Wholesale Cell Phones Industry News Digest 08/03/2012

Wholesale Cell Phones News

RIM chief: we looked 'seriously' at Android, didn't want to join the herd

RIM's current CEO Thorsten Heins has been very candid about his company's plans and past, but he has usually given the impression that the company wouldn't even consider deviating from its one true vision of a BlackBerry OS future. Although BlackBerry 10 is very much the center of RIM's universe today, Heins has revealed to The Telegraph that his firm's eyes did stray briefly -- at one point, it "seriously" investigated Android as a platform. The company ended up backing away after deciding a "me-too" strategy didn't fit the productivity-obsessed BlackBerry crowd, the executive says. RIM decided, like Nokia, that it couldn't differentiate enough in Google's ecosystem. There's still some time to go before we learn whether or not the gamble on the in-house OS pays off. If Heins' comments still leave you dreaming of what might have been, though, don't worry: at least a few companies are providing their own visions in a slightly more tangible form.

Samsung starts mass-producing 4x faster mobile flash memory, kickstarts our phones and tablets

Samsung isn't content to leave fast NAND flash memory to traditional solid-state drives. Its Pro Class 1500 promises a big jolt to the performance of frequently pokey smartphone and tablet storage. By how much? That name is a clue -- it reaches 1,500 IOPS (inputs/outputs per second) when writing data, which along with 3,500 IOPS data reads is about four times faster than any previous embedded flash chip Samsung has tested. In the real world, that leads to as much as 140MB/s when reading data and 50MB/s for writes. The speed comes after Samsung has thrown virtually every trick in the book at its new chips, including a dense 20-nanometer manufacturing process, quick toggle DDR 2.0 memory with its own controller and a new JEDEC memory standard with 200MB/s of bandwidth to spare. Samsung hasn't named customers for the 16GB, 32GB and 64GB parts that are rolling out of the factories, although we'd do well to remember that a flourishing phone business doesn't guarantee that the only major customer is Samsung itself: even in the face of legal challenges, Samsung still has at least one noteworthy client that tends to snap up much of its flash supply.

Stocks soar on jobs report

Stocks rallied nearly 2% Friday as investors welcomed a stronger-than-expected July jobs report.The Dow Jones industrial average surged 250 points, or 1.9%. The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq were both up 2%. The U.S. economy added 163,000 jobs in July, an improvement from an increase of just 64,000 in June, according to a government report. Economists surveyed by CNNMoney were predicting 95,000 jobs were added last month. "It was the perfect number for the market," said Mark Luschini, chief investment strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott.

Apple is freaking out over top-secret market research being used in patent trial

Remember when Steve Jobs famously said that Apple (AAPL) did “no market research” to figure out what consumers want? Well, it turns out that wasn’t exactly the case, as new documents unearthed during the Apple-Samsung (005930) patent trial reveal. Network World’s Yoni Heisler writes that Apple is positively freaking out about the possibility that its extensive market research surveys of iPhone and iPad users could be made public, thus revealing the company’s special sauce recipe for attracting and keeping loyal users. All Things D reports that Apple has now lost its bid to keep the market research secret and Samsung will be allowed to use it as evidence in the trial. In particular, Heisler found a declaration to the court submitted by Apple VP of product marketing Greg Joswiak explaining why Apple’s customer surveys should remain sealed away from the public eye. “The surveys reveal, country-by-country, what is driving our customers to buy Apple’s iPhone products versus other products such as the Android products that Samsung sells, what features they most use, our customers’ demographics and their level of satisfaction with different aspects of iPhone,” Joswiak wrote. “All of that information is set out in exacting detail in the proposed exhibits. No other entity could replicate this research because no other entity has access to the customer base that Apple has.” Heisler also notes that Joswiak claims the market research reports are even kept under tight wraps within the company itself and are only revealed to “a small select group of Apple executives” and cannot be shared with anyone outside of the group without Joswiak’s express permission. In other words, part of the secret to Apple’s success is that it has been run like one of the Pentagon’s black ops teams.