Author: Tero Kuittinen

Wall Street believes that BlackBerry (BBRY) will ship between 300,000 and 800,000 new BlackBerry Z10 smartphones during the February quarter. This is the most widely discussed number for BlackBerry’s fiscal fourth quarter, but it’s far from the most important metric. Since the Z10 was not shipping to the U.S. market and was available only in select countries for a fraction of the quarter, the Z10 shipment figure is going to be open to interpretation. Instead, the firm’s total subscriber base is the number that is going to be highly relevant. This is because in the August quarter, BlackBerry added 2 million net subscribers and in the November quarter, the company lost 1 million subscribers. Late autumn appeared to mark a dramatic turning point. The subscriber growth in emerging markets slowed down so much that it no longer was able to offset the base erosion in the U.S. and the U.K.

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Sony’s (SNE) Xperia Z was probably the biggest surprise hit of February. It sold out substantial early shipments from Japan to France and is currently dominating the U.K. smartphone market outside the Apple (AAPL) – Samsung (005930) axis. This has been a very painful experience for HTC (2498). The launch of the new flagship HTC One was recently delayed until the end of March and it looks like April shipment volumes are going to be very thin, most likely due to camera module sourcing problems. Wasting no time, Sony is now rolling out its cheaper Xperia models at lower than expected price points. The Xperia SP will launch in some European countries below 400 euros and the Xperia L will debut below 300 euros in Netherlands and Italy.

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Interestingly enough, several Bitcoin-related apps started spiking on the Spanish iPhone market over the weekend. Bitcoin Gold shot up in the Spanish iPhone Finance category from 498 to 72, and another app called Bitcoin Ticker zoomed from 526 to 52 in just one day. A leading service called Bitcoin App jumped from 194 to 151 between Friday and Sunday as Spaniards brooded over the Cyprus crisis.

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StatCounter’s February tracking results indicate that the iPhone’s global mobile OS market share continued the surprising growth it showed also in January. StatCounter’s trend data reflected disappointingly soft iOS market share in November and December, which dovetailed well with the softer than expected iPhone sales volume Apple (AAPL) reported for the Christmas quarter. But over the past two months, Apple’s mobile market share climbed from December’s 23.3% share to 27.2% in February. This sharp bounce seems to have stopped Android’s strong market share gains, which extended from May to January. Between January and February, the Android OS share stalled at 36.9%.

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Over the past couple of days, “SimCity” has eclipsed “Pope” in global search volume. Electronic Arts has finally created something that has captivated the world with an intoxicating melange of drama, tragedy and sick humor. Too bad all of these elements emerge from EA’s project management, not the game itself. The first stage of the SimCity fiasco stemmed from how EA’s servers spectacularly failed to cope with the entirely predictable launch week traffic. But the next stage is potentially even more damaging. On EA’s Answer HQ website, one of the most heated discussion threads is now about whether the entire pathfinding and traffic management systems of the game are badly broken.

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The latest setback for the new HTC (2498) flagship model is the announcement by UK retailer Clove about the device’s British launch getting delayed from March 15th to March 29th. This come after a long series of brokerage research notes discussing the component sourcing problems HTC is having. It has seemed clear for months that early volumes of the HTC One are going to be thin through April; but it now looks as though March shipments could be minuscule.

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BlackBerry (BBRY) executives have a history of making condescending comments to analysts, but this time, Thorsten Heins has really broke new ground in haughtiness. At an Ontario conference, Mr. Heins was asked about the low-end smartphone market and he firmly stated that his company is “not going to get into $50-60 segment,” Bloomberg reported. This, of course, is pure straw man construction. Nobody thinks BlackBerry should or can get into the $50-60 price segment. Mostly because that price segment does not exist. There are no $50 smartphones.

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Nokia (NOK) this week revealed that it will end up paying €500 million — about $650 million — in net Windows Phone licensing fees to Microsoft (MSFT) over the remaining contract period. At the moment, the platform support fees Microsoft pays to Nokia are larger than the licensing fees that flow to the opposite direction. This will soon reverse and by the time the Nokia-Microsoft contract expires, Nokia will end up paying $650 million to Microsoft. This raises two questions: What is the remaining contract period and what happens after that?

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HTC’s (2498) share price dove 6% yesterday as investors fretted over whether February revenue might drop below NT$12 billion. Well, it did. In fact, it plunged all the way to NT$11.37 billion. This was a -27% decline compared to January… and January revenue was down -28% from December. That January tumble was a pretty normal seasonal drop, but this February decline definitely isn’t. As a sign of that, HTC’s January revenue was down only -7% year-on-year — meanwhile, February sales were down -44%.

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UK’s leading mobile phone retailer Carphone Warehouse has cut the monthly package price of the BlackBerry Z10 from £36 to £29. That amounts to a £160 (or $240) price drop over the life of a 24-month contract. Vodafone is also now offering a package deal that is £72 cheaper than its previous one. The new monthly price for BlackBerry’s (BBRY) Z10 at Carphone Warehouse is on par with the monthly package for Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone 4S, so it now sits squarely in the mid-range smartphone price bracket. The Z10 does retain a £29 upfront fee since it’s a new model; older handsets such as the iPhone 4S come free with a two-year deal.

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Amazon (AMZN) has had a hell of a ride in the tablet market. The first Kindle tablet rode on the wave of Kindle eBook readers’ success and made a big splash. That turned into bitter backlash due to software and hardware quality problems, however. Now, Amazon has managed to stage a remarkable tablet comeback. According to a Yankee Group survey, Amazon is the second most desirable vendor among consumers planning to buy a tablet.

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There is no end to the humiliation the old Motorola guard is being forced to endure. Google’s (GOOG) top executives keep making disparaging comments about Motorola handsets. Many Motorola leaders have effectively been hounded out of the company via insulting contract negotiations. And now a legendary Apple (AAPL) star, Guy Kawasaki, is being brought in to teach the grandmother of the cell phone industry how to dance the Harlem Shuffle. Kawasaki is mostly known for his contribution in developing some of Apple’s most successful computer marketing campaigns, notably for Macintosh back in the Eighties.

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Another quarter, another half a million contract subscribers gone. T-Mobile USA’s contract customer losses and revenue decline that make good headlines, but the really interesting number in the latest T-Mobile report is the big drop in prepaid customer additions. A year ago, T-Mobile added 220,000 prepaid customers. This past Christmas quarter, that number dropped to 166,000. It is not hard to find the major reason for that decline: T-Mobile’s branded prepaid ARPU sky-rocketed by 11% in one year. Let’s examine the situation. T-Mobile continues bleeding contract customers… so it opts to focus on premium prepaid service pricing, which in turn damages prepaid customer adds and increases churn. And now T-Mobile has both a contract and a prepaid crisis in its hands. How does this make a lick of sense?

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The new Ooyala study on video consumption patterns highlights just how much tablets are now outperforming the PC, smartphone and video game console platforms when it comes to long-form video watching. The long-form video category is the lucrative Holy Grail of content delivery. Videos longer than 60 minutes tend to be feature-length movies, the product category that commands a stiff premium compared to network TV shows or online comedy clips. Apple (AAPL), Samsung (005930), Microsoft (MSFT), Nintendo (NTDOY), Sony (SNE), Netflix (NFLX), Amazon (AMZN)… who isn’t trying to hit the jackpot in the digital movie distribution competition?

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