovering unknown talents for small advances and selling millions of their books. That’s a very small part of our business. The bestselling books are all written by celebs, by people with huge platforms, by fiction writers with a long history of bestselling books, or by people who do a proposal that’s on its surface brilliant. In short, there’s a bidding war among the publishers over the big books.’

Throwing around money in a money-less industry

The publisher explains, though, that as overall book sales have declined, so too have the advances the publishers are willing to pay for said books. Amazon, however, does not have this problem. ‘Amazon could probably afford to lose $20 million/year in their publishing arm just to put the other publishers out of business.’ There is reason to believe that that is what they’re doing, wrote the executive.

Platforms more valuable than content

Amazon today and Apple before it have shown that any media that can be digitized puts the gatekeepers – the content owners and publishers – at business risk. While it would be presumptuous to take this anonymous executive at their word, there’s little reason to believe that the Amazon Kindle team are not doing this, either.

Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s co-founder, former CEO, and long-term board member, has stepped down. He leaves the company during a period of protracted turmoil following the departure of CEO Carol Bartz and strained relations with the company’s very important (and lucrative) Asian wing.

Sudden decision

Though Jerry Yang has been under significant pressure for sometime with many calling for his departure, Kara Swisher of AllThingsD reports that the eventual decision to leave was both a sudden one and Yang’s own. She writes the departure ‘was so sudden, in fact, that Yahoo’s key execs — including its communications arm — had only a few minutes heads up to what is arguably one of the more momentous events in the history of the Silicon Valley Internet giant.’

The dotcom survivor

Under Yang’s tenure at the company, Yahoo went from being one of the few 1990s startup to survive the dotcom bubble bursting, to becoming of the biggest media properties in the world. Even though he created exceptional wealth for himself and Yahoo’s investors, the hardships for Yahoo – and by extension Yang – can be traced back to several key events over the past decade. Once Google – a company Yahoo nearly purchased – eclipsed it as the pre-eminent search giant, Yahoo’s stature, while still massive, began to decline and would never ascend again.

Yang’s Microsoft moment

In 2005, during Yang’s tenure as CEO, Yahoo made the now frequently criticised decision to reject Microsoft’s unsolicited bid to takeover the company for $44.6 billion. For perspective on the magnitude of that decision, the media conglomerate’s market cap as at the time of writing sits at $19.14 billion.

Since then, Yahoo has struggled to compete, losing leadership and executives along the way, making a lesser agreement with Microsoft and falling further and further behind as new mega internet properties like Facebook rose to compete with titans like Google, Microsoft and Apple.

On many accounts, the only thing that kept Yahoo financially attractive to investors was its stake in Alibaba, a mega Asian internet property. That relationship, too, has come under strain in recent months, piling even further pressure on co-founder Jerry Yang.

Better days ahead?

Swisher concludes her piece on how Yang came to leave, writing: ‘With a new CEO in place and the possible chance that its Asian problems were moving in the right direction, it had to have sunk in for Yang that it had finally become time to make peace with the present by abandoning his future at Yahoo.’ That seems a fair appraisal of what may have happened here.

Nevertheless Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang remains one of the most important Internet pioneers of all time, and it will be interesting to see how the company charts its path without his legacy weighing on Yahoo anymore.

The long-rumoured – and frequently leaked – Sony Xperia S was finally revealed at CES 2012. In addition to finally being confirmed by Sony, the Android smartphone now has an official UK release date, as well as pricing guidance.

Release date

The Xperia S will be available from 5 March onwards, and is priced at £429.99 Sim-free, reports TechRadar. The handset will be available from O2, Three, T-Mobile and Orange, while Phones4U will also exclusively retail the white version of the otherwise black handset. Vodafone seems to have given the phone a pass for the time being.

Why you should care

The handset has a notable design, with the thick bottom bezel piece with XPERIA engraved across it, separated by a thin silver strip where the Android buttons rest. This gives the phone a unique, immediately recognisable look.
The Sony Xperia S is powered by a 1.5GHz dual-core processor so performance should not be an issue. The handset has an LCD HD display that spans 4.3-inches, which is fast becoming the ‘new’ smartphone display size standard. It has a high-resolution 12-megapixel camera that sports an Exmor R lens. It can also record 720p video, which can be played on a television directly from the phone through the built-in micro-HDMI port on the handset.

The handset has been built around Google’s Android Gingerbread mobile OS, with Sony committing to update it to Ice Cream Sandwich after release.

Is it enough?

I like the Sony Xperia S, especially its design, which is saying a lot considering the general homogeneity of most contemporary smartphones. With the impressive camera, mobile photography fans would do well to consider it for their next purchase, too, as would any other users looking to purchase an Android device. With Mobile World Congress at the end of February, Sony runs the risk of having some of its thunder stolen by what other manufacturers release there.

Google’s Android mobile OS continues to grow at a torrid pace, having established itself as the number one mobile OS on the planet. This torrid growth, however, especially with numerous developers flocking to the frequently updating operating system has meant that design uniformity across applications has been a problem, at times. Google is attempting to remedy this through the unveiling of a site that will serve as an Android design style guide.

A thing of beauty

The site will contain documentation, and will also be a ‘live demonstration’ of what the Android team would like to see.

Google’s Director of Android Matias Duarte revealed this to Josh Topolsky of the Verge during an interview just before Google made the wider announcement at CES. When asked if Google has never previously had a style guide, Duarte revealed that they did not have ‘an up-to-date style guide’, before explaining their mission for Ice-Cream sandwich was to ‘make it beautiful, to make it simple, to make it powerful.’ He says this was a three-parted task, which includes the operating system itself, updating the framework, which in itself results in easier ways of making remarkable apps, and finally, the style guide, which they have just revealed.

The value of uniformity

Duarte told Topolsky that this initiative was not a once-off, and that Google will continue to update and maintain it over the life of Android.

A uniform mobile OS experience is critical in this – and future – smartphone generations since it helps give a platform its identity. There’s fair argument that both iOS and Windows Phone 7 have done a better job of this than Google has to date. The fact that Duarte’s team realise that an Android design style guide is necessary as Google continually chisels out its identity is encouraging, and with Ice Scream Sandwich having several unique characteristics over what preceded it, it’s a timely release, too.

It’ll take time, though, to see if greater uniformity across apps will start happening as a result, but it’s a pretty safe bet that definite design trends will emerge as a result.

US retail group Target has revealed an initiative that will see mini-Apple stores popping up within several key Target stores over the next several months. The announcement comes after reports leaked that the mega retailer was looking for ways to position itself as a premium retailer of Apple’s high selling products.

“Shops at Target”

Target confirmed that they would have 25 stores that featured specialised displays for products designed by Apple, following speculation last week that a Target Apple relationship of this sort was in the works, reported Reuters.

The mini-Apple stores are part of a wider plan to launch what the group is calling ‘The Shops At Target’ concept. Unveiled in New York on Thursday, the initiative will also see specialised boutiques, candy stores, and the like fall under the designer shopping concept. Moreover, Target employees are reportedly flying around the world in search of unique shops that will be prepared to make products that are exclusively available through Target. It’s all part of a plan to differentiate the shopping experience in a highly homogenous marketplace.

The Apple effect

What’s of particular interest is that the mini-Apple stores in Target will reinforce Apple’s very strong retail position, which already trades heavily on the popularity of the many Apple stores around the world. Initiatives like this are always good signaling devices for which companies yield the biggest profits/profit margins for retailers, and given how well Apple has been doing financially in recent years, it’s no surprise they would be a consideration for this type of initiative.

How Target’s other electronics partners will respond to this will be interesting. The scope of the Target Apple partnership isn’t huge yet, but Apple’s competitors who happen to sell product through target, too – of which many do – will undoubtedly be unhappy about this.