In Germany it looks as though the closure of NOKIA's mobile phone manufacturing plant in Bochum has triggered German politicians to jump on the publicity bandwaggon and lose all sense of reality.

Sensible German newspapers such as the Financial Times Germany sum up the nonsense that is being heard and seen currently - such as German politicians giving back their NOKIA mobile phones:

"We are curious to see which mobile phone they will use in the future. BenQ is no longer possible, Siemens neither. Samsung? Well they have an unpleasant bribing scandal to go through. Motorola? They want to axe 7,000 employees by year end, double what NOKIA plans in Bochum. Well, as we said we are curious." I would like to add, maybe they will get Apple's iPhone, which is manufactured in China?

What surprises me about this all is the fact that people seem to be hanging onto jobs that can for the most part only be assembly jobs, so requiring low qualification. German politicians seem to be fighting constantly for jobs - such as those in coal mining - that have no real future. In addition, they lack clear planning and investment into higher education and research. It is easier and faster to jump at such topics in particular when there are state elections, as in Germany right now, than trying to find future solutions.
Fact is still that Germany has one of the highest side costs (not net labor costs), and that's simply due to the inefficiency of the German system which, despite an overall good economy, lags behind most other countries.
The net result will be that any other firm will think twice before bringing any new jobs to Germany.

This news from yesterday which was left mostly uncommented by the press could potentially mean more than the end of litigations between the two companies. Of course that alone would already be a nice achievement I think meaning that they spend money to serve customers and innovate rather than waste it in lawyer fees.

In addition I had immediately one other thought: is Ericsson back in WiMAX using Samsung's technology and is Samsung working with Ericsson in projects such as the Sprint Nextel deal now? Unsure if that is the case but the likelihood seems pretty high. Of course it would put Ericsson's decision to not develop WiMAX on their own into a different light. Like other major wireless infrastructure players they would license the technology or outsource the development to third parties. It only shows that they don't see it as a core technology but still take it serious enough so want to be able to offer it.

With about 2 months to go until Apple's iPhone is supposed to be launched in the US (Europe has to wait until the end of the year), among the established mobile phone manufacturers there is a combination of playing things down but at the same time launching some similar phones ahead of Apple. Interesting also to see that the S. Koreans are suddenly giving their phones a real name and not just an acronym like LG ... or SGH... Three of the supposed competitors are: Samsung's UPSTAGE, LG's enV and Nokia's 5300 Xpress Music. All are much lower priced than the upcoming iPhone and that seems to be their only differentiator. Also the service providers are busy working on their music download portals and price models such as e.g. Sprint Nextel, who are now offering a music download for the famous 99 cents, lowering it substantially from $2.50. And Verizon Wireless has a music website showing the LG enV. Both website designs have black backgrounds, another me-too borrowed from Apple, and that despite some older school marketers (e.g. Ogilvy) recommending avoidance of white on black by all means since it is difficult to read. New times, new marketing ideas...

CNET already praised this ultra slim slider cell phone from Samsung with the following words and gave it an overall "Excellent" rating:

The good: The Samsung SGH-D900 is a slim, lightweight phone
that feels great in the hand. It has a gorgeous display, and features a
3.0-megapixel camera, a music player, a MicroSD card slot, a
speakerphone, and quad-band EDGE support.

I have had it now for 4 weeks and I like it. The pros for me are:

• ultra slim and very light, fits nicely into a shirt pocket and you hardly notice it
• the screen size and display color and brightness is outstanding and a true pleasure to look at
• the software is highly functional and more or less the same as with its predecessor the D-600 model
• it is a quad-band phone so works wherever your business brings you to
• when you arrive at a new airport the wallpaper changes to that city's most prominent landmark, in London Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, in Barcelona or Helsinki the Cathedral, in Stockholm the Royal Castle, in Zurich the Limmatquai... you get the picture (so to speak)... and also it shows the landmarks during day and night.

Some of the things that could be improved in the future are:

• battery runtime could be slightly better
• keypad is flat and needs a bit of getting used to
• keypad tones cannot be disabled, not sure why not, and that is weird and a bit annoying

The feature set overall is also quite impressive and makes it a great phone for taking on the road.

In conjunction with my Nokia 9300 and a laptop I have all that is needed. I doubt that there will ever be a one-does-it-all phone and probably that is not necessary since in many situations you have a different need, in my case this looks as follows:

• making phone calls -> Samsung SGH-D900
• checking e-mails while traveling (in a taxi, at the airport while standing in line, etc.) and writing a quick response -> Nokia 9300
• waiting at an airport lounge, being in a hotel or at a public hotspot place during a break - laptop via WLAN (incl. Skype calls)

Now when you look at what Samsung writes about this phone then you can read all kinds of gimmick stuff that - I bet - none of their target users is interested in. It pays off to have people write about technology who have a clue and not some high-level Marcom folks that know how to market margarine and soda water but lack the technical usage understanding. Look for yourself at e.g. Samsung's UK website and you see what I mean... Funny to see that they think it is a phone to take along to a Caribbean vacation trip. Also they do not show a single good screenshot of the phone itself in action, nor any screen shot that shows the excellent display quality (that's why you cannot see the excellent display in the above pictures either).

Good that at least Samsung's product managers seem to understand the needs of business travelers, so that the phone sells despite being mis-positioned by their Marcom partners.

With Motorola's annoucement of slow sales in Q3 - and now also in Q4 - some analysts are starting to wonder if this is a sign for the entire mobile handset industry that slower growth times are ahead.

Now Motorola has had one killer model in the last few years, the RAZR, which instantly made clamshell phones a success. The RAZR was such a big success that Motorola became the number 2 cellphone vendor in the world and moved even closer to the number 1 NOKIA. NOKIA itself did not really have such a big single winner phone model but instead was trying in all phone categories (music, low cost, smartphones, multimedia, clamshells) to bring many, many models on the market. Lots of losers were among the designs, I am sure, but with the big model range they were able to maintain their number one lead and still grow their overall business overall. It was a product strategy of being present in all segments while also trying to move towards new multimedia devices, hoping that mobile TV would fuel that market. SonyEricsson has been primarily trying to position itself in music phones and some smartphones. The only vendor being really innovative in the last few months with really new innovative design formats was Samsung though. They have tried out new form factors with such phones as the small volume and - when opened - v-shaped SGH X-830 or the card phone SGH-P310. Both seem right now only available in Europe and Asia. Otherwise Samsung is trying to copy both the Motorola RAZR and also some of Nokia's Nseries multimedia phones with similiar designs.

Nokia is BTW also the only vendor that is doing very heavy product marketing activities online, such as for the Nseries and also pushes mobile TV. They have created partly very good content, which goes far beyond the usual TV clips with some fancy looking crowds in "cool" environments. Overall the Nseries multimedia phones (N92, 93) are too big and heavy for my taste and would really need a killer mobile application before they become a big success. The idea that everybody is becoming a blogger who wants to instantly upload pictures or videos taken on the road or at parties is not yet becoming a reality.

What all the above also shows though is that cell phone innovation which also enjoys mainstream acceptance seems to be coming to an end, at least for some time. The big leap forward as we have seen it in the last 2 years or so does not seem to be continuing. In such a tough environment Nokia and also Samsung seem to have the right strategy. SonyEricsson would be hit very hard if indeed Apple enters the music phone market as well this year. And Motorola could go through some tough times pretty soon, having relied and milked its RAZR success for too long without using the time to build something similarly successful. One thing remains certain in the mobile phone markets. It will stay a fast moving highly competitive market, too fast for Siemens, Alcatel and a few others. But maybe next week's CES show will prove me wrong in case the vendors surprise with truly new innovative designs. They had better do so if they also want to enjoy strong growth in 2007.

When I first read this news in the WSJ today (earlier announcements of a trial in New York were made back in November '06), I thought that Samsung imust now be entering the mobile TV chipset (DMB, DVB-H, MediaFlow, ISDB) market. That would not be news at all, of course, but what they really seem to be doing is enabling local TV broadcasters to bring their content to mobiles - and that's the big thing - without having to change or invest into a new infrastructure. So they can just use the existing broadcast infrastructure with only minor modifications.