I usually agree with Senor Cringely. He writes thoughtful, longer pieces about tech and he often portends grave changes in the industry. Today, however, I’m not quite sure he’s hit the nail on the head.
His piece posits that there is an 85-10-5 split in most markets, most notably the phone market. In this case you have 85% feature phones, 10% smartphones, and 5 odd ducks like Nextel and MVNOs bringing up the rear where the feature of interest isn’t quite smart but not quite mass market – walkie talkie features being a notable example.
He then extrapolates Samsung’s plan to stop producing “smartphones” for the mass market as proof that what they are actually planning is to produce smartphones masquerading as cheaper feature phones. Instead of trying to beat WinMo, Symbian, or OSX, they are going to use Android in a highly customized way to offer smartphone features at feature phone pricing. Fair enough.
