Galaxy S5, Nokia ‘Windroid,’ BlackBerry Q20: The hype hits the fan

It’s Mobile World Congress week, and many vendors are showing off the new smartphones and tablets they want you to buy this year. In all the hoopla, there are only a few key developments to focus on — and plenty of marketing hype to beware.

Galaxy S5: A minor revision in the Galaxy S line

The big news is the Samsung Galaxy S5, the successor to the disappointing Galaxy S 4. (Yes, the space in the name is gone.) The S 4’s sales declined after a big start, with many users preferring the still-available S III. The reason for the S 4’s slowdown was the poorly integrated extra Samsung features, such as the ability to track eye movement to know when to pause video or scroll a page for you.

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The S5 has an updated physical design: The new bezel is more reminiscent of the original Nexus 7, and it’s accompanied by more megapixels in the rear camera to support 4K video capture, a faster processor, a USB 3 port instead of the common MicroUSB (time for new cables!), a heart-rate sensor in the case (health monitors are the current fad), and a water-resistant design that lets it survive a short-term dunking. That last one is a great idea.

But S5 has the same software as the S 4, and it’s unclear whether Samsung has refined them to work better. The S5 also runs the latest version of Android, 4.4 KitKat, but retains the Samsung user-interface modifications.

The big new thing in the S5 is an integrated fingerprint reader, a clear clone of what Apple introduced in the iPhone 5s in October 2013. But Samsung’s fingerprint reader can’t authorize purchases in the Google Play Store, just in websites using PayPal. Reporters who got a hands-on demo of the S5 in Barcelona say the fingerprint reader is hard to use and unreliable. Such poor clones of Apple innovations are a sad, old story at Samsung.

Ironically, in announcing the S5, Samsung’s mobile CEO, J.K. Shin, declaimed that customers don’t want “eye-popping technology” for its own sake but instead prefer useful improvements. This is the same Shin who for the last year or two has been extolling the virtues of cool technology. He clearly learned a lesson from the S 4’s subdued reception.

Anyhow, if you like the S III or S 4, you’ll like the S5 when it ships in April. If not, it won’t turn your head.

Nokia’s ‘Windroid’ smartphone is not for you

As long rumored, Nokia revealed the Nokia X series, a smartphone trio based on version 4.1 of Google’s Android Open Source Project (AOSP). It has a decidedly non-Android user interface that mixes elements from Microsoft’s Windows Phone and Nokia’s low-end Asha, and uses five Nokia services instead of their Google counterparts: Here Maps, Mix Radio (a Pandora-like service), app notifications, mobile payments, and Nokia Store (so you can’t get Android apps from the Google Play Store).

Existing Android apps that don’t use these services can run as is on the Nokia X, once made available in the Nokia Store. Apps that use these services will need to be modified to use Nokia’s services instead of Google’s.

The X line also has apps for Microsoft’s OneDrive, Outlook, and Skype services. Pundits like me have been calling it “Windroid” due to Windows Phone similarities and the fact that Microsoft will gain control of Nokia’s mobile business in March.

This raises the question of why Nokia is bothering with a “Windroid” device when Microsoft still hasn’t given up on its poor, struggling Windows Phone platform. Surely, Microsoft will kill it in favor of Windows Phone. Microsoft’s announcement this week that it is gutting its license fees for Windows Phone shows it intends to go after the same market as the Nokia X and other AOSP phones, which sell very well in poor countries.

I believe the X line won’t be long for this world, nor will Nokia’s other platform, the Asha. Not only is AOSP a risky platform due to shifts in Google’s strategy that are effectively orphaning AOSP, but manufacturers like China’s Xiaomi use AOSP now for more powerful smartphones at prices comparable to the midline Nokia X’s.

Nokia used to be a leader in poor countries, but its market share has been eroding for several years due to AOSP devices. I get the “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” strategy — especially the adoption of a Microsoft-like user interface and services to ready people for Windows Phone when they’re rich enough — but it’s a very tough game that is not Microsoft’s strong suit. Still, as an interim measure, it could provide some breathing space for Microsoft to make Windows Phone compelling so that cheapo Asian manufacturers start using it in place of Android.

But Microsoft needs to remember one reason Asian manufacturers use AOSP instead of Android: Google’s services are banned in several key countries like China and rarely used in other nations where the privacy-mining business model doesn’t yet yield enough revenue. Microsoft’s desire to put its services on everything is similar to Google’s, and it could face the same barriers if the goal is to mine users’ data for cash.

Regardless, there’s a key fact about the Nokia X you should know: You won’t be able to buy one. They won’t be sold in developed countries like the United States. They’re designed for “second world” markets, like Eastern Europe and Latin America, where the merchant class can’t afford a “first world” device like an iPhone or Galaxy S, but wants more than a basic feature phone like the Nokia Asha. Those people can afford the $125 Nokia X — or the better AOSP phones.

Except for the rich, the Third World will remain focused on devices like the Asha, Xiaomi’s lineup, and perhaps Firefox OS-based devices, several more of which running an improved Firefox version were also announced at Mobile World Conference.

BlackBerry, Tizen, and Windows Phone: Struggling mobile platforms still struggling

The Mobile World Congress also served as a showcase for struggling platforms desperate to get attention and, even moreso, market share.

Thus, Microsoft released some details on its pending Windows Phone 8.1 upgrade (nothing major there, other than simplified security features and Microsoft dumping its own Bing Maps for Nokia’s Here Maps) and announced several hardware partnerships to demonstrate commitment to its platform. Problem is, those partnerships are not new, and their “announcement” is an old marketing ploy of repeating yourself when you have nothing to say in hopes people won’t remember it from the first time.

Then there’s Tizen, the open source mobile OS that has lurched from Nokia to Intel to Samsung in the last four years. Yet again, no smartphones or tablets run it. But Samsung announced its use in a new version of the Galaxy Gear smart watch to be released this spring. The original Gear smart watch, which ran Android, was released just five months ago, to jeering reviews and extremely poor sales; Samsung even got caught grossly inflating the purported sales. That Gear is now dead, and the new Tizen Gear awaits.

The new Gear isn’t out yet, and Samsung has not shared much about it, but it’s still limited to working with only Samsung Galaxy devices, and its main purpose seems to be as a fitness monitor (like I said, health monitoring is the current fad). There are of course many available competitors that work with a wide range of Android and iOS devices. I doubt the new Gear will be any more successful than the old Gear, and it certainly won’t give Tizen a boost.

Finally, there’s BlackBerry. Today, the beleaguered company — even Windows Phone now outsells it — announced the new BlackBerry Q20 model that brings back the old models’ trackpad and function keys to attract the loyalist who just can’t handle a touchscreen smartphone and is using an iPhone or Android smartphone under great duress. What a sad strategy.

The truth is that those loyalists are few and far between, and they didn’t buy the BlackBerry Q10, though it has the standard BlackBerry keyboard that was supposed to lure the old-timey users back to BlackBerry. Trust me, the Q20’s trackpad and function keys won’t accomplish that, either.

But there may be one bit of good news for BlackBerry: Ford will reportedly dump Microsoft’s disliked Sync entertainment and navigation syncing service for smartphones in favor of BlackBerry’s QNX. QNX is the company that BlackBerry bought several years ago so that it could use the OS as the basis for the new BlackBerry 10 OS. That hasn’t worked out, but QNX continues to be a player in embedded OSes. However, Apple’s two-year-old iOS in the Car effort is starting to result in cars coming to market with it, so QNX has modern competition now. It’s no slam-dunk for BlackBerry here, either.

This article, “Galaxy S5, Nokia ‘Windroid,’ BlackBerry Q20: The hype hits the fan,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.