CES 2012. Press Day Part II. Microsoft, Nokia, NVidia, Sony – Pieces de Resistance

This is my final report on the first day of CES 2012 dedicated for press exclusively. Here I collected my impressions of the most notable events and some thoughts that did not get into the first part. Let’s get to it.
Unfortunately, most companies did not have anything interesting to show at CES: Samsung decided to make a TV set with voice control their piece de resistance. And though this TV might be the future I was bored. However, later this year in Barcelona Samsung is going to show us something a lot more interesting but we will have to wait just until February.

Microsoft’s Last Visit to CES

This was the last presentation of Steve Ballmer at CES since Microsoft is withdrawing from CES after 15 years of continuous participation. In my opinion, the main reason is that the companies need to rearrange their own schedules to correspond with the expo and have share journalists’ attention with many others which is simple unprofitable for them. Major companies have all the resources to host their own events – they just don’t need trade expos. It is especially true in case of Microsoft because its partners at CES are going to tell everything the company has to say.
There are always queues at CES to any presentation and people were waiting for hours to listen to the last Ballmer’s speech. The word ‘last’ seems to have triggered a must see response and the importance of this event became a lot greater. Some probably just wanted to say that they were there at the last Ballmer’s speech. I personally was not particularly interested in his presentation so I chose simple to watch a web streaming and did not go to the showcase. Well, actually it was not even live I merely watched a recording of it so I did not have queue. Ballmer’s charisma did not work on me but I still want to share my impressions of his speech with you.
The first ten minutes were spent on the CES 2012 organizer ranting about how Microsoft is important for this expo and presented Ballmer with a collection of 15 CES badges for every year of Microsoft’s participation. It is of course a heavy blow for CES to lose such a big partner and it can make other companies consider leaving too. But this fact does not affect us at all – we will still be getting news, announcements and releases.
Long before CES 2012 Steve Ballmer called 2012 the most important year for Microsoft ever so many naturally expected that he would reveal what the company is working on now. But he did not make any significant announcements it was a good bye speech going like: I am not sure what I am doing here but I am going to tell you once again about some cool stuff we have I hope you never heard of.
Another ten minutes were spent on a demonstration of basic WP7 and Mango features. During the voice control demonstration the phone missed one of the words but the speaker was insisting on everything working fine. A bit later they showed us a bunch of already announced WP7 phones and it was also boring.
Then they showed Local Bing search in action and told us that together with Yahoo Bing covers 30% of search requests in the US. It is not that big a deal actually especially after seeing in the Vegas airport every arriving person receives a Google greeting and an opportunity to download the latest Google Maps and a number of apps.
Most of the presentation was dedicated to Windows 7 and the best devices using this OS – I don’t think there is any point retelling what he said as you can go to any electronics store and see everything with your own eyes.
The speaker than moved to Windows 8 and the audience gasped. We were shown a tablet prototype on Tegra 3 that was earlier presented at the NVidia event with the exact same words. The main feature is that the lock screen can be any image you want and you can slide any line to unlock e.g. a picture of a chair – you slide along a leg to unlock. It is a funny feature but nothing more.
Then there was a presentation of Windows Store – an application store by Microsoft. The company is trying to catch up with Apple here. Nothing special to report - just Microsoft’s own app store.
Probably the main piece of news there was is that Kinect will become available for Windows and… that’s it. Other parts of the presentation concerned the Metro UI in to get to all company’s products. Yes, all of them.
So, all in all, for over an hour Steve Ballmer was not saying practically anything we had not known already. It also felt like there was nothing else to say. He did not give any figures on mango sales (there are almost none) and no figures on WP7 sales in Europe (same story). I can go on forever enumerating things he should have mentioned. I had a bad aftertaste after this presentation although it illustrates the state of the industry today. Companies do not have any precise plans for 2012 but still feel like they need to promise something but have nothing real to tell us. These presentations are a reflection of 2012.

Nokia – Seller of Stale Goods

This Nokia’s presentation was extremely American – Nokia’s CEO Stephen Elop was trying to sell us stale goods the ay Americans do: with pomp and a smile. You think I am joking? Just watch the video:
I know I have already said a lot about Nokia in the first part of this article but please bear with me. I think it is very interesting the way Nokia presented their new flagship. For starters, let’s see what it is: it uses Nokia N9 and Nokia 800 design with a slightly bigger body, it has a 4.3” 800x480 display, a 1.4 GHz CPU (while other modern WP7 phones have 1.5GHz processors), and mere 512MB of system memory. The only upsides is the decent 8MPix camera and a not so bad front camera. And that’s pretty much it.
The speaker was aggressively selling this phone to the audience. But never mentioned the two main facts: when and how much. Nokia was trying to make us buy a pig in a poke. The price and the release date is everything. But apparently Nokia did not want to kill the initiative in the crib and decided to keep it a secret. The aggressive promoting means it will cost at least as much as its rivals because of all the ads.
There can be only one conclusion to what Nokia 900 is – a complete and total failure. On the US market it is a double failure because the Nokia brand is long forgotten here. My colleagues were asking ‘What were they doing all this time? This very simple and ordinary phone?’ So Nokia 900 is the best the company could make for 11 months they have had and it is a total flop. The company did not keep a single promise – there are no exclusive add-ins to WP7, no superior photo quality (HTC Titan II really ruined everything for Nokia with its 16MPix camera – Nokia 900 has only 8MPix and will cost the same). Nokia was selling a PR product and ranting about the importance of the US market. They said nothing at all about how they were going to survive this year and it is the most relevant question – Nokia is sinking faster than before. The gap in technology and quality with the competitors is turning into an abyss and obvious to regular users. There are no signs of improvement of any kind. What Nokia did is announced a copy of the first HTC Titan which will be soon decommissioned. Enough said.

Nvidia Brings Tablets to Everyone

I expected a lot from the press conference given by NVidia, but during the first 30 minutes I was about to fall asleep. It is becoming the main topic of CES 2012 to show products we have seen before. To add to the trend NVidia highlighted Asus Transformer Prime based on Tegra3. The company insisted it is the first gaming tablet opening new possibilities, which is indeed revolutionary, but repetition makes it less startling. Feel free to read our review of Asus Transformer Prime if you have not done it yet.

Review of Asus eeePad Transformer Prime TF201

Now look at the slide, which states the obvious about tablets as the fastest growing segment of the mobile devices.

The audience woke up during the introduction of Windows 8 tablet with Tegra3 inside, but there was nothing special there. A better impression was produced by a 7" Android tablet from Asus with Tegra3. The characteristics are standard: ISP screen, one of the best cameras in the class, 1GB of RAM and Android 4.0. When the journalists were asked to guess the price they mentioned $300-$350, but the company said that in summer this model will hit the shelves at the price of $249. Asus must be impressed by the pricing of Amazon Kindle Fire and intends to follow suit, which is logical. This amount means that in summer we will get tablets for $150-$200 from the second tier manufacturers and by the end of the year Android tablets will cost $199. Android will be boosted similarly to smartphones before, but the only difference is that the OS itself will be equal to Apple solutions only in 2013.
Nvidia will cheer the growth of the tablet market irrespective of the OS as it helps to sell Tegra3. Surprisingly, but unlike in 2011 nothing was said about phones. The manufacturer remained tight lipped about its ARM plans and showed only tablets and Tegra3. I was surprised by this silence and would like to get more insider information about Tegra3.

Sony Phones and Accessories

The press conference of Sony officially proclaimed the death of Sony Ericsson as new models belong to Sony only. I described Ion for AT&T in another article, so I will not dwell on it any more. It is worth mentioning Sony Xperia S in the new NXT range. Sony keeps on experimenting with design and the new concept is labelled Iconic Identity for Sony products to be instantly recognizable. For example, in Xperia S we see a tiny transparent stripe at the bottom, which becomes bright during the call or other events.
In terms of hardware Xperia S is almost a complete copy of Ion. A 4.3" HD screen (1280х720) adds to a 1080p video recording and a 12 MP camera. The most interesting addition is NFC implemented by Sony in a different and smart way. In the box with the phone you get two tags, which can be programmed. For example, you come to the office, where this tag is on the table. Touch it with the phone and it goes to the silent mode or starts the mail app. It is called Xperia SmartTags. I think it is a useful way of popularizing this new technology. On the down side Sony left out the memory cards and we have only 32 GB of inbuilt memory. The price goes up as well, because it is Sony. SIM cards are now microSIM and the battery is inbuilt. All in all there are many small tweaks in the trend of iPhone.
I like accessories, which come together with the phone. Smart Wireless Headset pro is a Bluetooth headset with inbuilt memory and FM radio. If disconnected from the phone it can play the saved music or transmit radio broadcasts. It looks nice and gives two features bundled in one body.
SmartWatch fits almost any Android smartphone and shows weather forecasts, time, helps to manage music and so on. The gadget still cannot beat iPod Nano with a bracelet, but the Sony product must be cheaper.
This is everything i wanted to say about the first day at CES. Tomorrow the exhibition proper starts, so wait for pictures and videos of products. Don't forget to check our website.

Best phones 2011: Mobile-Review.com version

Our principle is simple – we only nominate the best of the best. Other reviewers often have so many nominations and categories that readers are left confused and don’t know which products are worth their time and money.
In 2011 we have scrutinized 375 phones (314 a year before) and only a small number of them got a full review. All our conclusions concerning this or that phone are made based on actual user experience not just some numbers on paper.
The winner in a certain nomination receives a yellow icon while other contenders for the category get silver and white icons for the 2nd and the 3rd places respectively.
Phones that disappointed us are out of the main competition with emoticons next to them denoting our sentiment towards them.
When creating nominations we tried to focus on what is important for regular user, what information would be useful to him. So the first category is Bestseller: we only needed to look at sales figures and select phones with the best functionality. Users have already voted in this category with their money and we only announce your choice. We did not include low range phones into this nomination as they always have very high sales. Instead we tried to assess a wide range of factors: general review (user reviews, expert reviews etc.), whether the sales were going up or down after the release. We have mixed price ranges to demonstrate the diversity of the demand on the market.
It may seem at first that bestsellers also have the best price to quality ratio making them so popular. But market laws often intervene and some phones cannot be distributed widely due to limited production capacity of the manufacturer or other reasons. Such phones cannot become bestsellers even though they offer a lot for little money. For phones like this we came up with Price/Quality nomination. In this category we use all our knowledge to select phones that offer most features for the smallest price – anyone can create a near perfect phone for the price of a sports car.
Since we put aside budget phones for the Bestseller nomination we needed another category for low range phones so we came up with Mass Innovation category. On the one hand we assessed the specifications and features of phones and their sales on the other. Unlike the first nomination here we don’t so much take the market situation into account but rather assess how innovative this or that budget phone how the market reacted to them with sales figures.
The last nomination is Image and it speaks for itself – this category is all about style and social status. It is about phones used to tell others who you are.
In terms of the market segments our nominations work as follows:

• Bestseller – business or image phones with most features.
• Price/Quality – optimum sets of features.
• Mass Innovation – inexpensive mass phones that nonetheless have something special to offer.
• Image – stylish, image phones.

All other notable phones that did not get into the competition get an emoticon depending on our assessment of their qualities. Once again we decided not to have a separate nomination for smartphones. The popularity of smartphones is growing rapidly so they are represented in all market segments.
Enough for ado – let’s now get down to the awards:

Bestseller

Amazingly, in 2011 the history repeated itself and the most popular phones were the 2010 phones or to be precise their 2011 reincarnations. In terms of sales the undisputed leader is iPhone 4s that has already broke every sales record. Following him in sales Samsung galaxy S2 which momentarily turned into the best Android smartphone and its sales soared although it has a long way to go to catch up with iPhone 4s. these two smartphones were the most desired products of 2011 and all other phones were a compromise with sales far lower than these two. In 2010 the winner of this nomination was iPhone 4 and judging solely by sales in 2011 we should have awarded the Bestseller of the year to its successor but we did not. The reason is simple: Galaxy S2 is a technological leap, it packs real next gen hardware, it is a 100% solid flagship and it has a great novelty value. So we gave the Bestseller of 2011 to Samsung Galaxy S2.
The second place goes to Apple iPhone 4s partly because we anticipated iPhone 5 so much but we will have to wait a little more.
The third place id not that exciting. In 2010 it went to HTC Desire and this year once again we were looking at HTC products for the third place nominee. Among HTC smartphones the most notable is HTC Sensation but it falls far behind the two leaders and the HTC brand has lost a lot of popularity recently. On the bright side the rest of competition does not seem to get any closer to HTC: Windows Phone 7 smartphones are boring and unattractive, the only MeeGo phone was crude and all is desperate in the Symbian land. So the third place rightfully belongs to HTC. The competition however mainly concerns Apple and Samsung and we have all reasons to believe it will be the same in 2012.
But the third place does not go to HTC Sensation as you could think. This HTC flagship was too unbalanced: very humble time on battery, the Sense UI was too complicated. All in all it does not look very good against the competition. The previous flagship Desire S, on the other hand, was a very successful model with an attractive price tag and it takes the third place.
In 2011 smartphones have finally became leaders in all segments. No one remembers regular phones anymore. A touchscreen has become a must and the hard button dial pad looks very obsolete today. There are those who still long for hard buttons and there is offer of combo phones with buttons and touchscreens but they will never become popular.

Price/Quality

Traditionally this is the land of the Korean companies who offer as much as possible for the smallest possible price. In 2010 the winner was Samsung Wave and amazingly this phone had a long life and even in 2011 it was still setting the bar for other phones in its price range. And although bada had very decent sales people wanted Android. LG did very good with their Optimus Prime one of the cheapest smartphones with decent functionality together with a good quality body and a comfortable screen resolution for Android (there are cheaper QVGA smartphones but they often encounter compatibility problems with software). This smartphone became a real people’s phone with record high sales and the first place we give it is well deserved.
There were a great number of new releases during the year but it was a year of smartphones and Android. Sony Ericsson released the unexpectedly successful Ray that combines good looks, style, good body materials with some pretty basic Android features. Most importantly the price was not too high and it takes the second place.
At first we wanted to give the second place to a 2010 phone but then we thought that novelty is more important. The contenders in this category were HTC Desire S, Samsung Galaxy Ace and… Samsung Galaxy S – that’s right the price for the first Galaxy S went so low that it was one of the most popular phones in 2011. It also received a lot clones with different processors, screens and so on. That is why give put Galaxy S on the third place.
In 2010 Galaxy S became the second in the bestseller nomination and the fact that it is still in our chart tells just how strong this product is. Two year of popularity on the mobile market is a really big deal.
When we were looking for contenders for this nomination we wanted to include regular phones as well but it turned out that in 2011 in terms of the price to quality ratio regular phones are no match for smartphones. This is evolution of the market – regular phones are simply dying out.

Image

There was no intrigue in this section as well. Apple iPhone 4s gets the first prize again as it had no competitors in this category.
There is no point to select the second or third best solution here, but we would like to mention a special model with its own face Motorola RAZR XT910. It will never become a bestseller and its image status is more appreciated by the manufacturer itself, but the new RAZR is difficult to ignore. Let’s wait and see how the market reacts to this handset.

Mass Innovation

Touchscreen phones came to the fore in 2011. They were offered by all manufacturers and included not only smartphones. It was possible to buy cheap phones with tiny screens or more advanced gadgets. Samsung became the king of this segment and for many its models became their first touchscreen phones. The best were not necessarily the cheapest ones, but middle of the road Samsung Corby II and Star II. They offer excellent value for money, but the strongest point here was the redesigned interface. Ordinary phones are very easy to use now. Our choice goes to Samsung Star II.
Music phones are becoming things of the past as even the most budget offerings get FM radio, memory card support and mр3. Nevertheless, it is still possible to stand out from the crowd, which was achieved by Nokia with X1-01. It is one of the most popular music phones, where this feature is clearly highlighted.
Protected models continued their development in 2011 and one of the most interesting solutions was Sony Ericsson Active. This is a smartphone with the special covering to work with the touchscreen in the rain.

Out of Competition

This is the most intriguing category, which combines heroes and antiheroes. Samsung made a splash with Galaxy Note. It combines a mobile phone with a tiny tablet for those who like to draw and take notes. It is almost an ideal companion for creative types.
Among Android phones we have to mention the first dual core handset LG Optimus 2x. It did not become an iconic solution due to excessive price at the start and slow software updates, which was an issue with many Android models.
The first gaming smartphone Sony Ericsson Play was several years late to the show. SE disappointed many by trying to rejuvenate an old project. Promotion was not enough and we ended up with zero sales and dust gathering on the shelves.
2011 did not feature many clear cut leaders. The majority were mentioned above. Blackberry 9900 Bold was noticeable with its touchscreen and QWERTY keyboard combined. Its operation time is miserably low especially for RIM. At the same time it clearly beats Nokia E6 in terms of keyboard quality and performance stability. RIM fans must be happy.
Unfortunately, Nokia is going downhill and due to its own managers it will take a miracle for the Finnish powerhouse to survive. We were shown too many flagships starting from the first and last Meego handset Nokia N9. This model scared not the rivals, but partners, who declined to purchase the phone in considerable amounts. At the end of the day Nokia manufactured only 100,000 items for the world market. It was logical in the absence of demand. An interesting OS in the buggy body was the major failure of 2011.
Nokia decided not to learn from mistakes and created another flagship 800 Lumia, which had the body of N9 with Windows Phone 7 inside. Another “flagship” had mediocre characteristics, costs a lot and sells poorly despite a colossal promotion budget. The future of Nokia depended on this phone, but we can now clearly say that it failed. Traditionally for Nokia you get a defect affecting operation time. The company promises to fix the issue in February. So far the developers are busy elsewhere. May be they are trying to add the language switch key in old models on Symbian.
There are many things we can criticize Windows Phone 7 for, but the main point is that it develops too slowly. At the same time there are positives too. HTC Mozart failed everywhere, but when its price was slashed to 200-240 Euros 9 months after the start of sales it became very attractive for consumers.
It is obvious that Symbian phones are outdated. Moreover it is negatively affected by lack of support and buggy apps. On the positive note we have to mention Galaxy Nexus as the first phone with Android 4.0 under the hood.

Users Vote

This year was predictable and somehow boring. There was no intrigue and key models were known even before their launch. The same happened in the tablet segment, where Apple iPad2 reigned supreme, while others tried to catch up without much success. The gap is too big so far. Subsequently we did not award prizes to tablets, but in our user vote you can express your opinion.
In this article we have a ranking of best products according to Mobile-Review.com. We would also like to know how you perceive the market and which products you like. Until midnight of December 31, 2011 you can add any model in the categories described above to participate in a final vote. You can also offer additional categories. The voting will start on January 1, 2011 until the end of the month. Take part in the vote and offer your favorite models. Happy New Year!