Worth Noting

The following are recent developments:

 

• Mobile Phone Touchscreens - The market for mobile phone touchscreens using the advanced AMOLED technology will reach $4bn in value this year and $6.4bn in 2012, according to new forecasts from DisplaySearch. AMOLED will grow by 191% over 2010 to hit 128m units, and then rise by a further 66% to 212m units in 2012. In revenue terms, the total OLED market in 2010 was about $1bn and that included non-mobile products. A third of mobile phones will use touchscreen displays by the end of this year, according to another report, by Displaybank. They estimate the touch panel market size is to reach $10.42bn in value, a rise of 76% in 2011.
• Sprint Nextel Downgraded - Moody's Investors Service downgraded Sprint Nextel further into junk territory thanks to the company's heavy spending. The ratings agency cut Sprint's rating to Ba3 from Ba2 and attached a negative outlook. The ratings agency said the downgrade reflects its view that Sprint's credit profile, despite recent operational improvements, is likely to erode as the company spends a significant amount to modernize its networks and move to 4G. Moody's believes that Sprint's Network Vision plan will eventually achieve meaningful cost savings but is unconvinced that Clearwire will be able to bridge the gap and allow Sprint to continue offering a competitive 4G service until 2013 when Sprint's upgrade nears completion. Sprint is said to be considering supplementing its Clearwire 4G deal with its own LTE build-out and/or an alliance with LightSquared.
• New LTE Smartphone Offered - Verizon Wireless will offer its second LTE smartphone, the Samsung Droid Charge, for sale on April 28, for $300 with a two-year agreement. Verizon is still offering unlimited data for $30 a month with the Charge, which will also come with a free Mobile Hotspot feature for a limited time, allowing LTE connections with up to 10 Wi-Fi devices or five 3G CDMA devices. Unlike earlier Samsung Android handsets for Verizon, this one is taking on the carrier’s Droid branding.
• Texas Instruments has entered the touchscreen controller space with new models of its ultra-low power value line of microcontrollers, which now come with built-in support for touchpads at prices as low as 33 cents. TI is a leader in low power, low cost microcontrollers, but until now did not have specific models designed for touch panel applications. Freescale has already added touchpad interfaces for its Kinetis and ColdFire micro-controllers, Silicon Labs has the F9xx with the QuickSense library of common touchpad software routines, and IDT announced its PureTouch technology after acquiring touch panel specialists Leadis Technology in 2009.
• Barnes and Nobel Nook - Just three weeks after Barnes & Noble introduced a software development kit and tools for its Nook Color Android ereader/tablet hybrid, it unveiled Nook Apps, offering consumers more than 125 reading-themed programs optimized for the device. It also upgraded Nook-Color to Android 2.2 (but not Honeycomb) and expanded support for Adobe Flash Player and AIR. As well as books and reading apps, the new catalog includes games such as Angry Birds, and other features. At $249, the Nook Color is half the starting price of Apple's iPad 2. It has a color touchscreen, more general purpose than Amazon’s Kindle e-ink display, but less optimized for the primary application, book reading.
• Mobile WiMAX Chipset Shipments - Shipments of Mobile WiMAX chipsets reached 15m in 2010, up from 5m in 2009, according to Maravedis‟ 4Ggear Quarterly Report. "The 2010 surge in Mobile WiMAX device and chipset shipments is partly the result of the addition of 7.7m WiMAX subscribers during the year," said analyst Vikram Krishnamurthy. Meanwhile, shipments of LTE chipsets in 2010 were in low volumes, but are expected to reach 10m units in 2011. "There are now a large number of players in the baseband chipset landscape but consolidation is well under way. Some LTE chipsets have been sampled (Altair, GCT, Sequans and Cavium Networks), and others will follow in Q411 (Beceem, now Broadcom)," says the report.
• Acer Organizational Changes - Following the ousting of its CEO, partly because of slow mobile progress, Acer has restructured into two separate divisions, with the Touch business unit dedicated to mobile devices (smartphones and tablets). However, the Taiwanese firm warned that it expected its PC shipments in the second quarter to fall by around 10% from the previous quarter, following a similar sequential decline in Q1.
• Self-Organizing Network (SON) Technology - is emerging as a critical enabler for effective deployment of 4G mobile networks, potentially offering up to 40% opex savings for operators, according to the latest report from the Heavy Reading.