India-based mobile gaming developer and publisher Zapak Mobile Games made an announcement a couple of days ago that it has now passed the 100 million user download mark from all of its game titles on the Nokia Store. How many of Zapak’s game titles so far on Nokia? Over 350. The company notes its huge increase from 50,000 download mark passed just 14 months ago.

Currently ranked first on India’s Nokia Store, Zapak discloses that its most popular game is T20 Cricket 2012 with 7.76 million downloads, with Border War Face Off at second place with 5.83 million downloads. Nokia India representative Gerard Wego believes that Indians love games. With over 80 million downloads occurring on the Nokia India Store every month, one of its most popular categories is gaming.

Besides having its games on the Nokia Store, Zapak also showcases its games on its mobile site. A Reliance Entertainment Digital (the parent company of Zapak) representative told us that the mobile site has roughly three million unique visitors every month. The team will focus on creating local content that can be connected with its Indian audiences.

When it comes to mobile games, Reliance Entertainment Digital is eyeing a bigger market than just India. The company has made its presence felt in Canada, the US, as well as Korea and Japan. Its international gaming division Reliance Games – which primarily builds smartphone games – has announced its full acquisition of the mobile gaming division of Funnel Japan and the majority acquisition of Korean gaming studio Bluesom a month ago.

The big picture, the representative said, is to cater to the first generation of mobile device users in India while strengthening the company’s footprints in the international market.

(Image: China Radio International): Nokia’s Shanghai store is now shut, as shown on that small piece of paper taped to the door.

Back on April 1st, Nokia (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK) announced that it’d be closing its flagship Nokia store in Shanghai. But it was no April Fool’s joke. It’s the latest in a series of shutdowns of the phone-maker’s failing retail storefronts. The Shanghai store is – well, was – its largest remaining shop.

Unfortunately for Nokia, not many people really noticed or cared that the shop is closing. The ‘Nokia Flagship Store SH’ account on Sina Weibo has had only 938 reposts of its “Goodbye Shanghai” post in the past three days. Trending Weibo posts generally get tens of thousands of interactions. But the account only had 4,251 fans anyway.

The Nokia Shanghai store opened in 2007, one of about 10 worldwide. At that time, Nokia was still China’s top phone-maker with its Symbian platform. Then Android and iOS happened. While Symbian still has a surprisingly large user-base in China, all the traction is behind Android, and there’ll be an estimated 300 million active Android users in China by the end of this year. In contrast, Nokia’s stats for 2012 were disastrous in China, with sales down 79 percent throughout the year. Now Nokia is pinning its hopes on the Windows Phone OS, but it’s growing slowly.

In contrast, Apple has three major stores in Shanghai, and has rapidly expanded to have eight Apple Stores in four cities across mainland China.

Nokia’s flagship store on London’s Regent’s Street closed back in 2009.

(Source: Sina Tech – article in Chinese)

Japan-made messaging app Line is keen to chat up users in emerging markets by launching a version of its app for the budget Nokia Asha phones next month. NHN Japan says today that it’s “exciting news for all you Nokia fans” and highlights that this move is aimed at recruiting new Line users in Southeast Asia especially, such as Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Cambodia.

The announcement from the Line team today, as noticed by TheNextWeb, reassures Nokia Asha users that four types of sticker sets will come free with the app, and the Asha version will also include one-to-one voice chats. Line is already available on (the old) BlackBerry OS, giving it access to nations like Indonesia and helping the messaging app to fight against the iconic BBM service.

Line has over 100 million users so far, and is up against rivals old and new, from Whatsapp to WeChat. Indeed, both those have been available on Nokia’s Symbian platform for some time, so Line is playing catch-up.

Nearly 59 percent of Line’s users are overseas, and it has already been doing well in markets like Thailand and Taiwan (over 10 million in each) thanks to the iPhone and Android apps.

The Line app for Asha phones seems to have come about due to a specific deal with Nokia, though it’s not clear what are the terms of the agreement. A few months ago, Nokia revealed that Indonesia is its second-largest market in Asia.

Nokia’s Lumia phones weren’t enough to stop Nokia’s most disastrous China numbers ever. (Images: Techinasia.com)

If you thought Nokia’s (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK) China figures for 2011 were a disaster, you should see what just emerged today. Nokia’s China nightmare is clearly not yet over as the country’s growing middle-class continues to pick up iPhones and Android smartphones. That’s the picture painted by Nokia’s full-year 2012 report that came out today. It shows Nokia sales revenue down 79 percent in China from the previous year, and phone units plummeted 69 percent to a mere 4.6 million sold in the final quarter of last year.

The Nokia report details how Symbian is dying, causing dramatic drops in its Greater China numbers, and Windows Phone (WP) Lumia shipments are far from filling the gap:

In contrast, North America net sales and volumes were up quite substantively (phone units up 40 percent) mostly thanks to Nokia’s Windows Phone devices. While WP7 launched in China in March of 2012, and then WP8 last month, it appears not to have stopped Nokia from experiencing its worst ever annual report in China.

When we looked at Nokia’s end-of-2011 stats, the volume of phones sold was down 33 percent year-on-year, with 14.7 million units shipped into customers’ hands in 2011 Q4.

Nokia’s WP offerings look great physically, so there’s a chance that Chinese consumers will fall in love with Nokia all over again. But Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows Phone is still not an easy sell. Yesterday, Apple boasted of doubling iPhone sales in China in the past year, and the wide variety of Android smartphone price-points – boosted by lots of homegrown handset brands – is powering Google’s OS to what analysts say is 86 percent of 2012 Q4 smartphone sales in China.

With Nokia’s Lumia lineup up against all this, the Finnish company’s 2013 might be even more grim.

Indonesian developer Agate Studio, Nokia Indonesia, and Universitas Indonesia’s computer faculty have wrapped up their game development competition for the Symbian S40 platform called Mobile Games Developer War 4 (MGDW 4). It ran from June to December, and so we can finally check out the winners.

There were two categories for the competition – one for rookie developers, and another in the form of an open competition for Symbian S40 ‘full touch’ games. Here is the list of winners from the two categories [1]:

S40 Full Touch category

• Best gameplay: Kano from Shidec
• Best graphics: Miaw Venture from LynxProject
• Best cultural app: BalapEgrang from Frame
• Best educational app: Sakera Math Adventure from Solite Studio
• Best team: Pocong Escape from Otak Udang
• Nokia Asha Full Touch game of the year: Kano from Shidec

Rookie category

• Best gameplay: Daru: Lab Run! from Kernel
• Best graphics: Goniac from Popepo
• Best cultural app: Epic Run: Amazing Indonesia from Firebeast
• Best educational app: Sakera Math Adventure from Solite Studio
• Best team: Miaw Venture from LynxProject
• Most favorite: 17-AN: The Game from Sundae Cola
• Rookie game of the year: Sakera Math Adventure from Solite Studio

Nokia Indonesia representative Narenda Wicaksono said that the competition’s focus was not only to seek winners, but to also let novice game developers experience and learn to develop a mobile game product. The competition’s focus seemed to prioritize rookie game developers as the monetary prizes awarded to the rookie category winners were bigger than the ones awarded to the open category winners. The former category winners received IDR 5 million ($518) whereas the latter category winners received IDR 3 million ($311). For the game of the year awards, the rookie category winner received IDR 30 million ($3,109) with the open category winner receiving IDR 20 million ($2,073).

This was the fourth MGDW held by Nokia Indonesia and the second one that Nokia ran together with Agate Studio. Nokia Indonesia previously worked with Indonesian technology news site Chip and Universitas Gajah Mada students to hold the other two MGDWs over the last two years of the event’s history.

Taiwan’s Digitimes Research has a new report out looking at the smartphone landscape in mainland China. It states that sales of smartphones in China – across all platforms, like iPhone and Android – are expected to grow 137 percent year-on-year to 189 million devices in 2012.

It’s expected that 86 percent of fourth quarter sales in China will be Android phones (with 50.8 million Androids sold in Q4). For the year as a whole, that amounts to an impressive 157 million Android smartphones sold in China during the whole year, which is up 260 percent from a year ago.

The new report also signals a shift towards Chinese consumers favoring domestic smartphone brands, with local brands expected to account for 61 percent of China’s smartphone market in 2012 led by Lenovo. That syncs with Canalys data we saw last month which pointed out that China’s top five smartphone brands are, in descending order, Samsung, Lenovo, CoolPad, Huawei, and ZTE. That’s very bad news for the once-beloved HTC; as for other overseas phone-makers, only Samsung and Apple appear to be making a strong showing this year.

This all seems to be on a par with what Canalys said earlier this year. It found that China “accounted for 27 percent of the 158 million global smartphone shipments” back in Q2 alone.

[Source: Digitimes and Digitimes Research]

Nokia (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK) is having quite a disastrous time in China of late but it’s not going down without a fight. The Finnish phone-maker has just signed a procurement deal with 360Buy, China’s second-largest e-commerce site, that will see it buy 2 billion RMB (US$318 million) worth of Nokia phones in 2013.

The Lumia 920 now on 360Buy.

The huge buy-up covers everything from Nokia’s old Symbian phones to its newest and boldest Nokia Lumia 920, which runs Windows Phone 8 (WP8). The Lumia 920 was unveiled for China at the start of this month, and yesterday – coinciding with the 360Buy deal – it launched on 360Buy’s online mall. It’s selling there for 4,599 RMB ($731) in an unlocked state, with two versions ready to work with either China Mobile or China Unicom.

It’s not clear how much 360Buy will spend to market its haul of Nokia gadgets, but it should be good news for the Windows Phone platform. Earlier this year we saw that China already has 14 percent of the world’s WP users, but it’s still early days in the smartphone battle against iOS and Android.

[Source: iMeigu - article in Chinese]

Samsung Galaxy S3, Docomo’s Tokyo launch

According to forecasted numbers from analysts at iSuppli, 2012 will see Korean manufacturer Samsung (005930:KS) took the lead in the mobile manufacturing race. Preliminary figures for 2012 global shipments put Samsung as the top OEM, displacing Nokia which previously held that position for 14 years.

Samsung is expected to account for 29 percent of the mobile market in 2012, which is up from 24 percent in the previous year (see chart below). Nokia, on the other hand, drops to an expected 24 percent from 30 percent last year. Wayne Lam, senior analyst at iSuppli, elaborated on this changing of the guard in the mobile space:

Samsung’s successes and Nokia’s struggles in the cellphone market this year were determined entirely by the two companies’ divergent fortunes in the smartphone sector.

According to preliminary figures from iSuppli

How will Apple fare? The Cupertino company is forecasted to be a distant third, accounting for 10 percent of all global shipments. ZTE and LG round out the top five with six percent and four percent respectively.

If we drill down to the smartphone space, which iSuppli says has grown by 35.5 percent this year, you’ll see exactly where Nokia has failed. Where the company accounted for 16 percent of all smartphones in 2011, it will only account for five percent this year. Samsung, in contrast, will jump from 20 percent market share of smartphones to 28 percent in 2012. Its success this year has been largely due to its flagship Galaxy S3, which Samsung announced in November had surpassed 30 million units sold.

As for Apple’s smartphone shipments, those will stay about the same, up one percent in 2012 to 20 percent.

Photo: from Kompas

Nokia Indonesia’s Windows Phone apps competition, the Lumia Apps Olympiad, found its 20 gold medalists yesterday from a field of 428 competing developers. Here are four interesting apps from the event that stood out in particular:

PATION

From the Nokia Maps and Navigation API category, this app helps you look for hospitals and infirmaries in the country using keywords like names of hospitals, illnesses, or health services.

RumahSedap

The RumahSedap app comes from the fresh food e-commerce company, eRumahSegar. The app uses Nova magazine’s API to showcase cooking recipes for its users. It also allow users living in Jakarta area to also buy ingredients from RumahSegar.

Sakera Math

Solite Studio’s Sakera Math was originally a Nokia S40 game which recently won the Rookie Game of the Year 2012 at Mobile Games Developer War 4. Just as its name implies, players have to save 20 tourism spots in Indonesia from imminent danger by solving math questions on each dropping fireball.

DragManArds

DragManArds is a strategy game where you control swordsmen, magicians, archers, and other characters to fend off a swarm of enemies. The game is built by Own Games, which was also one of the winners in Ancol’s Coding on the Beach competition a few months ago.

Of course, there are other interesting apps that emerged from the competition as well. You can check all the winning apps’ pitch videos here.

[Source: Kompas]

Today Nokia Indonesia and local operator XL Axiata announced a partnership to help Indonesian Windows Phone (WP) users purchase apps through carrier billing. Nokia (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK) claims that this partnership with XL Axiata is the first of its kind in the Asia Pacific region.

Now Nokia Lumia and XL Axiata users can purchase apps straight from the phone’s Windows Phone Store and have those added from their phone bill. Or you can go to regular WP store for Indonesia to purchase apps using XL Axiata’s credits. So far there are around 120,000 apps available for the WP platform.

[UPDATED: The carrier billing cooperation is applicable for only Nokia Windows Phone devices at the moment, and not for other WP handsets.]

Both Nokia and XL Axiata haven’t disclosed the amount of money the sharing scheme gives to third party developers. On the WP platform as a whole, devs get 70 percent of app revenue, with Microsoft taking the rest.

This latest news could drive users make more WP app purchases as they now have more payment options besides using credit cards. This in the end could help developers earn more money from Nokia and the WP platform as well as convince them to build more apps for the Microsoft’s new mobile OS. You can check more information about the carrier billing scheme here.

[Source: Detik #1 and #2]

Indeed, Indian feature phone owners – such as those on the new-ish Nokia Asha phones (pictured) – account for over 60 percent of the app downloads since its launch on the Symbian S40 platform in August 2011.

Vuclip also has apps for BlackBerry, Android, and iPhone, so it’s able to target a broad range of individuals, though its service is still aimed mainly at emerging markets. The company claims to have 14 million monthly unique users and delivers over 20 million videos every day.

Not too many big-name video apps or sites even bother to cater to owners of low-power phones, but emerging markets still represent a keen viewership that’s a captive audience for brands. And so Vuclip – which is based in California and has four offices throughout Asia – mostly monetizes from advertising and specialist brand channels within its apps. Plus, those on other phones, like random JAVA-based creations, can still access Vuclip in the mobile browser.

The Vuclip app is here in the Ovi Store.

Nokia (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK) brought the first Windows Phone 8 (WP8) device to China today with the launch of its Lumia 920T on the nation’s biggest telco, China Mobile. It becomes the first Microsoft WP device on China Mobile (NYSE:CHL; HKG:0941), whose unique TD-SCDMA 3G network initially proved a turn-off for handset makers.

The Nokia Lumia 920T ships before the end of the year, and will cost 4,599 RMB (US$733) off-contract. The iconic phone – with a choice of black, white, yellow or red – should prove to be a boost for the WP platform in China, where smartphone owners overwhelmingly opt for Android or iOS.

In September of this year, China Mobile had nearly 40 percent of the country’s 202.18 million 3G subscribers, making it the leader by a not-too-great margin from China Unicom. But China Mobile has long struggled to get the hottest handsets due to its TD-SCDMA network, and is the only one of the nation’s three mobile telcos that can’t support the iPhone on 3G. But China Mobile president Li Yue was up to the task of polishing that turd:

Our close cooperation with Nokia is a key contributor to the success of China’s TD [ie: TD-SCDMA 3G] industry, and will further enhance the rapidly growing TD ecosystem. We are excited about this important next step in our partnership, and we look forward to creating an even more vibrant TD industry together.

In rough translation: We need more decent phones, so this is a huge relief.

The new Nokia Lumia 920T will come with some China Mobile crapware apps pre-installed, such as its service center app, and Fetion for group messaging.

Nokia president and CEO Stephen Elop was in Guangzhou for the event in partnership with China Mobile. The Lumia 920 in its more conventional WCDMA trim is expected to come to China Unicom soon as well.

As for rivals, HTC will unveil the 8X and 8S tomorrow at an event in Beijing, taking the two WP8 phones to China Unicom and China Telecom.

[Source: TheNextWeb, and Nokia]

Nokia is the only handset brand that has fully dedicated itself to the WP OS, and comes equipped with the company’s trademark apps like Nokia Here and City Lens. With the gift buying season almost upon us, Nokia might see a good reception from high-end Indonesian customers.

Nokia’s aren’t the first WP 8 handsets to be made available in Indonesia. The HTC 8X and 8S were launched earlier in November. We’re looking forward to hearing more information about Nokia’s plans in Indonesia during the upcoming Lumia launch on December 14th 4th.

Today we received the picture on the right from the folks at Nokia which teases an upcoming December 4th event in Indonesia, where Nokia is going to launch its Windows Phone 8 flagship phones, the Lumia 920 and 820. The picture tagline sports Nokia’s recent Time to Switch campaign which is targeted toward marketing its newest flagship Windows Phone 8 handsets.

A Nokia representative tells us that consumers will be able to pre-order the devices later this week. There are no further details about the prices yet, but as usual, we can expect them to be pricier here in comparison to the US price because of the country’s import tax.

Nokia would be the second maker to launch Windows Phone 8 handsets in the country. HTC released its Windows Phone 8 handsets, the HTC 8X and 8S, earlier this month. China might also see these Nokia handsets too, along with HTC and Huawei who are expected to launch Windows Phone 8 devices in December.

Some popular domestic-brand phones.

Over the past couple of years, Chinese companies have been cranking out smartphones like clockwork while global brands like Nokia and LG have busied themselves with losing market share left and right. The result, according to research firm Canalys, is that as of Q3 2012, domestic brands account for 60 percent of China’s smartphone market.

The top five smartphone brands are Samsung, Lenovo, CoolPad, Huawei, and ZTE according to the research firm. Samsung is a Korean company, of course, but the other companies are all domestic brands.

Whether this trend will continue is anyone’s guess. Lenovo’s recent performance would seem to be an indication of growing Chinese dominance, as its mobile division has been kicking ass recently. ZTE, on the other hand, is bleeding staffers and money, and cutbacks to the mobile department (or straight-up bankruptcy) could lie in the company’s future.

[via Sina Tech]

L-R: The HTC 8X, the Huawei Ascend W1, and the Nokia 920.

An industry source in China, cited by Sohu IT and Marbridge Daily, says that six new Windows Phone 8 (WP8) smartphones are lauching in the country in December. The rollout will mark the debut of Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) revamped mobile OS in China, a mere eight months after the initial WP7 found its way onto the local market.

Three phone-makers will be spear-heading the WP8 launch here: Nokia (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK), HTC (TPE:2498), and Huawei. These are the six colorful contenders that they have lined up:

• Nokia will unveil the China-bound, WP8-powered Lumia 920, Lumia 920T, and Lumia 820 at an event in Guangzhou on December 5th. The model with the ‘T’ suffix is destined for China Mobile, and supports the requisite TD-SCDMA protocol for 3G.
• HTC will do a local launch for the 8X and 8S the next day in Beijing. The source claims that the models will go to both China Unicom and China Telecom. The 8X is expected to cost just over 4,000 RMB (US$636).
• Huawei will show its Ascend W1 phone sometime in mid-December. It’s not known which telco’s 3G network it will support. With a lowly 480×800 pixels screen, it’ll be the cheapest of the bunch at just 2,500 RMB ($400).

In June of this year we heard that the uptake of WP7 in China has been fairly brisk, and that the country is already the second-biggest market in the world for WP devices – with the US out front.

[Source: Marbridge Daily]

It seems clear in which direction Google Maps is heading in China. Down. New stats for Q3 2012 for mobile maps app market share in the country show Google Maps getting even more lost amidst strengthening local competition, losing nearly half its market share and slipping to sixth position – that’s down from second place in Q2.

The fall of the Google Maps app sees it leapfrogged this quarter by Baidu Maps, Mapbar, Tiger Maps, and Sogou Maps. Google now has, in this data from Analysys International, 9 percent share of the mobile mapping market in China, down from 17.5 percent in the previous quarter. This data covers all smartphone platforms, but not feature phone OSes such as Symbian S40. We put all that into a new pie chart for Q3 2012:

After earlier gradual drops, it’s not clear why the Google Maps app suddenly lost half of its share in just a few months. There might be no single reason. While Android is booming in China, various localized flavors of Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) mobile OS don’t come pre-installed with Google Maps, so Google’s mapping product doesn’t necessarily get to ride that wave of smartphone popularity here. Plus, the website version of Google Maps is partially blocked by the Great Firewall, which might give some consumers the idea that Google’s product is faulty or slow.

The other foreign competitior in this sector, Nokia’s (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK) Ovi Maps, had a bad quarter too, dropping from 7.3 to 5.1 percent share.

Autonavi is stagnant at the top, and Baidu’s oft-updated maps app is growing slowly but surely.

If you’re looking for Apple Maps that appeared recently in iOS6, it’s too early to figure in the chart for Q3 which runs from July to October. But clearly it has some very strong local competition to deal with, though Apple’s China maps might be boosted by being sourced from market leader Autonavi.

[Source: Eguan/Analysys International - article in Chinese]

Nokia Asha 309

Nokia (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK) launched two new models in its Asha budget phone series – the 308 and 309 – in Jakarta, Indonesia, earlier today. Both phones are priced at under $99. Nokia insists they are “full touch” smartphones, but as they run the ancient Symbian S40, some would say they’re just fancy feature phones. The pair come with only 2.5G (GPRS) connectivity, but its range of apps and price look well suited to its target market – young feature phone users who still want some fun apps.

The phones have a 3-inch touchscreen which is scratch resistant. The Asha 308 has dual sim cards, while the Asha 309 (pictured) has a single sim card slot and also supports WiFi. There are four main selling points, say Nokia, for the new phones:

1. Games: The phones come with 40 free games from the likes of EA, and also such as Need for Speed and FIFA. Nokia mentioned that the company is working with Namco to bring 20 more games to the table, with Rovio’s Angry Birds in the fold too.

2. Nokia Life+ provides users with articles about entertainment, lifestyle, women’s info, and more. This probably appeals more to women than men.

3. Offline Nokia maps: Jussi Nevanlinna, the global head of developer product marketing at Nokia, said that the new Asha phones use the same map feature-base as the pricier Lumia series. The Nokia maps app also has a newly-developed ‘nearby’ button which lets users know nearby places of interests. Unfortunately, the prototype Asha models at the event were not able to use this feature yet, so I couldn’t test them out. But the Nokia Maps app on the Lumia looks awesome.

4. The battery lasts a whopping 42 days on stand-by.

The new Nokia phones use the same Nokia cloud browser which claims to able save data plans up to 90 percent. Though there are always alternatives like Opera Mini if you don’t fancy that. The Asha phones come pre-loaded with the usual social network apps like Twitter and WhatsApp. The phones will be out at the beginning of the fourth quarter this year – which means next month.

Nokia Stats for Asia

During the launch event here in Jakarta, Nokia also shared some statistics. Here are a few Asia related stats:

• Indonesia is amongst the top 10 nations who are users of Nokia.
• China ranks number one (though surely for not much longer), with Indonesia a close second in Asia Asia Pacific.
• The Nokia Asha 305 is the number one phone in China according to its pricing point category, while the same phone is the number one phone in Indonesia in its segment.

For developers out there, these stats might be of interest to you:

• There have been 20 faculty roadshows run by Nokia across Indonesia. There are more than 12,000 Indonesian developers for Nokia.
• The Nokia Asha series, which is sold in only four countries – Nigeria, India, China, and Indonesia – accounts for 75 percent of the 8 million music downloads worldwide. From the 6.1 million Nokia browser downloads, 60 percent of them come from Asha.
• Globally, there are around 17 million downloads per day from the Nokia Store. 60 percent of traffic to the Nokia Store comes from the S40 platform.
• At the moment, there are nine Nokia developers that have received more than a million downloads of their apps.

Right now, with the Asha event wrapped up, Nokia is holding its 24-hour hackathon called HackNation to find the nation’s best S40 platform developers.

Shameless plug alert: There’s another day-long hackathon that local devs, particularly those in Bandung, might like to check out – our own Startup Asia Bandung Hackathon on October 13th and 14th. We hope to see you guys there!

Indonesia’s Merah Putih Incubator (MPI) together with Nokia will hold a 24-hour hackathon called HackNation. Developers will create mobile apps out of the available APIs to be used on the Symbian-based Nokia Asha ‘full touch’ phones. The APIs will come from Infokost, Lintas.me, BolaLob, DailySocial, KrazyMarket, and Mindtalk. Here are a few more details:

• Time and Date: Starting September 25th at 2pm to September 26 at 3pm.
• Venue: Four Seasons Hotel, Jl. H.R. Rasuna Said, South Jakarta, 12920
• Total Prize: IDR 105 million (US$11,000) to six winning teams. Each team comprised of a maximum of two persons.
• Registration fee: Free

For more information and registration, you can check it out here. You can also see the available public APIs there.

[Updated on September 21: The poster date is revised. Edo from MPI also noted that the competition is targeted towards people who are accustomed to Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME). Which means that developers of Java based mobile platforms or web based programming languages are qualified to join this competition.]

[Updated on September 25: We changed the headline too. Sorry.]

Alvin Yap, CEO and founder of TMG

Readers may recall when we discussed feature phone business opportunities in Indonesia with Andy Zain. Continuing that discussion, we spoke with Alvin Yap, the founder and CEO of mobile gaming developer TMG and KotaGames, about the monetizing strategy and opportunity from the feature phone market in Indonesia. Here’s what he had to say.

Can you monetize in the feature phone industry?

We found out that we monetize better than [social games provider] Zynga. Zynga monetizes about 1.2 percent of its monthly active users (MAU). Over the last thirty days, if we look at the monetizable users, we [monetize] anything from 20 to 25 percent. So that’s about 20 times higher than what Zynga does.

Of course in our market, users have less money to spend compared to Zynga’s market. Zynga’s average revenue per daily active users (ARPDAU) is about 0.046, ours is about 0.038. So we’re about 22 percent lower than Zynga. But because we monetize 20 [times] more people, we are actually higher in terms of revenue potential compared to Zynga. For more information you can refer to our online [data] (pictured below). So can we monetize? Hell yeah we can monetize.

What are some of the key reasons behind that?

With feature phone users, they have less money to spend, but they are more willing to spend. But why?

Number one, unlike you and I, they have no access to TVs, and to regular internet services. For you and I, when we see a game that we have to pay for, we immediately stop playing it. Why? Because we have a lot of other options. Instead of Warcraft, we can play Starcraft. Instead of Cooking Mama, we can play Diner Dash. We can play anything we want, we have so many options. Instead of paying for songs, we can download them for free, instead of watching a movie of $2, we can stream it online. But for regular feature phone users, where majority of the market does not have this privilege. That is why they are more willing to pay.

Number two is because it’s cultural. They are not internet service users, they don’t have the notion that everything is free on the mobile web, they don’t have that notion. So they’ve been so accustomed over the last couple of years paying for content, paying for SMS subscription, paying for horoscope, paying for everything. So this is a common thing for them, they need to pay for content. There are people like us who are used to getting things for free, why should we need to pay for this? I will never pay anything online before because I know that if I look hard enough, I will find these things.

Does this apply specifically to Indonesia?

[This applies] in all new markets, in all emerging markets, where there’s a big income divide. Where you have the elite, and the majority of the market. In majority of the market where they don’t have regular internet access. Where they’re not educated in terms of internet access, you will see the same situation. I would say that this is a common denominator in all emerging markets: Indonesia, Thailand, India.

How much money are feature phone users usually willing to spend?

For us, we sell virtual credits for anywhere from five cents (IDR 500) all the way up to a dollar (IDR 10,000). You will never see Zynga doing these types of things, for them the starting price maybe is from $5 (IDR 50,000). So we are pricing our group at a denomination that users can actually afford. But if you go to many services, they’ll think that this [the pricing scheme] is too small.

For regular mobile users, at any one point at a time, their total credit is less than 80 cents (IDR 8,000). So if you charge anything more than a dollar, then good luck.

How do you reach these users?

We work a lot with telcos. Telcos serve the biggest paying service for first time internet mobile users. By working with [telcos], we get visibility and users get to know who you are. There’s a fair amount of word of mouth as well. That’s why we’re not active on online blogs, we’re not so active on email marketing, or online media because it doesn’t work for us. Our target doesn’t live there.

We work together with handset manufacturers like OEM, Nexian, Nokia, Opera Mini. We work with stakeholders from the mass marketplace, but we don’t work so much with Apple because our target market doesn’t use Apple.

If we had to pick a handset manufacturer to work with, who would it be? Nokia for sure. It still commands the biggest market share for mobile feature phone. If we have to work with browsers, we don’t work with Mozilla, because our users don’t know about Firefox, but they know what Opera Mini is, that is why we work with Opera.

How do you get the visibility from that cooperation?

It can be anything, maybe when working with telco, then naturally if they go to the telco website or when they try to find services they will see KotaGames. Or if you work with a browser, then they will see you from the speed dial. So that’s how we get user visibility, that’s how you know about our service. Sometimes we do SMS marketing, sometimes for example on certain Nexian devices, you will see us on its bookmark whenever you go to its apps section.

What should a company do if they want to partner with telcos too?

Everybody’s open to partnership. I think the challenge is how you can derive value. They are not easy to work with, because many people I think don’t understand how telcos achieve their needs. Because so many people want to work with telco, so naturally it is very competitive. Not everybody will get [to] work with telco, but you just have to know how to position yourself and how to be different than the other guy.

It also helps to have a personal and long lasting business relationship with them, we’ve been in the industry [for] about two or three years, so we know several people, and it helps when getting in touch with the telco. For fresh companies, it could be difficult because you will not understand the internal dynamic.

What do telcos want?

Everybody wants revenue, so you need to have a service that can monetize. Every telco wants reduced churn. If you have a service that helps a user stay with a particular telco, then you will be very valuable, and they will want you because a telco earn money by the number of subscribers.

How many feature phone are online? Who are they?

There are around 180 million mobile users in the market with maybe 30 to 40 million mobile internet users because it is still so new to the users. And this is a good thing because the 30 million can grow to 80, 90, 100 million as we go on.

If you look at Singapore’s emerging market, most users were early internet mobile users. While in Indonesia it’s still in an educational process. One fundamental point is that [Indonesian] users do not want mobile internet, but they want services. They don’t give a shit about what the mobile internet is, but they want Facebook and they play games. But they don’t know that that it’s all mobile internet. That is why telcos have been very intelligent in selling Facebook packages, Twitter packages, Kotagames packages. Because users don’t understand the mobile internet, but they understand services.

I don’t know the exact mobile internet demographic, I know that [the majority] are definitely between 15 to 29, and they are 70 percent male. Why? The early adopters of technology, they are males. How many technology magazines do you see catering to female? What is the probability of you seeing a hot girl on a cover of tech magazine compared to a hot guy? Almost exclusively you see more of a hot girl, because the target market is men. So technology early adopters are almost [all] men. Beyond 29, they are more difficult to change, because they are not open to new stuff.

On the future phone market

Regarding the future of phone industry, Alvin said that in three to five years, he believes that Android will start to take over, but even when that time arrives, feature phones would still be in the market to the tune of 30 to 40 percent. Feature phones will get smarter until one day there will be a blur on the distinction between smartphones and so called dumb phones — we eventually will just have phones.

Alvin explained that just because Android devices will get cheaper, it doesn’t mean that people will automatically have $20 (IDR 200,000) to spend on apps. Their usual income will still be the same. This will then cause the smartphone users’ ARPU (average revenue per user) to balance out. So there will still be a divide between the elite and the majority in the future smartphone market.

By the way, TMG is now hiring. For more details you can take a look at the slides below.

[Picture source: akuinginhijau.org]

It seems that Singaporeans love Apple products so much, as almost half of the country’s smartphone users use iOS, while Android accounts for more than a quarter of users in second place. The same can’t be said in Indonesia – because iOS and Android users are the minority there with only 2 percent and 10 percent respectively.

The mobile software of choice for Indonesians is Blackberry, along with Symbian, with 27 percent and 10 percent. Both iOS and Android take the silver medal in Vietnam with 21 percent for both of them, beaten by Symbian with 26 percent. Inmobi might not agree with the result though as it has published its own report on the Indonesian platform landscape a couple of months ago based on the company’s ad impression. The report stated that both Nokia and Symbian OS dominated the market, with Android having the fastest growth, there was no mention of Blackberry OS.

If you’re wondering what the figures might be for. China and Japan, the infographic provided by App Annie might help. The infographic shows that both China and Japan are in the top three countries for iOS downloads, and no Asian countries made it to top three in terms of most downloads on Google Play, which is for Android platforms.

The report also shows what people use their smartphones for. Singaporeans, Malaysians, and Indonesians have the same answer for this: SMS. This activity accounts for more than 90 percent of usage in all three countries. Internet savvy Singaporeans then use their phones to also browse the internet, and do their emails, both accounting for 82 percent and 75 percent. While Malaysians and Indonesians prefer to simply browse social networks and make phone calls with their smartphones. In Malaysia, 69 percent love smartphones for social media usage, and 67 percent to make phone calls. While in Indonesia, the phone calls usage account for 71 percent, and 57 percent for social network browsing and sharing.

[Source: Tech Republic, picture: norebbo.com]

(Image via 591hx.com)

The hi-tech manufacturing hub around the city of Shenzhen, in southern China, is set to be hit with a rise in the minimum wage of 13.3 percent in 2013. According to Wired, that could cause something of a shockwave through gadget manufacturers in that area – Taiwanese OEMs like Foxconn [1], for example, which does the final assembly of so many Apple products – that might result in inflated costs for the phones, tablets, and other gadgets we love to buy.

But after weighing up the figures and considering the changing manufacturing landscape in China, we don’t think this’ll make too hard an impact on consumers. For one, Shenzhen saw its minimum wage go up in February this year already, by 13.6 percent, to stand at 1,500 RMB (US$236) per month. The anticipated hike for 2013 shouldn’t be a surprise, as the China Daily points out that, “Local governments are required to raise their minimum wage levels at least once every two years.” If it does rise 13.3 percent next year, probably again in February during Chinese New Year, then it’ll stand at 1,700 RMB ($268).

Other factors come into play, too. Shenzhen is not quite the manufacturing hub that it once was, and it seems that the international media haven’t yet followed the trail of gadget guts to newer tech hubs in, say, Jiangsu province in eastern China – where a great deal of Samsung, Apple, and Nokia components are made – or to much poorer inland areas where land and labor costs are significantly lower. And so minimum wages in other regions of the country are more of a factor than ever before.

Taiwan’s Foxconn (LSE:HHPD; HKEX:2038; TPE:2354) has blazed this trail, and it has already had a profound – and positive – impact on one town in central China’s Henan province where Foxconn’s two-year old plant now accounts for 48 percent of the province’s total exports. And others have moved too. Acer was making about 30 to 40 percent of its notebooks in the municipality of Chongqing by the end of last year; Philips opted for Chengdu in neighboring Sichuan province; others, such as Dell, are shifting to central China too, and are even looking towards ‘shipping’ by train directly to Europe from China’s amply hilly bosom.

So, the Shenzhen minimum wage hike is good for its factory workers – so long as greedy local landlords don’t screw them for extra rent once again – in an area that’s definitely not cheap to live in. But labor costs in other areas of China need to be taken into account as well, and so gadgets shouldn’t see noticeable or alarming price hikes in the coming year.

2G vs 3G vs Wifi

Among all the mobile visitors to Baidu, we also see a strong trend in greater 3G usage, now up to 15.6 percent of pageviews, up from just 6 percent exactly a year ago. If those visitors are broken down by iOS and Android versus everyone else, it should be no surprise that 3G usage wins out:

Phone brands

Apple accounts for a strong 8 percent of such visits to Baidu sites, which is impressive for just a few models of iPhone and iPad. That makes it the third most-used brand of mobile device, by Baidu’s observations. Nokia still (though not for much longer) reigns over Samsung:

Breaking down the Android space, it should be no surprise that Samsung and HTC rule the roost. Huawei is a very strong third, with 9.8 percent; but that’s down a bit from the previous quarter. The smaller homegrown phone-maker Xiaomi sure is making an impact, with its one single model now accounting for 4 percent:

But the iPhone remains the king, just as it was when I last looked in 2011 Q4. At that time, the iPhone was the biggest model observed visiting Baidu, with 4.48 percent, but now it has rocketed to 9.6 percent in the newest stats. The Xiaomi M1 makes an appearance as well:

Mobile OS

Android is, as we expected, now bigger than ever before – the new stats show that 21.4 percent of all Baidu’s mobile hits were on Android devices. The Symbian S60 platform, as seen in many recent Nokias, holds on to a shrinking third spot. But the presence of the generic “feature phone” label, and other JAVA-based OSes like MTK and S40, shows that non-smartphones – like the Nokia 5233 that’s ranked second only to the iPhone in terms of popular models – are still widespread across China. That gives smartphone makers a lot of scope for growth.

Changing Telcos

The search giant is seeing a sea change in the dominance of China Mobile (NYSE:CHL; HKG:0941) – it’s now seriously ebbing away, flowing to a rising China Telecom (NYSE:CHA; HKG:0728):

For the full PDF report, head to the ‘Baidu Open Mobile’ page.

Google’s loss is – as with search – Baidu’s (NASDAQ:BIDU) gain. When we looked at data from the same source for 2011 Q4, Google Maps had 25.2 percent market share of the mobile mapping scene. This time, in 2012 Q2, it’s down to 17.5 percent (see the chart below). Baidu Maps has gone the other way, climbing from a share of 11.7 percent to 17.3 percent.

But both those companies are still being bested by the Chinese firm Autonavi (NASDAQ:AMAP), which remains the market leader. Albeit with pretty stagnant market share in the country. But with Baidu recently rolling out free in-car voice navigation, it’s clearly hunting down Autonavi. Here’s the scene in full in 2012 Q2:

Overall, the market research firm found that the mobile mapping market grew 33 percent from the previous quarter – now up 206 percent year-on-year. The “accumulated accounts” stat in the graph below is an approximate analysis of actual user numbers of such apps. Analysys claims that maps apps have now hit 50 percent penetration amongst phone users in China.

[Source: Analysys International (1) and (2)]

Opera, the maker of the popular and web and mobile browser, has shared some interesting statistics with us. Asia is pretty big so we took the liberty of focusing on three key countries/markets: China, India, and Indonesia. Opera has had presence in these markets before mobile internet was a big thing, and since 2008, it has at least a million users in each nation (regrettably, we don’t know the exact user total).

The following infographic, designed by Piktochart, details popular sites accessed via Opera browsers and we’re pleasantly surprised that Mobile9, a startup based in Malaysia, was listed as number eight in India. As you might expect, each country’s list has its fair share of local sites. Google has a dominant showing as well, ranking within the top three for China, India, and Indonesia.

As far as the mobile internet is concerned, Nokia is still the top brand. Sony Ericsson and Samsung are the only non-Nokia phones within that particular section. Note that the stats and figures in the infographic may or may not be an accurate representation of these markets as a whole, but the numbers obtained from Opera users certainly are interesting!

The Top Brand Awards 2012, conducted by Frontier Consulting Group and Marketing magazine, wrapped up last night at Hotel Mulia, Jakarta. The award lists extensive brand categories in Indonesia ranging from food products to automotives. Here we bring to you a brief overview of the tech category winners:

Online Shopping Category

The winner for the new category ‘online shop’ is Tokobagus.com with an astounding 47.5 percent of the vote, making it a clear winner compared to runner up Kaskus with 15.6 percent. It’s quite interesting that e-commerce giant Multiply didn’t make it into the top four. Third place goes to Berniaga.com with 9.2 percent and fourth place to Bhinneka.com with 3.3 percent.

On this occasion, Ichwan Sitorus, the PR manager of TokoBagus shared some of their recent stats via Kabar Bisnis:

• There are millions of advertisement listings, with about 70,000 to 100,000 new daily ads.
• Daily number of visitors is 800,000 to 1,000,000.
• Monthly transaction value is reaching IDR 1.4 billion ($148,000) to 1.5 billion ($158,000) in 2012.

Mobile and Smartphones Category

In the mobile phone category, Nokia is champion with an impressive 54.2 percent, leaving the rest of the pack behind. The other runners-up didn’t even reach ten percent. They included second place Huawei with 8.5 percent, third place Samsung with 4.8 percent, and fourth place Nexian with 4.6 percent.

Now on to the smartphone category, did Samsung or the iPhone win it? No. Indonesia definitely loves Blackberry as it is the victor against Nokia in that category with 40.7 percent and 37.9 percent respectively. Samsung and Nexian took third and fourth places with 6.6 percent and 3.9 percent. Apple’s iPhone was fifth place in the vote with 3.8 percent.

The winners didn’t change much for both the mobile phone and smartphone category from the 2011 awards. The only difference in the mobile phone category is that Sony Ericsson fell from third spot in 2011 to fifth spot in 2012. iPhone had a similar fate in the smartphone category, dropping from third place in 2011 to fifth place in 2012, overtaken by new player Nexian.

Notebook Category

In this category the resounding champion is Acer with 42.1 percent. Second and third places go to Toshiba and HP with 15.9 percent and 13.8 percent respectively. Apple is in fourth place with a meager 6.1 percent. They’re all in the same exact positions as in 2011.

About the Top Brand Survey

The Top Brand survey was conducted among a total of 3,250 random respondents from eight big cities in Indonesia: Bandung, Jakarta, Makassar, Medan, Semarang, Surabaya, Balikpapan, and Pekanbaru. Respondents are aged 15 to 65 with an average expendable income per month of between IDR 750,000 ($79) and IDR 3,500,000 ($370). For the complete list of winners, you can see it here.

It has been another record-breaking quarter of smartphone sales in China with more than 42 million shipped in the country in Q2 2012. That’s from the newest report by the analysts Canalys. That represents 199 percent year-on-year growth in smartphone sales in China, and 32 percent up on the previous quarter.

Canalys also notes that:

China accounted for 27 percent of the 158 million global smartphone shipments, compared to 16 percent for the United States.

Samsung (005930:KS) remained the top smartphone vendor in China with 17 percent market share of sales. (Backing up web impressions stats we looked at last year showing that Chinese consumers love the Samsung Galaxy SII). But it can’t be complacent, as its sales were pretty flat. In second-, third, and fourth-place are, respectively, ZTE, Lenovo, and Huawei – all local brands. Lenovo saw astonishing 2,665 growth in shipments – but then it’s always easier to improve on a previously crappy performance. Apple fell to fifth place despite being up 102 percent year-on-year. HTC grew 389 percent, mainly on the back of its new Desire V phones which look to be replicating the success of the first Desire model. Nokia and Motorola both fell sharply.

Here’s all that condensed into our one simple graphic for China [1]:

The one primary winner among all this is Android, Google’s mobile OS, which is now on 68 percent of all smartphones sold globally. Apple’s iOS, by contrast, is on just 26 million of them.

Samsung is on top worldwide with “over 45 million” smartphones sold – that’s 35 percent of the pie. Apart from Taiwan’s HTC, no Chinese brands cracked the top five. Yet. Interestingly, that differs from IDC recent report for the same period that declares ZTE a new-comer in the global top five smartphone brands.

[Source: Canalys; via TechCrunch]

Nokia pushing its new WP7 devices, like the Lumia 800, in China. (Images: Techinasia.com)

The mobile ad platform AdDuplex has released new stats that suggest that China is now the second-largest nation of Windows Phone (WP) users in the world – despite Microsoft’s new mobile OS only launching officially in the nation in March of this year. The figures show that China appears to be home to 14 percent of all WP enthusiasts, according to collated ad impressions, behind only America’s 26 percent share:

Though this is no measure of sales, it’s interesting that China’s share of hits on the WP-exclusive AdDuplex platform has more than doubled since the same stats were looked at for January 2012. Even at that time, a couple of months before WP7 even rolled out in China, the country was still in joint fifth place with six percent:

Microsoft is boasting that its WP OS has over 2,000 Chinese-made apps ready for users, so they won’t miss out on one ounce of QQ-ing, Weibo-ing, or Taobao-ing. Plus, Nokia’s good-looking Lumia 800 and 900 models are piquing the interest of local phone buyers – but we’ll have to wait a while to see some hard and official sales figures.

AdDuplex was founded by Lithuanian-born geek Alan Mendelevich, and is an in-app cross-promotion and ad platform.

[Source: AdDuplex blog]

Nokia (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK) introduced its new series of the Nokia Asha line today. They are the Nokia Asha 311 3.5G-HSDPA, the Nokia Asha 305 Dual SIM Easy Swap, and the Nokia Asha 306 Single SIM Edge + Wifi. Unlike its predecessors, these do not have physical keyboards, but they still use the same Series 40 OS.

Nokia claims that the Asha series should no longer be categorized as feature phones because its capability stands closer to smartphones, something like a smartphone lite or smartlite. Martin Chirotarrab, the president director of Nokia Indonesia, said that because the phone uses the Nokia 2.0 browser, users can now access the internet three times faster, and the battery life is now much more efficient too.

Chirotarrab also claims that the new phones can also reduce internet data usage by 85 percent through its automatic compression system, meeting the demand of average Asian customers.

There’s also great news for entertainment lovers out there as users can download any Electronic Arts game for free for 60 days after purchase and also download music for six months.

Nokia Asha 305 is priced at IDR 849,000 ($85), while the Nokia Asha 306 and 311 still havent’t been officially announced and will be available in stores this month.

[Source: Kompas.com]

This is great news for all phone app startups out there, as Indonesia has an impressive developing market for both smartphones and feature-phones. Smartphone impressions grew by a remarkable 123 percent, showing a faster rate of growth than the feature-phone market at 93 percent.

In terms of Indonesia’s OS market share, Nokia OSes (33.4 percent) and Symbian (22.5 percent) stay as the top platforms in Indonesia, though they are slowly losing their share to Android. Android has the strongest growth in the last one year with a strong gain of 8.3 percent share in terms of ad impressions, now reaching close to 10 percent market share while both Nokia OS and Symbian OS are slowly losing their shares by -1.0 percent and -5.3 percent respectively.

In terms of the top devices based on their ad impressions share, Nokia still dominates Indonesia with 56 percent. The five most popular devices all come from Nokia as well, led by the X2-01 with 4.6 percent.

Phalgun Raju, InMobi’s regional director and general manager for Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and Taiwan noted:

Indonesia continues to show strong growth rates as one of the most mobile-centric markets in this region. Smartphone adoption will continue to ramp up quickly – with Android leading the way – allowing brands even more creative and engaging opportunities to connect with their audiences.

Here is the infographic in its entirety:

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

Before we get to the shiny charts: a quick reminder that this is data gathered based on Baidu pageviews, so it doesn’t apply to the entire Chinese mobile web browsing market. That said, Baidu has such a huge percentage of China’s overall search market share that Baidu’s numbers are likely very representative of overall internet trends in China.

OK, let’s get to it! Here are the top twenty handset models in China, by percentage of Baidu pageviews (note the Android handsets in green):

That iPhone stat has nearly doubled since we looked at Baidu’s previous report for 2011 Q4. At that time the iPhone’s lion’s share was at 4.48 percent.

It’s interesting to look at the massive contrast between this and the data we saw yesterday, which indicates that iOS users account for just 5.8 percent of mobile web browsing. Of course, the data is not contradictory; rather that big iPhone bar is the result of Apple’s limited handset offerings — there is only the iPhone. In contrast, note that while no single Nokia handset is anywhere near as popular as the iPhone, eight of the top twenty handsets are made by Nokia.

Diving more specifically into Android handsets, the fastest-growing segment of China’s smartphone market, we can also see some interesting things:

One of the most interesting things about this graph is the popularity of Xiaomi’s mi-one (also called M1) handset, apparently the fourth-most-popular handset model despite being only available in limited quantities and being generally difficult to find. That certainly bodes well for Xiaomi’s future device launches. Also of note are HTC and Samsung, whom eagle-eye readers (or just readers who can count) will note each have five devices on the top twenty list. Overall, there’s no one handset that’s blowing any of the others out of the water here. It will be very interesting to see how this graph looks a year from now, once the market has been flooded with the low-priced, Android-based smartphones we’ve been writing so much about lately.

Looking first at brands in general, Baidu shared this chart, which we have taken the liberty of translating below. Remember, this is the breakdown for phones that are used to browse online, so it doesn’t account for anyone whose phone never crosses the Baidu homepage. It includes both smartphones and feature phones, so long as those feature phones are capable of browsing Baidu.

Notice that the top three most popular net-browsing phone brands are:

1. Other
2. Nokia
3. Off-brand knockoffs

Collectively, those guys account for more than 60 percent of the web-browsing mobile phone market, according to Baidu’s calculations. I knew off-brand and Nokia phones were still a major factor, but I’m a little surprised they continue to make up such a massive percentage of the web-browsing market.

Looking at the breakdown of mobile phone platforms used to access Baidu, the outlook is pretty similar. Did you expect Android to be in the first place spot? Guess again:

Look at that! Android is still pretty small, and there are nearly as many people browsing the web with outdated versions of Symbian (S40) as there are with iOS. Bet you didn’t see that coming, did you?

It’s quite clear what direction the Chinese market — heck, the world market — for smartphones is headed, of course. I would expect that next quarter we’ll see Symbian continue to shrink and Android continue to grow. But these numbers are definitely a worthwhile reminder of where we are right now in China. The mobile internet is here to stay, but don’t assume that everyone accessing it is doing so from an Android or iOS smartphone, because it turns out a majority of them actually aren’t. Yet.

[via Baidu's Q1 2012 Internet Trends Report]

Samsung looks for more success in 2012 with Galaxy III

A new report from Gartner claims that because of decreased demand from Asia, worldwide sales of mobile phones dropped two percent in the first quarter of 2012 on the same time the previous year. The overall total for the first quarter was 419.1 million units shipped, according to the research firm.

Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner, explained:

Global sales of mobile devices declined more than expected due to a slowdown in demand from the Asia/Pacific region. […] The first quarter, traditionally the strongest quarter for Asia – which is driven by Chinese New Year, saw a lack of new product launches from leading manufacturers, and users delayed upgrades in the hope of better smartphone deals arriving later in the year.

Looking at the breakdown of mobile vendors (see interactive chart below), however, it should be noted that not everyone did poorly, far from it in fact. As we mentioned previously, Samsung (005930:KS), who displaced Nokia as the top mobile maker in the quarter, saw a whopping 25.9 percent increase in units shipped over last year, accounting for 40 percent of the Android market while no other vendor could surpass 10 percent. Not to be outdone, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) saw a very productive quarter as well with its sales growing 96.2 percent thanks to strong iPhone sales in China.

Gupta noted when speaking to Business Week that the market for feature phones and low-end handsets has declined significantly with consumers waiting for better smartphone deals. We hate to point fingers at Nokia (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK) again, but its sales dropped 22.7 percent. The breakdown of operating systems (as you can see below) shows that while Android and iOS have skyrocketed, Symbian has plummeted. It’s notable that RIM didn’t have a particularly good quarter either.

While it may have looked like a good strategy to target the so-called ‘next billion’ by focusing on feature phone offerings for emerging Asia markets (again, sorry Nokia…), it appears as though consumers in those markets might just be waiting for something a little ‘smarter.’

The Infographic of the Day series visually expresses important stories from Asia and the world of technology.

Mobile ad platform InMobi has been busy these past few days crunching ad impressions stats from across Asia, giving us insights into growing smartphone usage in various countries. Now it’s Hong Kong’s turn, where mobile advertising grew 656 percent from Q4 2010 to the same period at the end of 2011. But the picture in Hong Kong is a bleak one for Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), whose iOS presence in the Chinese SAR fell 16.1 percent; in contrast, Android seemed to grow by a staggering 36.8 percent, and is now the dominant mobile OS in Hong Kong by some margin.

Smartphones as a whole now account for 80 percent of all of InMobi’s observed advertising impressions, squeezing down features-phones – or “advanced phones” as the company calls them – from 38 percent at the end of 2010 down to just 20 percent at the end of 2011.

It’s all in interesting contrast to InMobi’s stats for Vietnam, which we looked at last week – but of course, Hong Kong is a technologically much more advanced market.

There’s also good news for Samsung (005930:KS) in there, as it now has the first- and third-most popular phone in Hong Kong. Here’s the full infographic, which you can click to enlarge:

InMobi says that of the more than six billion ad impressions it served in Q4 2011, 5.6 billion were on feature phones [1], and only 0.4 billion were on smartphones. For those of us who live in more mature markets, it may come as somewhat of a surprise to find that Nokia (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK) is the dominant phone manufacturer in the market, one which is still dominated by feature phones. As you can see below, even though Nokia is the dominant handset maker by far, its market share is shrinking, while Samsung (005930:KS) and other Android phones appear to be on the rise, but Android still only accounts for 2.6 percent of the market overall.

Vietnamese users also differ in their media consumption habits, as mobile is their preferred media channel (35 percent of their daily media time), over television (25 percent) and PC (18 percent), according to a survey conducted by InMobi [2]. The company’s regional director and general manger in Southeast Asia, Phalgun Raju, noted that an upswing in mobile online shopping can be expected in Vietnam as well:

Our survey found that three-quarters of mobile web users in Vietnam have been influenced by mobile advertising when making purchases… In addition, we also found that 77 percent of consumers expect to conduct mobile commerce in the next 12 months – a 36 percent increase from where we are today.

Check out more details in infographic below, which nicely illustrates these important changes happening in Vietnam’s mobile sector.

Sony was perhaps the most consistent brand, ranking in the top ten in most regions

Japan’s Nikkei BP Consulting has released the result of an interesting Asia-wide brand survey today. Its “Brand Asia 2012″ rankings span many industries, but has a number of insights into key trends surrounding the movers and shakers in tech in the region.

The survey focused on 60 global brands, as well as 40 regional for seven of the eight countries (regional brands for China, for whatever reason, were not included) [1].

Given the recent woes of Nokia (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK), it may come as a surprise to many that the company ranked atop the brand rankings for India, Indonesia, and Vietnam, and second in Thailand. This was observed last year as well, and expect Nokia to continue to hold significant mindshare in emerging markets as it tries to win over ‘the next billion.’ But in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, Nokia did not appear in the top ten.

It’s interesting to contrast this with Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), which was the standout in more mature markets, ranking as the top brand in China [2], Japan, and Taiwan, and ranking second in South Korea. Compare that to India, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand, where Apple didn’t crack the top ten.

We’ve talked about the diversity of Asia before, and certainly these result seem to indicate a sort of economic dichotomy. Surprisingly, it was only Sony (NYSE:SNE) that was consistent across all regions, as it was the brand that was ranked in the top ten in the most regions, seven of the eight. According to the report, “Although the company continues to be a source of downbeat news… in Asia Sony has a global brand asset to be proud of.”

As much as we talk about market share for these players, particularly in the mobile space, studies like this are certainly an interesting reminder of how the general population sees these brands. The rankings are below, but I encourage you to check out the full report for even more details.

New stats for mobile mapping clients used in China show that Google Maps has, for the first time ever, lost its leading position in the country, losing it by a fraction to Autonavi (NASDAQ:AMAP).

Beijing-based research firm Analysys International found that Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Maps app now accounts for 25.3 percent of mobile client usage, pipped by Autonavi’s 25.5 percent. In the industry as a whole, the accumulated number of map accounts was at 135 million at the end of 2011, up 34.6 percent on the previous quarter.

When we last looked at the stats from the same source for 2011 Q1, we saw Google Maps dominant with 46.3 percent market share. But by the end of that year that was nearly halved.

Looking at 2011 Q4 and Q1 side-by-side (see the two pie charts below), we see a great deal of growth for Baidu’s (NASDAQ:BIDU) map app, quadrupling its market share; while Nokia’s Ovi maps lost ground somewhat – though not as badly as its failing phone sales would suggest:

(Note that Google Docs butchered my manually-entered numbers: 25.5 and 25.3 percent are the actual figures).

Since the stats come from the same research group, there should be constant methodology applied, and it should give a fair representation of which apps Chinese consumers are turning to for their online mapping needs. Note that the figures don’t include which services are uses within various social media apps, such as LBS apps like Jiepang, which might otherwise make Google and Baidu appear stronger relative to Autonavi.

Google has been struggling in China for some time, and it became markedly worse after its making a stand against web censorship in mainland China. When we last looked at search engine market share figures, they revealed that Google has sunk to third place in China below Sohu’s (NASDAQ:SOHU) Sogou.com.

[Source: Analysys International]

Reuters is reporting that its poll of analysts indicates that Samsung’s (005930:KS) cell phone sales for the period of January through March exceeds those of Nokia (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK), supplanting the Finnish phone maker as the industry’s top manufacturer for the first time in 14 years. Reuters says that on average, analysts estimate Samsung’s sales for the period to be about 88 million handsets, trumping Nokia’s reported 83 million.

For a closer look at how this shift in power took place, Horacio Dediu has estimates for Samsung’s per-quarter sales to compare with those reported by Nokia [1]. Dediu says that Samsung is estimated to have shipped about 85 million phones, surpassing Nokia’s 83 million, in line with Reuters afore mentioned estimates on the conservative end of the scale. As you might have guessed by now, Samsung’s big growth advantage over Nokia is represented almost entirely by its growth in the smartphone space. See Dediu’s chart below which breaks each makers sales down into feature phones and smartphones:

What’s remarkable here is that in a time when one would expect all handset makers to be gradually shifting energies away from feature phones to smartphones, Nokia’s smartphone business has shrunk from 24 percent of its total handset portfolio in Q3 2010 to just 14 percent in Q1 2012, according to Dediu. He adds:

The bet Nokia made many years ago was that there would be a continuing, substantial business in the “low end”. And low end meant feature phones. This strategy was still in evidence last year under the moniker “the next billion” users.

With regards to Asia, there is of course potential in that strategy. But as we’ve written here before, Nokia has found difficulty in China over the past year, and will be looking to new leadership and Windows Phone 7 to help it bounce back. But don’t be surprised to see Samsung get comfortable in the number one spot. It’s hard to imagine Nokia rebounding to overtake them given the current trajectory of both companies.

Nokia (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK) has just wrapped up a launch event for its WP7-powered phones in Beijing. With an emphasis on localized features and Chinese apps and content, Nokia’s CEO Stephen Elop (pictured above) demoed the Lumia 800C and Lumia 600C, which will both launch soon on China Telecom’s CDMA 3G network.

The Lumia 800C, running Microsoft’s WP7 OS, will launch on March 31st and cost 3,599 RMB (US$570), which is a little cheaper than rumors predicted. The budget 610 model will come later “in Q2 2012” with no word on price for the moment. There was no mention at all of an anticipated Lumia 719 handset.

China Telecom's Wang and Nokia's Elop hold up Lumia 800C phones.

China Telecom (NYSE:CHA; HKG:0728) was given a lot of air-time as well at the Nokia event, with the telco’s president, Wang Xiaoxhu, taking to the stage at one point, brandishing a Lumia device and shaking hands with Mr Elop (pictured right) at the same time. Mr. Wang later said he’d been using the Lumia 800 for a day-and-a-half and was loving it. The ‘C’ designation at the end of the pair of Nokia phones shown today indicate they’re destined for China Telecom. Presumably, support for the two other mobile telcos in the country will appear in due course.

But the main message from Elop and Nokia was how in-tune the company’s new phones are with local users. There were demos of the company’s apps which, it says, are better suited to China than those found on iOS or Android. These included Nokia Music, Ovi Maps, Nokia Drive, and Microsoft’s Marketplace for WP7. On top of all that, Elop announced a program called ‘Be Top’ to reward Chinese app developers who make quality software for the platform.

Live on stage, Nokia’s Simon Leung said that Microsoft’s app Marketplace for China opens this afternoon, in readiness for the first buyers of the Lumia 800C phone this weekend. And, sure enough, here’s the localized WP7 store. Here’s the Sina Weibo app pictured in it:

A few finer details were mentioned as well, such as how the People Hub (i.e.: the contacts app) in WP7 lists people by the pinyin order – not Chinese character lexical order – of their name; which sounds like a useful and speedy way to find people’s names that’ll make sense to youngsters used to inputting pinyin.

After focusing on the phone, Nokia wheeled out some Chinese social media giants in the form of the CEOs of Sina (NASDAQ:SINA), Sohu (NASDAQ:SOHU), and Renren (NYSE:RENN) to join top execs from Nokia and Microsoft on stage; lots of chit-chat and mutual endorsement ensued. Note that Microsoft’s own event was last Wednesday, where the Redmond company emphasised how there are already 2,000 Chinese-made apps ready for WP7.

[Thanks to PopMobile on Weibo for its images and narrative, and also to Kane Gao (@chassit) on Twitter!]

We’re only two days away from Nokia’s (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK) desperately needed second-coming in China in which it will launch a couple of Microsoft WP7-powered phones. One news site, WPDang, has it on good authority that the Nokia Lumia 800 will be set at the official price of 3,699 RMB (US$585).

This pertains to the Lumia 800c model which is CDMA, and is therefore heading to China Telecom (NYSE:CHA; HKG:0728). And while that would make the phone 700 RMB ($111) cheaper than the telco’s iPhone 4S with a one-year contract (at the cheapest 3G package entry point), it’s worth remembering that the Nokia phone, for all its good looks, doesn’t have anywhere near as impressive a screen (just 800×480 pixels) as on the latest iPhone.

That 3,699 RMB price-point, while cheaper than some thought, makes the phone look pricey up against an Android-powered Samsung Galaxy SII. That device will probably follow in the tracks of the first iteration in being China’s most popular smartphone in terms of sales this year.

Still, at least it’ll be cheaper than the utterly pointless Meego-powered N9 (that sports the same form factor as this Lumia 800), which hit the market at nearly 5,000 RMB last autumn.

Nokia is holding a launch event in Beijing on Wednesday (the 28th), so we’ll soon enough find out what the price will be, and if it has any special Lumia app treats in store for Chinese consumers. Microsoft held its own WP7 launch event last week in which it emphasised that there are already 2,000 Chinese-made app for its mobile OS.

[Source: WPDang - article in Chinese]

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) has just wrapped up its own launch event in Beijing for its new mobile operating system, WP7. It marks the official Chinese debut of the software, which will hit the shelves by the end of the month on new devices from Nokia, HTC, and ZTE.

Here are some of the event highlights, along with photos from various sources on Sina Weibo:

The hour-long launch focused on usability and readiness, emphasising that 2,000 Chinese-made apps – out of over 70,000 WP7 titles – have already been made, allowing potential switchers in China to be able to do all the social networking, gaming, and online shopping that they’d expect on a new smartphone:

Among the new apps was one on display from e-commerce site 360Buy (pictured below), and plus there are a number of updates to the early-bird Chinese WP7 apps that we looked at last summer:

WP7-powered phones from Nokia (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK), HTC (TPE:2498), and ZTE (HKG:0763; SHE:000063) all got a quick live demo:

China Telecom’s (NYSE:CHA; HKG:0728) deputy GM, Yang Xiaowei, hit the stage to explain in brief that his company will launch a CDMA version of Nokia’s Lumia 800 next week in conjunction with Nokia itself:

Weird interpretative dance. Apple doesn’t give you stuff like that!

ZTE’s contender will be this, the WP7-powered Mimosa:

HTC’s will be the HTC Triumph, which is a remake of the Titan phone:

Microsoft’s SkyDrive cloud service got some stage time, with the focus on its 25GB of storage compared to only 5GB on Apple’s iCloud:

That’s it for now. Nokia is expected to be in action this time next week launching its Lumia WP7 phones in China, probably with China Telecom, and maybe the other two mobile telcos as well.

[Most images from Popmobile’s Weibo page - thanks!]

Nokia’s (NYSE:NOK) CEO has told the Chinese news site 21st Century Business that its first Nokia phone will launch in China on March 28th. It is, said the Finnish firm’s new head honcho, “an exciting time.”

It’s the first clear indication of a date for the official launch of a Nokia WP7 handset in China. But unfortunately there was no word from Elop whether the upcoming launch would involve a mobile carrier or be sold unlocked. The first device is likely to be the Lumia 800 which has reportedly been tested extensively to ensure a smooth, localized user experience. The newest Windows Phone software update from Microsoft already added needed features such as Chinese text input.

But one Weibo user has found proof that Nokia might bring two models to the country soon: the Lumia 800 plus the 719C. That’s because, as pictured below, China’s telecom inspection department has approved both those models already:

Nokia is locked in an apparent race with HTC to launch the first official WP7 device for Chinese consumers. HTC (TPE:2498) started taking pre-orders for its HTC Titan – or ‘Triumph’ as it might become here – back on March 4th, but it might not be the first to actually get into people’s grasp.

When March 28th comes – or perhaps sooner if HTC gets its way – there are already crucial Chinese apps ready in WP7 form, such as Sina Weibo and Tencent QQ. Also, Microsoft has its Marketplace sorted out for China, complete with stricter rules about salacious or overly political apps.

Hit the comments to tell us what you reckon Chinese consumers will make of WP7, or if Nokia’s ship has already sailed now that so many folks love Android and iOS so much.

[Source: 21st Century Business - article in Chinese]

With China’s Congress in session, the Minister of Industry and IT, Miao Wei, has revealed that the country will not launch a 4G mobile network for another two to three years. Although 4G trials are currently underway in a few cities, the minister said that the timing was dictated by the building of the higher-speed network’s base-stations, which ought to exceed 200,000 by the end of 2013. And that’s when a nationwide roll-out might actually happen.

For now, China Mobile (NYSE:CHL; HKG:0941) will have to make do with its 3G network which uses the home-grown TD-SCDMA protocol that’s not used anywhere else in the world. This has made it tough to get killer devices onto the network – though it finally did last year, with help from the likes of Motorola (NYSE:MMI) with its customized-for-China Atrix phone. But the country’s leading mobile network needs another boost, prompting one China Mobile executive to hint that China Mobile will soon launch a Windows Phone 7 (WP7) device – that would most likely by a HTC or Nokia model. Both HTC (TPE:2498) and Nokia (NYSE:NOK) are racing to be the first to launch a WP7-powered phone in China, and so it seems that China Mobile will be in on the action.

That’s in contrast to China Mobile’s misfortune in not being able to persuade Apple to make a TD-SCDMA version of the iPhone. Nonetheless, just over 15 million locals use their unlocked iPhones on the network anyway, using mere 2G (i.e. GPRS) if they want to get mobile data.

In the interim, the IT minister said that China’s three mobile telcos will have to boost their 3G network in order to bring on more subscribers before the move to 4G. For the government’s preferred mobile network, the semi state-owned China Mobile, that means planning to have as many as 400,000 TD-SCDMA (3G) base-stations in three-years time – critical to a smooth handover to 4G. The country saw 80 million new 3G users in 2011, and the grand total now stands at over 127 million 3G subscribers out of a billion nationwide phone users.

But the future 4G landscape will be fragmented by differing protocols – just as was the case with 3G. China Mobile will use the LTE TDD variant (though it’s not a homegrown solution, unlike TD-SCDMA), while most American networks use LTE FDD. The former is better known as WiMax, and the latter as simply ‘LTE.’ China is pushing for LTE TDD to be the global standard.

[Source: HC360 Telecom news - article in Chinese]

Comparing the Q4 2011 stats with those from Baidu for the same period of 2010 reveals that the iPhone has surpassed any Nokia device for the first year ever. The old numbers (below) show that Nokia’s influence is dwindling as a whole, but Android (formerly grouped together into just one bar) is slowly gaining strength in China:

Here are some other key stats from Baidu’s report, which was released earlier this month.

Smartphone versus feature-phone usage shows that users of China’s two smaller mobile telcos, China Unicom and China Telecom, are more likely to be searching on Baidu from iPhones or Android smartphones, in contrast to the prevalence of all other platforms (eg: Symbian, a mass of JAVA OS devices, etc) that tend to be feature-phones on China Mobile:

3G usage more than doubled this year, growing steadily as more people switched from the very slowest mobile data. Indeed, we know that China saw 80 million new 3G users come on board last year:

Android and iOS users much more likely to be on 3G, which is no real surprise since many feature-phones do not support it. Interestingly, such smartphones are also much more likely to be used on wifi networks:

Nokia and shanzhai phones are still the leading brands being used to search Baidu, as was the case in Q4 2010. A rag-tag assortment of cheap shanzhai phones still account for 20.4 percent of such pageviews in the most recent stats – but that number is going down at quite a speed. Note from the second pie chart how the numbers are shrinking for the Finnish phone maker as well, dropping 13 percent in the course of a year:

Baidu’s stats are interesting, and reveal a lot of trends. We’ll check back in on these as new reports get released later in the year. I’ll admit I was astonished that Android wasn’t more prevalent on Baidu’s servers, as the last time we looked at smartphone usage figures in China (from another source) we saw that Android was more than twice as popular for web browsing as iOS.

Nokia’s supremacy shouldn’t be too much of a surprise though. Last summer we crowned Nokia as China’s web browsing king thanks to the humble Nokia 5230. But with Nokia’s sales figures tumbling so terribly in China, its glory days might be over. And this win by the iPhone is the start of that.

For the full PDF report – and others from 2010 and 2011 as well – head to the ‘Baidu Open Mobile’ page.

Nokia (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK) net device sales in the Greater China area shrank 18 percent from 2010 to 2011, and the number of devices sold dropped by 20 percent. Looking at net sales for phones by area, China accounts for 17 percent of revenue – down just one percentage point from 2010 – to make it the third most important area for the company. But, as China’s growing middle-classes switch to Android or iOS in growing numbers, Nokia’s situation in the middle kingdom is a lot more critical than its numbers suggest. Here are graphs we’ve made showing changes in devices sold (in millions) and revenue from 2009 to 2011:

The only number going up in China was net sales for the Nokia Siemens Network business, which saw 1 percent growth in the country. But the SEC filing – grab the PDF document here – notes that the acquisition of the majority of Motorola Solutions’ wireless network infrastructure assets in the middle of 2011 means that the year’s numbers are not directly comparable to 2010’s.

The global picture was no less gloomy, as Nokia posted a US$1.4 billion operating loss. The company sold a grand total of 417.1 million devices, down 8 percent year-on-year. Interestingly, its feature-phones suffered the least (down 3 percent to 339.8 million units shipped), while its smartphones – now using either Symbian or the WP7 platform – suffered the most, plummeting 25 percent from 2010 to 2011 to hit 77.3 million devices.

Nokia’s WP7-powered phones are due to hit China this month or next, giving the phones the rest of the year to rescue, perhaps, Nokia’s 2012 numbers.

Here are the full revenue and devices sold stats, with China highlighted in yellow:

Hedy is the English branding, while the Chinese name is ‘Qi Xi’ which is actually the official local brand for the soda drink 7-Up, so not even that is original.

Ripping Off HTC

The Hedy H701 (pictured above) is a very blatant rip of the HTC Desire S. On Hedy’s own Tmall online store (see it here), which links to individual Taobao product pages, it’s selling for 999 RMB (US$158). But I’ve seen prices vary wildly from 669 to 1999 RMB on other sites, so it feels like they’re just picking random numbers.

As is always the case with such ‘shanzhai’ phones, the software shown in the screenshots might bear no resemblance to what’s actually in the phone. But the heavy Android branding on the H701, and the general ease of sticking an Android ROM into a device, means that it could well actually be running a HTC Sense-flavoured version of Google’s mobile OS. The text claims that it’s running Android 2.3, but, very suspiciously, many screenshots on the store’s item page show a much older version with that white toolbar at the top. Live photos of the device only show it switched off, which is probably not a good sign.

The H701’s specs are nowhere close to the actual Desire S, sporting only a low-res 320 by 480 pixels screen, no 3G support, and a wheezy 640MHz processor.

Note that it’s probably stuff like this that keeps Alibaba’s Taobao on the US government’s piracy blacklist, despite the company’s repeated claims of it being an unjust assessment.

Ripping Off Samsung

We’ve seen that the real Samsung Galaxy phones are proving to be China’s top choice of Android handset, so it’s not too much of a surprise that Hedy’s other smartphone clone is of Samsung’s popular product. Dubbed the Hedy H601 (pictured above), it’s priced at 559 RMB and cunningly incorporates a few style elements of the iPhone 4, thereby sort of metamorphosing the Galaxy with Apple’s much-loved phone. Clever. Specs are something of a mystery, but it comes in either white and black.

Some photoshopped images of the device show the logo at the top, while on others it’s between the one hard-button and the screen – again a clear indication that veracity is tossed to the wind when you’re a shanzhai cloner. Live photos show the logo is up top, and also reveal a very grainy screen. You pay your money and you take your chance.

Ripping Off Nokia, Lots of Japanese Feature-Phones, etc etc

Hedy also makes a huge array of feature-phones. I’m not so familiar with these devices, but I spot one Nokia (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK) clone amongst its lineup, and my colleague in Japan sees another that’s strikingly similar to Emobile’s Smart Bar phone. There are probably more. The Nokia fake is the Hedy V001 (pictured above) which actually launched way back in 2009.

Although we’ve previously reported that the shanzhai phone industry might be dying out in China, there are still some audacious cloners who’ll fake, package, and sell whatever resembles the most popular phones out there. Cloning smartphones is tougher than doing so with feature-phones, but Hedy shows that it’s worth a shot, with apparently no copyright protection in sight. Unless you’re a Chinese company up against a western one.

This Chinese-made G'Five G303 has triple SIM card support - just the kind of thing that used to be really popular in India.

Indian consumers’ love affair with cheap and gimmick-packed Chinese phones seems to be over, as reports emerge that all ‘shanzhai’ phones are seeing sales figures drop to hundreds of thousands per month rather than the millions that were being bought in the recent past. About 10 million mobiles are sold in India each month.

To back that up, the most successful Chinese phone manufacturer in India, G’Five – an unknown brand in China itself – has seen its own sales plummet in 2011. The Shenzhen-based company – which makes about 300 handsets, and claims to launch a new phone every two weeks – caused a stir in 2010 when it soared to second place in terms of phone sales in India, claiming an astonishing 21 percent market share, surpassing Samsung (005930:KS) and threatening to usurp Nokia (NYSE:NOK). But G-Five’s 2011 sales were a sorry ebb from that zenith, down to 8 percent [1], with Samsung rising to second in its place.

If G’Five slips any further, it’ll fall back into the obscurity of hundreds of other struggling Chinese and Indian cottage-industry manufacturers. But it does plan a fight-back, expanding its feature-phone line-up – albeit some with very large screens – to encompass some proper 3G-enabled smartphones. These are expected to hit shelves sometime this spring.

If shanzhai phones do fail in India, they’ll be following the pattern set in China, where Shenzhen-based phone makers are shutting in huge numbers, forced out of business – or forced out of the city, perhaps – by a mixture of police clampdowns, quality concerns on the part of consumers, and fancier cheap phones from major brands.

The cause of the downfall of shanzhai in India is harder to pin down. A Sina Tech report speculates that although the Indian government brought in new security legislation in late 2009 to require all phones sold to have a legitimate IMEI number, that wasn’t the sole reason for the fall. Yes, that would’ve squeezed out some of the shadier operators, but that’s no explainer for why G’Five and some other legitimate manufacturers have fallen out of favour with Indian consumers. In April 2011, Nokia filed a lawsuit against G’Five [2] for allegedly copying certain Nokia hardware design elements, which might have put off some buyers.

A quick search of India’s leading e-commerce site, Flipkart, is very revealing of the future of phone brands in India. In the Flipkart category listings there are 509 feature-phones and smartphones, but not a single one from G’Five. Instead, the product line-up is dominated by Samsung and Nokia, with a good amount of telco-branded phones from Spice and Micromax as well. Not counting which telco phones might’ve been made by Chinese OEMs, there are only two Chinese-brand phones for sale on the site, both from ZTE (HKG:0763; SHE:000063).

But the rise and fall of shanzhai phones will not be decided on middle-class Flipkart, and will instead lie in the fate of the crush of punters who pack the Karol Bagh-area electronics markets, looking for bargains.

[Source: Sina Tech news - article in Chinese]

For many of us, it’s fun to dig into the specs of the latest gadgets. Power impresses us, quality impresses us; everyone wants the best smartphone. But how can we measure what is best? All too often, it becomes a numbers game, and that makes it easy for device manufacturers to hoodwink consumers.

Take, for example, Nokia’s recent and much-balleyhooed “41 megapixel” camera in the new Pureview 808 smartphone. The camera itself actually looks impressive — too bad it’s stuck in a phone running Symbian! — but the 41 megapixel number is nothing more than a branding trick designed to make people feel like the 808′s camera is better than other cameras because it has more megapixels. In fact, the 808′s camera is better than lots of other smartphone cameras, but the megapixel number is misleading. In standard mode, the camera produces 5 megapixel photos; the other megapixels are used to enhance the quality of that smaller image. Moreover, the idea that a high megapixel count equals quality is ridiculous. Canon’s newest high-end professional camera, the 1DX, takes far nicer photos than the 808 or any other smartphone, and it has an 18 megapixel sensor.

Another example is the “core war” Chinese smartphone manufacturers are currently engaged in. Having apparently decided that two just isn’t enough cores, everyone is now working on quad-core smartphones and tablets. In a few years, my guess is we’ll be hearing about 6-core phones, and we’re already hearing about hyperthreaded phones (a way to increase the processor count virtually).

I have no interest in standing in the way of progress, but I think as far as a lot of these numbers are concerned, we’re already well beyond the “good enough” stage. The average consumer does not need a quad-core smartphone to make phone calls and play Angry Birds. Heck, even the average geek consumer doesn’t need a quad-core smartphone, or a 41 megapixel camera for that matter.

Manufacturers know this, and so do their marketing teams, but unfortunately numbers are one of the quickest and easiest ways to communicate “best”. User experience is a much better metric for consumers to use when selecting a phone (or whatever), but it’s also a much harder one to quantify. Moreover, when a company knows the user experience doesn’t stand up to the competition’s — looking at you, Symbian — puffing up some number is the best way to get attention. Look how well it works; here we all are talking about the Pureview 808. If Nokia had left the numbers out of it and just pushed how good the images look, do you think as many people would have noticed?

World consumer rights day is approaching, and in China that generally means lots of media exposes about shoddy products and lying companies. But I hope that consumers — myself included — can also pay a bit more attention to the misdirection companies aim at us as the market in China and elsewhere begins to get flooded with quad-core smartphones and (in all likelihood) high-megapixel camera sensors.

The highest number sometimes is the best, but most of the time, it’s a lot more complicated than that.

[Image Source]

Nokia Indonesia together with Microsoft Indonesia held its Nokia Lumia Developers Day 2012 last week in Bandung. With the launch of the WP7-powered Lumia 800 and 710 imminent, they want to boost the marketplace with more apps – especially local ones. The event surprisingly attracted 1074 registrants on day one, and 810 developers attended the event in one room where they coded for more than 12 hours to submit an app to the Windows Phone Marketplace. The winners were awarded Nokia Lumia 800 handsets and also will get media/PR exposure through Microsoft and Nokia media/PR activities, both through this event and future Windows Phone promos in the country.

After hours of hacking and coding, a grand total of 173 apps were submitted, which were then reviewed and dwindled down to 21 apps to be judged for the prize. With Narenda Wicaksono (developer operation manager, Nokia Indonesia), Irving Hutagalung (technology advisor, Microsoft Indonesia), and Puja Pramudya (Microsoft MVP & master trainer for the event) as the judges, they eventually announced 8 winners.

The winners were: BuzzleMall, CitizenHero, TheGarbager, GogoKeto, Movieblist, ShelterView, Spothemall, and Puppet Solitaire. The winners all come from developers from universities such as the Bandung Institute of Technology, IT Telkom, and the University of Indonesia.

What’s next after this event? It was announced that there’d be an ‘Amazing Nokia Lumia Apps Challenge’ which is a contest to build a prototype of your application with the Windows Phone SDK and register it before the March 31st deadline. If your app is approved, a Nokia Lumia 710 will be sent to your address for testing purposes. Then after 30 days your app must be published to the Windows Phone Marketplace; and if you have published 3 apps before June 30, 2012, the Nokia Lumia 710 will be yours to keep.

Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Irving Hutagalung said:

Nokia and Microsoft will continue to engage the developers to ensure that their apps are submitted to the Marketplace worldwide. On top of that, for other participants who have not submitted their apps, we will also continue the engagement to include them on our app creation process, such as to invite them to future trainings and workshops, to provide them support to submit their to-be-created apps.

Nokia’s (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK) Lumia will be launching on February 17th in Indonesia, and the Windows Phone Marketplace has already opened in the country in readiness for its new customers. If Nokia and Microsoft can work out the payment method with the telcos and prove that they can win over both developers’ and customers’ hearts again, the Lumia could prove to be a serious challenger to Android, or even the aging Blackberry, here in Indonesia.

[Disclosure: Nokia promoted its developer days across the region at our recent 'Startups in Asia' event in Singapore, where the company also served as a sponsor. But of course we remain independent on this issue].

Agate Studio is probably one of the few great mobile gaming startups in Indonesia that we haven’t been really able to cover yet. Agate Studio is really good at making games as well as holding events for game developers and gamers themselves. Together with Nokia they have staged Indonesia Bermain, and the Mobile Games Developer War. We got in touch with Arief Widhiyasa, the CEO of Agate Studio, to find out more.

1. What is Agate? What is the difference between you and your competitors?

We are just a bunch of crazy people that want to create a happier world, and live the world in a fun way. Our vision is to craft fun experiences to enrich the way of life, we want to create or convert our activities to be more fun, more engaging, happier, and we believe the basic (core) ingredient is the game itself. At Agate, we want to build a legacy, some long lasting alliances that could contribute to a happier world. We really want to focus on the long-term results, that’s why we really focus on building culture, a strong vision, a great and long-term team.

2. You have released many games on many platforms. Which is your best-selling game?

Yup, we’ve made more than 100 games, for various platforms. Not many of our games are B2C games, as we just started to release games for B2C this year. And currently our best performing self-published social game is Football Saga.

3. 2011 was quite a year for Agate with you guys winning some awards and even holding events…

Thank you so much Joshua. We’re just lucky I think. Just like my partner said, “Our best achievement is the happiness we have until now, doing everything that we love everyday.” So 2011 was another very happy and fun year to live.

4. Can you tell me more about Indonesia Bermain?

Of course, Indonesia Bermain is one of our efforts to share and inspire society with the importance and the positive effects of playing and games. It really is a very delightful experience seeing thousands of people come together on the same day, very happily playing together. Basically it’s an event where everyone gathers in a venue with a lot of games. It’s a very big success and we really want to share this happiness with more people in the future.

5. Is there any specific platform that you guys are focusing on? It seems that you have a strong connection with Nokia and its effort to make a comeback here in Indonesia.

Currently we’re not focusing Agate on any specific platform, but actually the focus is on the team. Because we believe making games is platform-independent, as long as we can make fun experiences. Yes, we’re very happy with our partnership with Nokia Indonesia. They really give us a very big opportunity where we can share happiness through our games to a very big market (the mid- to low-end phone market). Maybe most of those customers are not able to play most kinds of games (on PC, consoles, etc), but with the Nokia platform we can access those people.

6. You guys have two games that seem to be popular lately, which are Sexy Witch and Smash Mania…

Yes, those two games were our major releases in the last quarter of 2011, and we created lots of buzz in local markets around the release date. Smash Mania is a game we can play like playing badminton — it’s a full body experience, and we have to swing the device as we swing the racket. Sexy Witch is a simple game on the S40/60 platform. We just wanted to share a fun small game with very simple game-play and a very nice graphic to all mid to low end handset owners.

7. How many employees do you guys have right now? And are you hiring?

If you don’t mind, we prefer to use the term ‘crew’ because all the people in Agate are partners. Currently our crew is around 65, and yes, we’re always recruiting people with game developing as their passion and a dream to make a happier world.

8. With so many games being produced, are you profitable right now? And with all the venture capital flying in to Indonesia, are you looking for funds?

Yes, we’re slightly profitable; which is lucky, because if not, we would be already filing for bankruptcy since we started with almost no capital. Of course we’re very interested in a strategic partnership, and so currently we’re not looking for just funds but rather to enter into a strategic partnership, to leverage on contributing and building a happier world.

9. Do you have any tips on starting a company for those entrepreneurs-to-be out there?

Live the fun way! Live your life as an entrepreneur very happily and enjoy every moment in the process of building the company. And be sure to start building with a lot of passion, with a clear dream or vision, that will be long-lasting. Never start a company with only greed to gain as much money as you can, or [with the intention] to sell the company to others.

A graphic that's currently on Nokia's official Renren page. But how many consumers in China are still aboard the Nokia train?

The final quarter of 2011 proved to be another chapter in Nokia’s (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK) horror story in China with the Finnish phone-maker reporting a drop of 40 percent in net sales compared to the same period in 2010. According to its newly-released unaudited results, the volume of devices sold in Greater China dropped 33 percent from Q4 2010 to the same quarter of 2011.

It’s nothing new for Nokia, whose sales have been trending downwards in China for quite some time. The quarter-on-quarter figures are not so dramatic: sales down 19 percent; volume down 8.

Nokia has been hit hard by the lack of a convincing smartphone line-up at a time when China’s newly-emerging middle-classes have been snapping up iPhones and numerous Android devices. Worldwide, there’s an operating loss to the tune of EUR2.5 billion (US$3.29 billion) year-on-year, with 31 percent fewer phones sold.

But Nokia’s business in the Greater China area – which is the mainland, plus Hong Kong and Macau – is still worth EUR1.008 billion ($1.32 billion) in net sales, shipping a claimed 14.7 million units in the final quarter of last year. Here are the two key tables, with the China region highlighted in orange:

The stats from Nokia come with the hopeful promise of Lumia phones for China “in the first half of 2012.” That is, I believe, the first official word from Nokia on this, after Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) earlier dropped a big hint that its Windows Phone 7 (WP7) platform, which powers the Lumia phones, will launch in China pretty soon.

Asha means ‘hope’ in Hindi, and this handset follows its predecessors the Asha 303, 200, and 201. With this new phone, Nokia has blurred the lines between feature phone and smartphone, with smartphone features that can be used on the cheaper mobile phones like the Asha series.

The Asha 300, which is priced at just IDR 999,000 (US$ 110), boasts fast internet connections over 3G HSPA, and is powered by a 1GHz processor. It has a touch interface with a keymat and a 5 megapixel camera with video recording. It also comes with Angry Birds Lite pre-installed.

Bob McDougall, the country manager for Nokia Indonesia, noted that there are over 3000 local apps available already, and the company is working together with 50 universities and 10,000 developers around the country. A success story from a local developer is Ramadhan Bachtiar, whose app reached 22 millions downloads globally, and with Nokia-integrated operator billing he could fund his own start-up and be independent.

Although Nokia claims that it still has 30 percent marketshare over all the mobile phones in the world (it was 27 percent at the end of Q3), it is declining and with pressure from all directions. On the lower end of the market in Indonesia they are fighting Android handsets and cheaper phones manufactured in China. If Nokia really puts its focus on the right segment of the market, I think it can still survive the mobile wars.

Want a fake Nokia N9 that has a rip-off iPhone (or also HTC Sense) UI? Then some random shanzhai manufacturer has just what you desire. (Image source: Micgadget)

China’s ramshackle cottage industry of low-grade phone and gadget makers – known as shanzhai in Chinese – looks to be on the verge of extinction with one report saying that the southern city of Shenzhen has gone from hosting thousands to just twenty such shady manufacturers in the past year. It comes as consumers in the country become more aware of branding and quality, and also due to crackdowns on shoddy or pirated goods and other illegal activities in which some of these shanzhai manufacturers engage.

It’s hard to define precisely what these cottage industry factories do. Some are genuine OEMs or parts makers that create things like phones as a sort of side-line, perhaps using their own cast-off parts. Others are opportunists that copy a popular phone to make a quick buck. A few used blatantly ripped off names, such as NOKLA; although most just made up a random logo with no thought to long-term branding. According to Techweb, which today writes on the demise of these shady gadget makers, a shanzhai manufacturer could copy a phone and get it ready for production in just two weeks – in contrast to the year or more that it takes established manufacturers.

Shanzhai manufacturers were always superb at giving consumers what they wanted, and so they contributed as much – or more – to the fall from grace of Nokia in China as, say, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) or Google (NASDAQ:GOOG). That’s because whereas China’s wealthier citizens bought smartphones, a lot of its poorer and rural folks made do with shanzhai ‘feature phones’ that gave them what they needed: dual or triple SIM support so as to juggle the cheapest calling plans; TV antennae; dozens of colours or snap-on accessories; pick and choose a fake UI skin that aped iOS, Symbian, or Android. It was grassroots innovation – so long as you didn’t expect your new phone to last for years. The fly-by-night gadget makers gave all those features, and more, for prices that way undercut Nokia (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK) and other feature phones.

The End is Nigh

But all that seems about to unravel, and it will be to the benefit of makers of cheaper devices, such as ZTE (HKG:0763; SHE:000063), Huawei, and perhaps Nokia as well.

The Techweb report says that a lot of factories in and around Shenzhen are going under, leaving thousands out of work, and collectively owing a lot of money to employees and investors. There appears to be four main reasons for this:

• A clampdown on illegal activities and piracy - With so many shanzhai manufacturers breaking numerous laws – from copyright infringement to tax evasion, the forging of IMEI numbers to the smuggling of parts or phones – increased police pressure is putting a lot of them out of business.

• Cleaning up Shenzhen ahead of the Universiade - A lot of the afore-mentioned clampdowns were actually clean-up campaigns related to the Universiade games which took place in Shenzhen in August of last year. Major events like these often cause a police sweep of normally overlooked illegalities.

• Consumers worry about quality - With a number of high-profile food safety concerns in China, consumers are perhaps thinking about their gadgets as well. After all, if a shanzhai phone explodes and rips your ear off, you’re unlikely to find the manufacturer let alone be able to win compensation.

• Better cheap phones from established brands - And, lastly, there are now cheap handsets with more diverse features from a number of well-known brands. They’ve finally realised they they need to listen to consumers more, and give them some useful features such as dual SIM slots.

We’ve already seen decreasing demand for these cheapo phones in China, but as long as there’s some measure of demand, some entrepreneur will choose to make a profit from it. And so we don’t think shanzhai is dead yet – perhaps it’s just about to depart Shenzhen and move inland.

[Source: Techweb - article in Chinese; image from Micgadget]

American model and entrepreneur Anina loves fashion, tech, mobile – and China. And that’s why the country is the focus of her 360Fashion Social news app. It comes preinstalled on all Nokia N9 (Meego OS powered) phones sold in the country and mixes curated haute couture news with deep Chinese social media integration. Indeed, the app is a sort of third-party Sina Weibo client all by itself, which helps users chat and share designer info and pictures without launching another app.

In conversation via email with PO, she says that China remains a focus for the team going forward. And so she’s looking at bringing the Chinese version of the app to Windows Phone 7 (WP7) later this year when Nokia (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK) phones running Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) new mobile OS seem likely to hit stores in China.

Her company, 360Fashion, started up in 2005 and Anina is proud to say that, “I have funded my company myself and I am 100 percent owner.” The fiery-haired model’s fascination with China started with a modeling assignment in Hangzhou in 2007 – “I realized then, that if I wanted to become well known in China I had to go to Beijing and participate in the China Fashion Week during the Olympics.” And so she did, and that led to participating in panel discussions in the country, which led to her wanting to bring international – yet localized – industry news to young Chinese women.

Being a self-proclaimed fan of Nokia, Anina’s apps are not quite so full featured on other platforms: on iOS and Android, the app is shrunk down to be ‘360 Fashion News,’ without the in-built social streaming elements. Those apps have not yet been localized into Chinese, but Anina promises that they’re coming soon.

That long-running relationship with Nokia has won the company a top partnership award, presented by CEO Stephen Elop himself (pictured right).

Going forward, Anina says that she’s mostly sticking with Nokia:

For our 360Fashion Social news app, we are looking forward to the Windows Phone platform with Nokia. And also Android TV looks very promising in China.

It has been rumored that Microsoft’s WP7 will launch in China later this year, and doing so primarily with Nokia makes sense given the company’s (faded?) prestige in the country. Indeed, Microsoft is telling developers to prepare their WP7 app for distribution in China, so the Redmond giant – hand-in-hand with Nokia – seems to be close to a new move into smartphones in China.

What Chinese Women Want

As for the question of what Chinese women want in terms of fashion, Anina feels that it’s best served by a woman – and one who appreciates and understands cultural differences. She says that marks out her 360Fashion apps:

First, our app stands out because of it’s content: our approach is to curate the designers and collections and have a high quality mix of emerging designers from east and west, established western brands, and established eastern brands. Currently, I have not seen any apps with such a wide content of fashion collection galleries inside, that connect to social media, on the market. The Style.com app for example, does not have any mainland fashion designers inside, nor connect to Chinese social media.

Second, our understanding of how women in China shop: they tend to begin by looking at social media and what people are saying about the brand, then they read the established news, and then they will consider checking out the items in a store to test the quality. We overcome and make the first two steps easy for consumers, and in the near future we will bring out the e-commerce and mapping features [into the 360Fashion Social News app].

Get the 360 Fashion News app for Android (Market link) or iPhone and iPad (iTunes link). Or for just China-related news from the startup, follow along on Weibo.

A few days ago we reported that Nokia (HEL:NOK1V, NYSE:NOK) was bringing in Gustavo Eichelmann as its new chief executive in China, in an effort to help its operations in the country. And now the company is announcing that it is also moving its Asia headquarters from Singapore to Beijing as well. Operations at the Singapore office will continue however.

A MarketWatch report quotes a Nokia representative as saying that:

[The move is] part of our strategy to adapt our operations to the business environment to ensure our competitiveness. This includes an increasing focus on assembly in Asia, close to our suppliers.

In addition to struggling in China, Nokia hopes that it can ride Windows Phone to a rebound in global mobile market share in 2010. As for Asia, the company still is one of the top recognized business brands over the past few years; in fact it was the top brand as recently as 2012 according to TNS Global.

It will be interesting to see how things play out, particularly in the smartphone space where the company has some catching up to do.

[h/t The Next Web]

Nokia China employees going back to work this week, after a short break for the new year, will find they have a new chief executive in the form of Gustavo Eichelmann (pictured right). Based in Beijing, he will have the formidable task of turning round Nokia’s (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK) sinking business in China, where tens of millions of Android devices and iPhones are now dominating smartphone usage.

Eichelmann has had plenty of time to prepare for the role, having been officially appointed months ago. It came after the shocking departure of Liang Yumei, the senior VP for China, Korea, and Japan, earlier this summer. In the interim, Colin Giles, Nokia’s global head of sales, had been keeping the seat warm.

Although Nokia is still fighting hard for the massive market for smartphones and cheaper ‘feature phones’ in China – such as working with local startups on cool promos – the Finnish company had an awful 2011 in China, with declining local sales reaching the point that some distributors were refusing to take on new inventory.

For Eichelmann, there are both new challenges and new opportunities in 2012. Firstly, Nokia has totally revamped its lower-end feature phones – such as the new Asha series – to bring some smartphone-like features and aesthetics onto devices costing just US$84 to $164. (A strategy aimed at India, Indonesia, and other developing regions too). Secondly, there are signs that Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows Phone 7 platform will launch in China in this new year, giving Nokia a more serious challenger to popular iPhone and Android devices than it can muster with its aged Symbian mobile OS. To that end, there are rumors that Microsoft is prepping some retail channels for WP7 distribution, and that Nokia is adapting the WP7-powered Lumia 800 for sale in China later this year.

We’re not sure how much Eichelmann is getting paid in this new job, but the Nokia man sure has one of the toughest jobs in tech in the region.

[Source: Techweb - article in Chinese]

Note that this method is better than taking a poll, as asking an invited audience for their opinions can be very self-selecting and reductive. So by taking these stats from popular product searches, we get a free-form and realistic view of what Chinese consumers are keen to buy with their own money. Of course, that doesn’t translate into sales, but it gives a good picture of which smartphones are the most likely to be parting cash from consumers.

So here, in reverse order, is the top ten:

10th. Lenovo A60

Lenovo (HKG:0992) smartphones won’t be too familiar to overseas readers, but they’ve been a low-end to mid-range mainstay in China for years. This A60 is one of the better efforts, with Android 2.3.3 and a 3.5-inch HVGA screen. Lenovo’s custom UI, with those huge round icons, is not exactly classy though. But it seems plenty of Chinese netizens are keen to read-up on the phone with a view to buying it. Afterall, with a China Unicom (NYSE:CHU; HKG:0762) subsidy, it’s a cheap ticket to the smartphone club, costing just under 1,000 RMB (US$158).

9th. Meizu MX

Another local kid makes the list, as Shenzhen manufacturer Meizu generates a lot of hype and excitement for its newest MX. The Meizu MX comes with a highly-customized Android 2.3.5 (which it now calls Flyme OS) which looks good on its 4.0-inch screen and is powered by its dual-core processor. The screen is higher-res than many others on the list, at 960 by 640 pixels. Starting at 2999 RMB for the 16GB version, this could be a headache for the more established brands in 2012.

8th. Motorola Defy (ME525+)

Despite Motorola (NYSE:MMI) pushing some high-end business-oriented handsets in China, its cheaper phones are proving to be of interest too. This ME525+ runs Android 2.3.4, has a 3.7-inch screen, and costs about 1,900 to 2,200 RMB.

7th. HTC Wildfire S

And now things get a bit lame, with the ridiculously under-powered Wildfire S from HTC (TPE:2498) – known as the G13 in China – with its small, low-resolution screen that makes it obsolete and unable to run a lot of newer, funkier apps.

Despite running the older Android 2.2 OS, its small form-factor combined with the Sense UI makes this pretty popular around here. It costs about 1,300 on the grey-import market, but it’s a very bad deal via more official channels where it costs 2,000+ RMB.

6th. Samsung Galaxy SII

Samsung’s (005930:KS) new flagship – dubbed the i9100 around here – is the impressive follow-up to the best-selling original Galaxy S. In a recent analytics report, we found that the first version was now the most popular single Android phone model in China, usurping the HTC Desire. But, frustratingly, it seems Samsung might deny all those consumers an upgrade to Android 4.0, which ought to be the decent thing to do for a mere year-old phone. Shame on you, Sammie!

Anyway, Chinese consumers seem to like the TouchWiz UI and other local customization such as a Chinese app store which accepts local payment methods. The Galaxy SII is currently about 3,400 RMB on the grey-import market.

5th. Nokia N9

Halfway through the list, and we finally encounter Nokia (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK). This beautiful-looking device seems popular in product searches, though I’m very skeptical that this will translate to sales once people realise it runs a moribund OS – MeeGo – for which there are few games or apps. The 16GB models costs about 3,500 RMB in most gadget malls, although the official local price is a not-so-reasonable 4,888 RMB.

4th. HTC Sensation XE

HTC’s most impressive release this year was perhaps the Sensation XE, which launched in China last month with all the usual Beats ephemera such as branded in-ear headphones and better music software. Its 4.3-inch qHD screen was a welcome feature, as Android phones were so slow to rise to the challenge of Apple’s ‘retina screen’ iPhone. The 1.5GHz dual-core phone, complete with the updated Sense 3.5 UI, costs about 3,500 RMB on unofficial sales channels.

3rd. Apple iPhone 4

Daddy’s home! Yes, Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) ubiquitous iPhone makes the list of popular product searches, but only in third place. With the iPhone 4S still not on sale here officially, it seems the older but aesthetically identical previous model is still in vogue. The 8GB model costs 4,000 RMB when schlepped over the border tax-free from Hong Kong, or 4,500 RMB direct from Apple or China Unicom.

2nd. Nokia N8

Grandpa’s home! Pull up a comfy chair, make a mug of hot chocolate, and get out the medication – because Symbian has just arrived on our list. The creaky old OS is still soldiering on in Nokia’s N8, which is proving popular amongst those who’re familiar with Symbian and its still significant catalog of apps and services.

There have been a lot of bad omens for Nokia in China this year, but the interest in the N8 is a ray of hope at a time when middle-income Chinese have been turning to Android smartphones and the iPhone. The N8 costs about 1,800 RMB.

1st. Xiaomi M1

Regular readers of PO won’t be too surprised to find the much talked about dual-core, Android-powered Xiaomi phone at the top of the list of searches in 2011. It launched with a bang and a breath-taking price tag – just 1,999 RMB – back in August of this year, and ends the year being talked about in the Chinese tech press pretty much everyday, snagging a supply deal with China Unicom, and attracting a further US$90 million in funding – some of which is coming from Yuri Milner’s own pocket.

In October, we dropped into Xiaomi HQ in Beijing to get a hands-on demo of the phone on the same day that it hit shelves across China; here’s the video:

[Hat-tip to QQ Tech news (article in Chinese) for collating the list data; Motorola Defy image from Whatmobile.net, and the Lenovo one from Zol.com.cn]

Nokia's WP7 phones already have Chinese localization, but no official release in China. Yet. (Image source: QQ Tech news)

There’s a rumor in the Chinese media that Nokia (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK) is preparing its Lumia 800 model (pictured above) to be China’s first ever Windows Phone 7 (WP7) device next summer.

Apparently, the Finnish mobile giant is extensively testing its Nokia Lumia 800 in its Chinese-language localization, as well as ensuring that its other services – such as its Comes With Music thingy – will work for locals on WP7. Nokia, however, has not publicly confirmed all this.

Since this move would actually require more work on Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) side, especially in terms of supporting Chinese users in its Marketplace with full localization and online payment methods, this is presumably being coordinated with the Redmond company.

The time-frame in this rumor chimes with word that the retailer Suning (SHE:002024) has already been chosen by Microsoft as its main retail partner to distribute official WP7 releases.

Currently, WP7 phones are being used by a tiny minority of local geeks who bought the phones on the grey-import market. Nonetheless, major Chinese web companies have been developing apps for the WP platform already – we looked at five of the biggest Chinese WP7 apps last summer; and just this week one more biggie was added with Tencent’s (HKG:0700) beta release of its group-messaging Weixin for WP7.

[Source: DoNews - article in Chinese]

Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) ‘Innovation Center’ at the Bandung Institute of Technology (MIC-ITB) has linked up with Nokia (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK) and another partner to get Indonesian developers coding for the Windows Phone 7 (WP7) platform. And that has led to the creation of hundreds of locally-made WP7 apps that you could soon check out.

The initiative was centred on the MIC-ITB Code Camp 2011 for WP7, in which Microsoft Indonesia, Navcor Nextology, and Nokia set a target of 200 mobile applications to be created by local developers.

The training-oriented event, which was attended by 230 university students and mobile technology developers, lasted from November 22 until November 24 as a part of the Digital Media Festival 2011. Organisers claim it was the biggest mobile application training/coding event ever. In this workshop, the participants were also taught how to develop applications and games that are cost efficient, using a cloud computing infrastructure. Plus, the participants were coached in how to market the games and applications as well.

Hundreds of apps that resulted from this workshop are set to be available through the Windows Phone Marketplace for Indonesians to download and use. Nokia has been really pushing developers to make apps for Windows Phone so that the Marketplace can improve and expand ahead of the arrival of WP7-powered Nokias in the region.

Fighting Off Android and iOS in Asia

Based on research by Appcelerator and IDC, application developers around the world claim to be more interested in developing mobile apps for WP7 now compared to their previous enthisiasm for Microsoft’s defunct WinMo 6. The Windows Phone platform got as much as a 38 percent vote of confidence/intention from 2,160 developers that said they are really interested to develop an app in Windows Phone. Both MS and Nokia need this to come to fruition so as to prevent Android and iOS reaching the same kind of critical mass in Asia that it has already done in Europe and the US.

Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iTunes App Store was introduced in 2008 and has now amassed more than 500,000 apps up tp October 2011. While the Android Market has no formal approval/testing system for apps – and claims to be more open – but has just 300,000 apps so far. What of WP7? Well, the newly introduced Windows Phone MarketPlace (in October 2010) has 40,000 applications from 10,000 application developers all across the world.

[Source: Detikinet]

Nokia (NYSE:NOK; HEL:NOK1V) has created a viral video marketing campaign for the launch of the Nokia N9 in China, featuring the hot starlet Fan Bing-bing cross-dressing as a man (pictured above).

The social media-oriented “micro film” that Nokia commissioned for this – a suitably succinct 2 minutes and 22 seconds long – is called Unfollow, and features moody shots of the beautiful handsome Bing-bing talking about being true to oneself.

The first tweet containing the poster (click to see it in full) and link went viral immediately, generating nearly 13,000 comments and an astonishing 313,681 retweets on Sina Weibo as of the time of writing (see it here, on the account of Nokia’s China marketing manager). The video has been watched nearly a million times in just one day over on Youku (NYSE:YOKU), China’s biggest video-sharing site.

Nokia began online pre-orders for the N9 back in September. Despite having a moribund OS (MeeGo), it’s a flagship product for Nokia in terms of its style and finesse. Nokia seriously needs to stem its declining market share in China – and ominously unenthusiastic distributors – in order not to hemorrhage the country’s new middle-classes to iPhone and Android devices. It’s questionable if the N9 will help.

Here’s the YouTube version with English subtitles (or see the original on Youku):

[Source: Nokia’s official Sina Weibo account; via ChinaSmack]

I have been hearing a lot about Fashionandyou.com from some of my friends in India. It is one of the most socially savvy e-commerce sites in the country.

Today, we have heard direct from the luxury fashion e-commerce company that Smile Group Venture and Goldsquare Sales India (the owner of Fashionandyou.com) have raised US$40 million, led by Norwest Venture Partners and also participated in by Intel Capital, Sequoia Capital India, and Nokia Growth Partners.

Sequoia Capital India previously invested $8 million in Goldsquare in 2010.

Fashionandyou currently has 2.7 million members and growing. With $40 million in the bag, the self-styled “shopping club” is looking for ways to expand to offer more product categories – and to other countries. And acquiring smaller e-commerce sites was hinted at as a possible way moving forward.

That sure sounds familiar, as it adopts the same strategy as Homeshop18 and Flipkart — I mean, how else can it expand?

Unfortunately, the company remains tight-lipped when asked about its expansion and acquisition strategy.

Social Shopping

For Fashionandyou.com, growing its business via social channels has always been the core of the company’s strategy. Laksh Arora, a Fashionandyou.com rep, explained to us that since the company was launched in November 2009 it has grown to have the largest Facebook page in India in terms of the luxury retail sector with almost 0.9 million members.

“We were the first company in India to offer a real-time customer care platform to our members on both Facebook and Twitter,” she says.

Oh… and not forgetting that Laksh also states that Fashionandyou is the first Indian brand to be on Google Plus. That I wouldn’t be too sure of, since we have received several pitches from India who told us that they were the first.

The e-commerce warfare in India — with Homeshop18 and Flipkart — seems to be getting more fun with Fashionandyou now bagging $40 million. Grab your popcorn and enjoy the battle. And for small e-commerce companies, you could be the lucky (or unfortunate) ones who might get acquired.

Earlier this year we told you about Indian location-based service Mojostreet, a promising start-up that received $350,000 in funding in April. As we mentioned before, the service is very much a check-in service like Foursquare or Gowalla, but with an interesting twist that allows you to use Mojobucks to buy a location (ala Monopoly). Read more about how it works in our previous piece.

We just received some stats from the service’s founder Kaylan providing some insights into how mobile users are using Mojostreet. It might surprise you which mobile platform has been seen the most Mojostreet action so far. Kaylan says that nearly 78 percent of Mojostreet app downloads so far have been for RIM’s Blackberry handset (NASDAQ:RIMM). In addition, 71.2 percent of check-ins and 62.1 percent of offer redemptions have come via a Blackberry handset.

This comes as a surprise to me given that (as of just a few months ago) Nokia (NYSE:NOK) still held nearly 40 percent of the mobile market share (at least in terms of revenue), with Blackberry way behind at about 6 percent.

But Kaylan explains that for Nokia, Mojostreet had some issues at the app level for a while which caused downloads to be low. But he expects to see those numbers jump over the next 30 days.

Even considering that fact, is Blackberry a platform that developers should focus on? Kaylan assumes that Mojostreet enjoyed higher visibility on that platform simply because there are not so many Blackberry apps out there to compete with. Regrettably Kaylan couldn’t share actual download figures, so we only know the percentages. But the breakdown is interesting, and we certainly wish Mojostreet luck across all platforms!

Nokia's global VP, Blanca Juti, unveils the Asha phones. (Image source: Engadget)

When Nokia (NYSE:NOK; HEL:NOK1V) unveiled a bunch of new feature phones at the recent Nokia World event, there seemed to be two recurring themes: that so-called dumb-phones are getting smarter, and that Indian youth are both an inspiration and a focal point.

Indeed, Nokia’s new feature phone range is called Asha, which means “hope” in Hindi, and was launched with enthusiasm by Nokia’s global VP, Blanca Juti (pictured above), who grew up in India, and who stood on stage dressed in an elegant jacket made of a mosaic of Indian materials. The mantra was “the next billion” – as in the next billion potential customers for the company’s Symbian-powered phones. She said:

Think about the opportunity. In India today there are 1.2 billion people, but did you know there are only 63 million fixed internet connections.

That’s where mobiles plug the gap in India, tuning hundreds of millions of people into the web in the absence of decent broadband. And that’s where affordable yet cool phones come in – though they need to be, she emphasized, ones that can satisfy today’s demanding teenagers.

Ms Juti’s presentation culminated in four new phones being revealed, which were made specifically with emerging markets in mind – the Asha 200 (pictured below), 201, 300, and 303, priced from Rs 4,100 to Rs 8,000 (US$84 to $164). The latter two have touchscreens, transmuting into devices more powerful than those normally aimed at, say, Indian or Indonesian consumers, with a 1GHz processor, 3G, and multi-SIM support.

The Nokia Asha 200 feature phone, powered by Symbian. (Image source: MobileBurn)

Speaking to the Times of India today, Nokia India’s VP, D Shivakumar, said:

Our target share [in India] should always be more than half of the total market [...] I think we would be able to get there in 2012 by focusing on great innovative products, great delivery and experience at retail points, services and content integration.

Actually, Nokia already holds the majority of mobile market share in India, with an independently tallied 59 percent, so the marketing-speak might be disguising the sentiment “We better not lose that or we’re screwed here as well.”

It remains to be seen if Nokia’s more powerful and funky Symbian phones can fight off the broader, more youthful Android and iOS platforms, which are gaining ground in India and across the region. It’s already looking like Nokia has lost all momentum in China. But at least some lessons are being learnt and Nokia is giving Asia consumers more of what they demand, such as multi-SIM support (which is useful for using the cheapest networks at certain times, or for juggling multiple small businesses), and in-built integration of the mobile OS with social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

As a back-up, Nokia’s two Lumia phones, which run Windows Phone 7, will make their way to India as well.

[Image sources: Engadget event liveblog; and MobileBurn hands-on with the Asha series]

According to a Morgan Stanley report cited by AppleInsider, for the first time ever, more Chinese customers say they want an Apple for their next smartphone than a Nokia.

via AppleInsider

Granted, Morgan Stanley’s report was almost certainly written before Nokia unveiled their new Windows Phone handsets, but the results of this survey still speak to what is apparently plummeting interest in the Nokia brand and increasing interest — no surprise there — in Apple. Apple has been stepping up its involvement in China recently, opening several new stores.

Apple’s rise has clearly been a rapid one, as a survey from TNS Global last year found Nokia to be Asia’s most recognized brand. Apple didn’t even make the list, yet now, a year later, their phones are more desirable in China than Nokia’s. Impressive. So much so, in fact, that a girl in China was willing to trade her virginity for an iPhone 4 and another guy traded his kidney for an iPad.

It’s hard to beat Apple at branding, but it’s worth keeping in mind that for the moment, anyway, this is just about branding, and the report is on Chinese consumer preferences, not actual sales. Lots of people want their next smartphone to be an iPhone, after all, but not all of them will buy one, especially since the already-expensive devices cost even more in China than they do abroad (thanks a lot, import taxes!) and tend to arrive here months after the same handsets were released elsewhere.

Plus, Nokia is doing some cool stuff in Asia. So, you never know, a comeback isn’t totally impossible.

But I kind of doubt it.

[Via AppleInsider]

GREE model poses with Android Infobar phone, Tokyo Game Show 2011

A new report from research firm Distimo shows that countries around the world vary greatly in their preference for apps, specifically on how countries prefer local apps (or, in the context of the study, ones published in only one country).

To explain it in another way, lets consider what Distimo says about the US. The country’s most popular applications are similar to those preferred elsewhere, and that “only 19 percent of the most popular apps in the Apple App Store in the US are popular in the US only.” Essentially this suggests that US tastes for apps are not dissimilar with the tastes of the world as a whole.

But Asia is a different story. 67 percent of the most popular iOS apps in Japan are popular only in that country. Likewise, in China 56 percent of popular iOS apps are popular only in China. In the chart below, you can see that for the Apple App Store, the Android Market, and the Ovi Store, Japan and China lead the way as the two nations with the most locally popular apps per store.* Note that there is no data available for China and Japan regarding Windows Phone 7.

Similarly, looking at which countries prefer the same apps as the US, Japan and China overlap the least with American tastes. Not surprisingly, it is other English speaking countries like Canada, Australia, and the UK which overlap the most. China does share preferences with Hong Kong and Singapore, however, with an ‘average overlap’ of 25 percent.

For more information, be sure to check out Distimo’s full report.

*Note that Distimo did not include South Korea, South Africa, and Brazil in its analysis, explaining “countries do not have any games in the Apple App Store, and would distort the findings of this study if included.”

Nokia N97

Last month we told you about India’s self-proclaimed largest e-commerce company, HomeShop18.com, and how it was spending aggressively to compete in the fast-growing local market. Today we received word about the company’s current Nokia Fest promotion, which sees this same competitive spirit extend to its pricing this week.

The Nokia sale comes after HomeShop18 did an online poll to see which brand people most wished to see discounted. Many of you might be surprised to find that 409 out of 741 respondents chose Nokia. But Nokia, despite being on a downslide in most regions, still accounts for 39 percent of India’s handset market share according to Voice & Data. It’s also still one of the most recognized brands in Asia.

However Nokia’s own figures show that it’s still on a downslide in the Asia Pacific region though having dropped from 30.8 million units shipped in Q2 2010 to 24.5 million a year later (see below).

So even if Nokia has lost a bit of its former shine, it’s still pretty shiny to many in India. And expect more than a few to take advantage of this week-long price drop. According to HomeShop18, users can find discounts of up to 28 percent on Nokia handsets, although a quick browse of the Nokia page seems to show an average discount of about 10 percent. The 28 percent markdown is on the N97, currently selling for 18999 INR (about $393) after the discount.

In its statement sent to us earlier today, HomeShop18 claims that it is growing faster than any other e-commerce site in the nation, with a 300 percent year-on-year traffic increase, as well as 1.7 million unique visitors. If it can continue with aggressive sales like this one, the company should continue to grow in popularity among India’s online shoppers.

[N97 Photo: zomgitcj]

Nokia Fest

Nokia's pre-orders page for China, which went live this morning.

Form an orderly virtual queue… No pushing… Nokia has just announced on its two official Weibo accounts that it is starting to take pre-orders in China for the sleek, Meego-powered N9 smartphone.

Pretty much the same message went out to its Sina and Tencent Weibo followers this morning – which total about 850,000 fans – saying, in my rough translation:

From September 16 to October 14, Nokia fans can log into Nokia’s official website, or go to an authorized Nokia vendor, and pre-order an N9. You can choose three colours: black, magenta, or blue. At the same time, Nokia will draw 100 names from the reservation list to win one of 100 N9s as a prize.

The pre-order page is here. It’s a bit odd to be cannibalizing 100 very willing customers by gifting some of them free phones – but I guess Nokia has actually thought all this through.

Nokia will have a hard time in beating the Android-powered Xiaomi phone in a battle of the hyped pre-order rush. Just last week 300,000 Chinese netizens surged to book-up the entire first batch of 1.5GHz dual-core phones in just 34 hours. It’d be uncharitable of me to point out that the Xiaomi phone is not only cheaper and more powerful than the N9, but also has a much larger catalog of Android games at its disposal. Oh, wait, I just said it already. The N9 is 4,888 RMB, versus the Xiaomi M1′s 1,999 price tag.

However, the N9 does have some winning features, such as NFC support, which is burgeoning as a means of payment, as well as social check-ins. Nokia is pushing NFC in Asia with its recent 600, 700, and 701 model phones, for which it has teamed-up with Chinese LBS, Jiepang.

If you want to eyeball the N9’s Meego OS running in Chinese, check out this Engadget China hands-on from earlier this summer for plenty of photos.

A heat-map of Jiepang check-ins across Greater China. This and all infographic images in this post are provided by Jiepang,com.

The Infographic of the Day series visually expresses important stories from Asia and the world of technology.

One of Jiepang’s most popular location-based services (LBS), Jiepang, has made a neat infographic that breaks down some user trends. It gives a snapshot of how China’s smartphone-carryin’, LBS-lovin’ youngsters spend their time. It reveals a pretty keen engagement with brands by these users, and a good understanding of what’s hot right now.

Beijing Hot-Spots

Starting in Beijing, we see the hottest part of the city, in terms of check-ins, is the unassuming downtown area of Xizhimen. Not a place for tourists to bother with, it reveals that Jiepang’s users are utilizing the service to check-in to lots of regular restaurants, gyms, and offices – not just fancy malls or travel destinations.

Just last month, the company revealed that it was working with Nokia on a new series of NFC field trials in Beijing and five other Chinese cities. Those NFC check-in posters will come in handy in the city, where some areas see well over a thousand check-ins.

Brands and Movies

When Penn-Olson talked to Jiepang’s CEO this summer, he made it clear that engaging with brands was big news for the company, as well as with its users. Thus it’s no surprise that the service’s users have some distinct favourite brands: namely Starbucks, McDonalds, Burger King, Doraemon (yes, the Japanese cartoon), and Earth Hour. That last one’s a bit of an oddity, but it shows that sometimes Jiepang’s fans make use of the service as a microblog to broadcast stances, and values.

Next, Jiepang’s infographic reveals which film caused the biggest buzz in China so far this year amongst its mostly younger users. And the winner was… Pirates of the Caribbean 4, narrowly beating out Kung-fu Panda 2 in terms of movie check-ins.

Eating Out

Lastly, turning to food, Jiepang’s multitude of daily check-ins reveal what people like to eat at certain times of day. Fast food is favoured fare around breakfast time, and then loses popularity during the day; deserts, meanwhile, hit a peak at about 4pm as lots of people venture out for some Chinese-style afternoon tea. Unsurprisingly, street BBQ check-ins multiply in volume as the night deepens, and people seek out pretty much the only hot food there is available.

Mad for Malls

One last detail worth noting is that Chinese consumers are mad for malls – but mainly mid-range ones with plenty of food options. The two most popular venues in Beijing and Shanghai are both such venues (Joy City Xidan, and Jinqiao Plaza, respectively). Beijing’s Sanlitun district – home to one of China’s official Apple stores – is that city’s second most checked-in site; Shanghai’s IKEA is that city’s third-placed venue. To check out the entire infographic, click here.

It hasn’t been a good year for Nokia, getting absolutely hammered in the smartphone industry. But yet in Indonesia it has a fighting chance. In an effort to help, Nokia Indonesia is encouraging developers to build more apps for its platform, and to that end it has launched Nokia DevStart together with DailySocial. Narenda Wicaksono, a developer operations manager at Nokia Indonesia, answered our questions regarding this competition and the future of Nokia in general.

1. Can you explain a little about DevStart?

Nokia DevStart is a competition for startups and professional developers based in any of the four cities (Jakarta, Bandung, Jogjakarta and Surabaya) to make an app with Qt tools and specifically targeting Meego OS on Nokia with Nokia N9 as the hardware.

2. DevStart submissions have already ended. How many apps were submitted? Did it exceed your expectation?

The submissions definitely exceeded our expectations. To cut from over thirty to ten submissions is hard for the committee. One of the apps that really caught my attention was a location-based augmented reality app.

3. One of the competitions is Best NFC Apps. Do you think NFC will be easily adopted by casual users in Indonesia?

NFC adoption isn’t depending only on hardware makers, but the most important thing is the supporting ecosystem — for example, the government, the brand, and of course the developers. . . But as for the technology, i think it should be easy.

4. What makes you think Nokia (especially the upcoming N9) can compete with other smartphones in Indonesia?

Nokia N9 has features that are better than most smartphones out there on the market, so there is no reason the Nokia N9 can’t compete. (You can check the features here)

5. Nokia still holds a lot of the Indonesia mobile market share. What is your strategy to hold on to this, or improve it?

Nokia is still number one in terms of sales or devices on the market. Nokia has some strategy for this year, for example: smartphones, the next billion, and future disruptions. You can view some of our Ovi Store stats here.

6. The N9 uses MeeGo as its OS, but future Nokia smartphones are going to use Windows Phone 7. What are your thoughts on this?

The Nokia N9 is an ‘aspiration platform’ for a lot of developers. But the most important thing for a developer isn’t the OS, because the OS is only the target for a development platform. With Qt as the dev platform, developers can aim for Nokia’s more than 100 million Symbian users right now, and reach another 150 million smartphones that will use Symbian in future sales. Nokia will use Qt as the core component in the Nokia strategy to bring apps to the next billion. This market is the one that will be larger than the smartphone segment we have right now, and we are preparing the developers to align with Nokia’s strategy in the future.

7. Start-ups and app developers are on the rise nowadays in Indonesia. What is your expectation in the coming years?

My own expectation is that I want to see some brand names born from Indonesian start-ups, not just making products or applications. Hopefully, the next global company (like a Rovio or Microsoft) can come from Indonesia.