Huawei Vision : a view from the cloud

Huawei Vision runs on Android 2.3 but comes with a 160 Gigabyte spot in the cloud for every owner, positioning the Chinese player at the strategic gateway between that soft spot and its own hardware (scheduled for September in China, along with 4G). Apps agregation starts with the usual suspects : music, images or video that you may not want to transfer forever from laptop to laptop or to XX century storage solutions (ie CDs, DVDs).

Hardly disruptive : Alibaba just launched a similar concept, and of course Apple made a splash with its iCloud earlier this year. But Huawei was supposed to be essentially about hardware.

Sounds like that business model may not be sustainable anymore. Clouds may pass in the sky, replaced with new UFOs, but the truth is starting to sink in : smartphones are not much smarter than computers, and differenciation is getting more and more difficult every year. Worse : product cycles are even shorter and being cool never lasts long.

Food for thought for Samsung, who's been threatened by the Nokia syndrome even before claiming the leadership in handsets. But at least the Finns did venture into new business models. Never forget that OVI preceded Apple's App Store iOs by one year.

Of course, back then, Jorma Ollila was already gone, and Steve Jobs still cool.


mot-bile 2011