Consumer Electronics: The grass is never greener

The grass is sel­dom greener

Now I’ve been read­ing up sev­eral devices, try­ing to find out if there’s a per­fect device out there. The results were exactly as I expected, there are no per­fect devices. So the ques­tion is, why is this? Why can’t some com­pany just make a killer device that does every­thing the users want. Just how bad is the Sam­sung Omnia  HD (that I had to write a 32 page report on) or the iPad, which has been described as a fail even before its launch?

I did a bit of research on the mat­ter  and to cut a long story short, it’s all about cost and time-to-market. The demand for con­sumer elec­tron­ics has grown quite sig­nif­i­cantly over the the years. This cre­ates tremen­dous pres­sure on prod­uct man­u­fac­tures such as Samsung.

Grow­ing reliance on con­sumer elec­tron­ics = need for shorter devel­op­ment cycles + a need for the dif­fer­ent divi­sions to work closer together.

For instance, con­sumer electronics(CE) pro­duc­ers can design and develop prod­ucts faster than Inte­grated Circuit(IC) sup­pli­ers can design the nec­es­sary chips. So the suc­cess of the CE indus­try is depen­dent on how well these two can work together.

Now, prod­uct life cycles are becom­ing shorter and com­pe­ti­tion more intense. The method­ol­ogy that IC design­ers use is cost-effective, they have a lengthy design cycle so they try to antic­i­pate what the CE pro­duc­ers and the con­sumers may want. IC design­ers also lack flex­i­bil­ity, they freeze the cir­cuit design at a cer­tain point for man­u­fac­tura­bil­ity. CE man­u­fac­tur­ers approach projects oppor­tunis­ti­cally with flex­i­ble ideas since they work more closely with the con­sumers. This dis­junc­tion results in most of the prob­lems we see in prod­ucts. You can read more on these and other issues on the KPMG web­site.

The Sam­sung Omnia HD was never meant to sup­port 720p video record­ing, the hard­ware is sim­ply not capa­ble of pro­duc­ing up-to-standard 720p per­for­mance. Devel­op­ment of the hard­ware for the Omnia HD was con­cluded some­time in late 2008 yet mobile phones capa­ble of HD record­ing, like the Sony Eric­s­son Vivaz, are only start­ing to come out now  2years on. That alone says a lot when con­sid­er­ing that just 2 months can make a world of dif­fer­ence on the con­sumer elec­tron­ics scene. An arti­cle on Giz­modo quoted Steve Jobs as say­ing this in 1994 (in the image below):

Steve Jobs Quote

In the con­sumer elec­tron­ics mar­ket, it’s all about speed-to-market, it’s either you’re going to be an inno­va­tor, pio­neer­ing new tech­nolo­gies and win­ning lots of cus­tomers or you’re going to be a fol­lower, trail­ing behind at the tail end of profit. But at what expense? The Omnia HD is my favorite exam­ple since it had so many ‘firsts’. First Sym­bian smart­phone: capa­ble of HD video record­ing, with a large 3.7″ AMLOED dis­play and with a capac­i­tive touch screen. The Sam­sung i8510 Innov8 before it had a sim­i­lar fate, it was the first mobile phone on the mar­ket with an 8MP cam­era but it was plagued with severe video lag and poor sound, issues that were never resolved. So the devices that make it first to mar­ket with ‘never before seen’ fea­tures are rife with prob­lems. Those ‘improved’ prod­ucts that come after them suf­fer from poor sales and they are poorly sup­ported by the man­u­fac­turer as a result.

So it’s a never end­ing cycle that comes down to soft­ware. The iPhone is an exam­ple of typ­i­cally poor hardware(no front fac­ing cam­era, remov­able bat­tery, cam­era flash etc.) but awe­some soft­ware to try make up for it. The Apple iPad may have that same strength when com­pared to the Joo­Joo for instance. Given that the i8910 has an excit­ing year of sup­port up ahead, it remains to be seen whether or not Sam­sung will step up and fix all the wrongs.