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Monday, June 6, 2011

Taiwan tech firms challenge iPad with locally designed products

Ralph Jennings of voanews.com writes:

Taiwan's massive high-tech industry has long been synonymous with building gadgets cheaply for foreign companies. But at the country's annual technology convention, locally designed tablet computers are hoping to change that image by challenging Apple's wildly popular iPad.

After decades of making PCs at a discount for more well-known foreign companies, Taiwan firms are using their manufacturing experience to design their own machines.

Following the success of Apple's iPad computer, local firms are now building their own tablet PCs, the slate-like devices that are bigger than phones, but smaller than laptop computers. Computex organizers say Taiwanese brands account for many of the show's 50 tablet exhibitors.

Local firms are still building gadgets for others, but they say a mix of contract and self-branded work helps protect them during recessions. Taiwan's high-tech industry is about one eighth of its GDP, but faces increasing competition from emerging markets such as China and Brazil.

To compete with Apple's global brand, local companies are relying first on their experience in finding cheap but viable components by hunting for deals within Taiwan's giant technology supply chain. The practice gives local manufacturers a unique flexibility to customize PCs for business users, who represent a market not fully tapped by Apple.

Market research firm Gartner still expects iPads to command almost 70 percent of the global tablet market of 69 million sales in 2011, though its lead may shrink by 2015.

Local firms say they still cannot fully compete with Apple's in-house hardware and software designs or with its application store. But beating Apple has become such a big cause in Taiwan that its two best known PC makers, Acer and Asustek, openly market their tablets as being priced close to the iPad but with features such as USB ports that Apple missed.

Richard Ma, a senior vice president with Taiwan's Gigabyte Technology, explains why local firms are becoming more competitive.

He says the contract work has let Taiwan IT firms quickly get established while self-branded PCs come with the high costs of finding sales channels, marketing products and clearing inventory. He says Taiwan firms are good at finding partners and mass producing new breakthroughs in hardware components.

Software remains Taiwan's biggest obstacle, because local developers have always prioritized the production of hardware for other parts of the world. Jamie Lin, co-founder of the Taipei-based venture capital firm appWorks Ventures, sees little progress until software matures.

"In the end, I think it's really about all these tablet makers trying to differentiate their products, because Apple is holding tight to their iOS [operating] system and it's not going to license it to anybody else," Jamie Lin noted.  "If they want to compete with all the other tablet makers, in terms of their product, a lot of it would come from the software, or the customized user experience. If they have the ability to build that user interface on top of their tablets, right now we're not seeing it yet."

This year two top government-funded technology research institutes focused on Taiwan's global competitiveness announced they are focusing on designing new software, starting with tablet applications. Taiwanese PC brands will be able to license the institute's applications to make their devices more competitive

Originally published on voanews.com
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Opinion Articles

How long can Apple remain torn between two lovers?

Mark Bridge writes:

“Torn between two lovers, feeling like a fool, loving both of you is breaking all the rules”.

Mary McGregor sang those words in 1976 – and Apple would do well to bear them in mind today. Why?  Well, Rick Astley is to blame for it all.

Oh, alright, Rick’s not personally involved. It’s worm-writer ikee, along with the people who’ve followed him in creating security threats for the Apple iPhone. But why am I invoking the lyrics of Mary McGregor?  It’s because Apple has two loves... and it may be struggling to choose between them.

Author: The Fonecast
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Everyone’s selling Android phones… but who’s selling Android?

Mark Bridge writes:

Samsung. Huawei. Acer. HTC. Motorola. LG. Toshiba. Sony Ericsson. INQ. Dell. They’re all after a slice of the Android cake. (The Android cake is an éclair at the moment. Not particularly good for slicing. But I digress).

And my, what advertisements we’ve seen. Most recently Motorola has been knocking the iPhone while HTC has been playing with marker pens.

But those ad campaigns are mainly about manufacturers and phones. As you’d expect, really. Not about Android.

Author: The Fonecast
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1 paisa for 1 second

James Rosewell writes:

One paisa is equivalent to 1/100 of an Indian rupee. In American dollars, a paisa is worth 0.00022 cents. For the British reading this, that’s 0.00013 pence.

Why is this important?

A company in India called MTS have launched a pay as you go SIM card that allows you to make on-network calls for ½ paisa per second...

Author: The Fonecast
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Two mobile operating systems to rule them all

Mark Bridge writes:

Cain and Abel. Price and Andre. Judge Dredd and Rico. History is full of pairings that didn’t work out. Two forces that started off together but ended up trying to destroy each other. And so it could be with mobile phone operating systems.

This week it’s been reported that Nokia will be dropping Symbian from its N-series devices by 2012, favouring Maemo instead.

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Who ya gonna call when the phones go dead?

Mark Bridge writes:

This week there’s a government exercise taking place in London. A number of civil servants and private sector employees are simulating the failure of the UK’s fixed-line telephone network. Called “White Noise”, it imagines a scenario where telephone exchanges are destroyed by a giant subterranean monster that pulls really hard on all those underground cables.

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