Microsoft offloads Nokia feature phone business to Foxconn for $350M
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I think there's a serious market for good feature phones that can make calls, send/receive SMS/MMS/group chats, take high resolution pictures, and send/receive emails all with a qwerty, tactile keyboard.
(I mean, that means you've got a HTML renderer, so you've gotta push updates every 12 weeks or so)
Like this one?
https://www.rapid7.com/db/vulnerabilities/mfsa2010-41-remote...
Opera Mini or a pure-JavaME browser would be safe, but just having an image decoder is too much to expose to whole internet.
I'm not saying that someone couldn't work out a way to exploit that phone, I'm saying that it's not going to happen because there's no point (and also wouldn't have been one while I was still using it).
As a practical concern, I'm more worried about my phone now (an up-to-date Android) than I am about any feature phone, including recently-released ones.
[1] http://blog.mailgun.com/transactional-html-email-templates/
Tell that to Android
So you'd like a feature phone that's a smart phone?
>I don't need a big display
Yes, you need a big display. Smartphones have completely warped our notion of what a "big display" is. Remember, until the iPhone came along, a 3" screen was considered massive. Smartphones had something like 2" or 2.5" displays, usually running at sub-VGA resolutions. You can't have Google Maps running on something like that.
I think I would be OK with a display a little smaller than the original iPhone. Even for maps where I just need directions. But it's a moot point anyway since it ain't gonna happen.
I don't know how a feature phone that isn't Android could be worth much.
The one thing one I don't have is a good camera. But I'm pretty sure decent cameras require "real" money to create.
An entry-level smartphone can do all the same things a feature phone can and even more. Why would you want to limit yourself in this day and age?
Less easy to spy upon you. At least for non-state actors.
'Smartphones' are a usability nightmare. (Especially Android smartphones, and especially cheap Android smartphones.)
The smartphone form-factor is geared towards buying and playing games -- it's essentially a glorified game console. It's a popular product but by no means universal.
No, because a really good feature phone would be a premium product. Custom form factor and parts (not manufactured in as large a volume), custom operating system with custom apps, no app store to make money off etc. Cheap Chinese smart phones are the new feature phone.
http://www.vertu.com/ca/en/collections/signature/shop-collec...
If you are super rich and want to show off, you are probably much better of getting a jeweller to remove your iPhones casing and replace is with diamond encrusted gold or something similar (and I believe there are companies who do this).
But then again, the best way of showing of excess richness is being wasteful (lighting cigars with 100 dollar bills, kind of stuff). So you can argue that you waste features when getting a Vertu. If that makes any sense.
Regardless, Vertu comes with a world wide concierge service, and you can probably have them do all your tweeting and googling for you, so maybe owning a Vertu is a signal that you have people to do your smart phoning.
At least it is sobering to know that even the super rich can't get a better phone than you and me. I believe there is a Warhol quote about how the best softdrink available to the president is the same coke as you and me can buy for a dollar.
Sadly GSM is going down in Canada for good next year. I'd love to have a 106-shaped LTE or HSPA phone with multilingual input and display. Essentially no other device would make me happier.
I have learned to love T9, it is very comfortable once you are used to it; and it maps very well to Japanese (though not available on this device). If I ever need to get a smartphone again, I'm using a T9 keyboard on it.
I wonder if they'd hire me...
Foxconn is Taiwanese
And meanwhile, the country has been in a sort of cold war with the PRC since the late 1940s, and was a Japanese colony for the 50 years prior to that. The last government to have military control over all of Mainland China and Taiwan (plus Mongolia) was the Qing Dynasty.
Saying that "Taiwan is Chinese" is basically true in an imprecise way, but once you drill down into the details a little, it gets complicated.
ROC held the China UN seat until 1971, and the first multi-party elections were held in 1986. KMT still considers ROC to include all Chinese territory.
> Taiwan has many citizens who speak Mandarin or various dialects of Chinese; many of them consider themselves Chinese, but also many do not. There are Taiwanese whose ancestors moved there from China as early as the 1600s. Besides, they also have a sizeable population of aboriginal people with totally non-Chinese cultural practices and who speak a language that isn't even loosely related to Chinese.
You're confusing nationality with ethnicity. PRC has many non-Han minorities too, but their nationality is Chinese.
> And meanwhile, the country has been in a sort of cold war with the PRC since the late 1940s, and was a Japanese colony for the 50 years prior to that. The last government to have military control over all of Mainland China and Taiwan (plus Mongolia) was the Qing Dynasty.
PRC and ROC claim all of the territory as "China", whether they historically controlled it or not.
I'm not confusing anything, I know the difference between nationality and ethnicity (and language). The non-Han people in the PRC are of Chinese nationality because they are residents of territory that is under the PRC's political and military control. That statement is not true for the people of Taiwan. They have their own government, and many people including elected officials in that government want to remove the word China from the country's official name.
So are Taiwanese people of Chinese nationality? No. Chinese ethnicity? A slight majority. Chinese speaking? A larger majority. So again it depends what you mean by "Chinese."
The rest of the facts you're stating are true on paper only--they are political fictions perpetuated by the cold war.
PRC has naturally a much stronger claim to that since it controls a vast majority of China. But in 1970's, PRC was deep in radical socialist experiments and the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, and the economy was weak, while ROC had opened up to world trade (I remember all those Taiwanese Apple and PC clones of early 1980's). It looked like ROC will actually be the more significant economy, even if it has much smaller population.
Then PRC changed its course.
Foxconn is wherever they decide to move their head office
We also need an infographic of the migration of Nokia engineers between different corporate entities and the dollar value destroyed/created during each hop.
Let's hope this corporate re-engineering saga has a happy ending. I miss my Nokia N8, N900 and N9.
Why do they need the Nokia featurephone business?
They're not allowed to use the Nokia name are they?
[1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-takes-control-of-noki...