Parchayi.com – Personal Finance Simplified

Nokia, a company that spends more on R&D than most of it’s peers has decided to abandon Meego, it’s next generation smartphone Operating System and semi-abandon Symbian, the heart and soul of most of it’s current phones.

Official Statement about Meego:

Under the new strategy, MeeGo becomes an open-source, mobile operating system project. MeeGo will place increased emphasis on longer-term market exploration of next-generation devices, platforms and user experiences. Nokia still plans to ship a MeeGo-related product later this year.

Official Statement about Symbian:

With Nokia’s planned move to Windows Phone as its primary smartphone platform, Symbian becomes a franchise platform, leveraging previous investments to harvest additional value. This strategy recognizes the opportunity to retain and transition the installed base of 200 million Symbian owners. Nokia expects to sell approximately 150 million more Symbian devices in the years to come.

Huh? What does that even mean? How does Nokia expect somebody to buy a Symbian device with that nonsense about “leveraging previous investments to harvest additional value“.

And for Meego, that sounds like the death knell. I wonder why they are even bothering to produce that oft delayed Meego phone anymore. Are they taking insiration from the Kin?

This is fantastic news for Microsoft though. With Apple and Android quickly taking over the smartphone market, Windows Phone 7′s future was sort of uncertain even though the product itself showed promise. With Nokia’s might behind it, WP7 is here to stay.

The only thing that AT&T iPhones can do over Verizon’s is simultaneous talk and data. Otherwise Verizon has the better offer. Unlimited data, like I currently enjoy on my Droid X, 3G Mobile hotspot available (probably the same deal as the Droids) and Facetime over 3G.

But with LTE devices around the corner, will the iPhone do as well as analysts expect? My guess is it will. I know a lot of people who suffered with AT&T when the original iPhone launched and have been suffering for years as they upgraded their iPhones with bad service. But they wouldn’t give up their iPhones.

Disclaimer: Own AAPL and VZ

I’ve been following all the product announcements at CES and amongst the major players, the most interesting devices are both from Motorola - the Motorola Xoom tablet and The Motorola Atrix phone. Both these are one step ahead of everything else out there.

How or why the Atrix landed on AT&T instead of Verizon first is surprising (maybe due to the Verizon iPhone rumors) but it should hit Verizon soon as the Droid Bionic. Anyway after the split from Motorola into Motorola Mobility, the flaling company is in a lot better shape. Not only that, the company has been doing very well with their lineup of android phones.

And the next two monster devices should keep that momentum going. The iPhone is expected to hit Verizon and that could provide a boost to both Apple and Verizon. It is possible that the news is probably mostly baked into the stocks already and if you are from the buy on rumor, sell on news camp, you might want to be prepared to dump those tomorrow.

I’m holding on to my AAPL holdings for atleast a little while more. I might add some Verizon – the 5.5% dividend looks good even though it is a lot less than the 7% just a few months ago before the fast rise of Verizon stock prices.

Disclaimer: I own no stock in any of the companies mentioned in the article except Apple. I do own a Droid X which so far has been great.

I’ve been following the Apple “Back to Mac” event live on blogs and news sites and just saw the new 11.6″  Macbook Air. It is a small notebook and starts at $999 – which is the price of the current lowest end Macbook. So it meets my definition of netbook – a small and light notebook that is available in the price range of a low end laptop.

I was disappointed that OS X Lion will come Summer 2011. That is a long way away. But the app store coming in 90 days is good news. If you’ve been following my Apple posts, I sold a third of my Apple stock when it reached $280 and I plan on selling another third at $375.

With the way Apple has been performing, I would say the stock is currently a buy but I’m uncomfortable with being so heavily invested in a single company. So I’m not adding to my Apple holdings anytime soon.

Let’s start with the disclaimer that I own Intel Stock. After this acquisition, which I will try to fathom as I write this post, the stock is back down below the dismal level I bought it at. When I bought the stock it was with the thinking that “it can’t go lower than this” and for a while it hasn’t. Until they overpay for a company that makes a mediocre product.

I can see geeks joking everywhere that Intel bought McAfee because the bloatware that McAfee sells is second biggest driving force for CPU upgrades after Windows. And CPU upgrades are good for business at Intel. But the real reason might just be one or more of the following

1. Diversification. Intel wants to move up from just being a hardware company, maybe?
2. Some future in-processor security mechanism. However McAfee is not a great acquisition for that purpose. They could have bought out one of the smaller players if it were just for the security aspect. A combination of 1 and 2 is more likely to be the driver.
3. They think adding McAfee will improve profitability down the line. McAfee has revenues of $2 billion and growing with margins of 80%. But I don’t see any common ground here where the acquisition will save costs. So either McAfee was seriously undervalued or the deal will bring major improvements to something Intel has in the pipeline.

As an investor I’m not exactly sure this is a good thing. It might be but I’m skeptical. I would have been much happier if they would have bought some smaller security vendor and thrown the Intel weight behind that to get people to move away from McAfee/Symantec instead. Intel spent more than half it’s cash on this deal. Maybe their headquarters being a stone’s throw away makes it easy to merge and form Intelton, CA.

Whatever it is, hopefully this foretells less malware in our future?

AT&T has ended unlimited data pricing on all devices including the iPad. The $30 unlimited plan has been replaced by the options of $15 for 200MB or $25 for 2GB. This may be good for AT&T in the short term but this is a long term negative for the consumer as data consumption is only growing as smartphone adoption increases. Also, Verizon is considering similar changes to their data plans. Already on most devices and plans, unlimited really meant 5GB.

Notable exceptions were AT&T’s plan for the iPad and Sprints upcoming 4G plan for the HTC EVO.

What does this really mean? It means that the HTC EVO seems a far superior choice than the new upcoming iPhone because Sprint’s plan is cheaper and unlimited. As it is Sprint’s plans have been better and cheaper than other carriers for a while but anybody who has experience with Sprint customer service a few years ago never wants to go back. After this change they might consider giving Sprint a second chance.

As a side effect (hoping for reduced data usage) of this AT&T expects to  introduce tethering for the iPhone at an extra $20 per month (without adding any more data, What?) to coincide with the launch of the new model. This has been a long time coming with promises of it ‘coming soon’ made three years ago when the original iPhone launched. US is the only country with tethering missing for the iPhone in the world. This should be have been an embarrassment for AT&T who also cannot get the phone to work right in major metros like New York.

Just a few days ago AT&T introduced new smartphone early termination fees. My assumption is that AT&T doesnt want a mass exodus to Verizon when a new iPhone launches on Verizon later this year or next year. But now I realized it also prevents people from defecting to Sprint when they get hit by data overages.

Final conclusion is that this is bad news for the consumer, not so good news for AT&T and Apple (especially in case of the iPad) and impending bad news for Verizon when they introduce tiered pricing themselves. The only winner here is Sprint. Maybe. AT&T claims that the tiers are based on what people actually use but I’m not sure I believe that and going forward as we start watching vidoes etc. on our phones and mobile devices – I’ve been using Youtube often on my phone – things are only going to get worse.

As for stock, if you can handle the risk buy Sprint. It has been on a roll after recent upgrades but if the first to 4G works out for them, the stock might to well. If you are less risky buy Verizon because over the long term they will get an iPhone. I’m not so sure about AT&T’s prospects if they lose their iPhone exclusivity and they will also be the last to market with 4G. Even the CEO says the people will not switch to other providers because they are locked in and not because AT&T will provide better service.

Disclosure: I own no stock in any wireless company. I do own Apple stock but no Apple products. I am happy with my Windows Mobile HTC Touch Pro which can be tethered and also has wifi hotspot.

As soon as the event started the stock started dropping but picked up steam as the event went on, especially after the pricing was announced. As a stockholder I am happy with this device. It is everything that was expected at a cheaper price than expected. The most expensive version is $829, well under $1000 and the cheapest starts at $499.

However I’m slightly disappointed that there were no announcements other than the iPad. No new iPhone. No news about ending iPhone exclusivity. The good part was that the iPad is unlocked so you can use it with any provider, not just AT&T and the web browsing deal with AT&T is good.

As a consumer, I would wait for the iPad 2.0 because this version has no webcam, no real connectivity except wireless (aka not so hot for presentations, connecting to TV etc.) and no integrated memory slot.

I’m not sure how serious a competitor this is to the kindle because I’m not sure how many people use the Kindle’s data connection to download books. If the data connection is not that often used, then the $499 version is a serious threat to the Kindle because it is full color, has a bookstore and much more than the Kindle or other book readers can possibly offer. However I’m not sure how the display does while reading (it is 1024*768 = blah) as compared to the eInk display on most book readers.

Overall I’m happy with the pricing and options and I think the stock is headed up. But not up as much as if Apple would end exclusivity with AT&T and bring in Verizon (or Sprint, or even T-Mobile if they want to stick with GSM) on board for the iPhone and the iPad.

Oh and the device uses Apples brand new 1GHz A4 processor, a result of their acquisition of PA Semi. From the demo it seems like this is a perfectly capable processor maybe more so than the other 1GHz processor out there – Qualcomm’s Snapdragon. Maybe the next iPhone will run on one of these? If they can make this processor maybe they can switch Macs to their own processors in the far future?