The Millennium Semiconductor Survival Guide

Nokia will choose to hold the iphone conference on the first day of 2002, which shows that they have enough confidence in this product and are confident in challenging Mphone's position in the high-end field.

It is not that there are no mobile phone companies that want to make mobile phones with a price of more than US$500. Giants such as Motorola, Nokia, Sony, and Samsung have all tried. The problem is that consumers do not buy it.

Everyone knows the benefits of being a high-end brand, especially a global brand like Nokia. They thought about adopting a sub-brand model before, imitating the relationship between Volkswagen and Audi, and launched a sub-brand like Rittal in 1998 that focuses on the high-end market.

When Nokia's definition of Rittal was to use luxury gems and luxury leather to create high-end mobile phones, Zhou Xin launched the Mphone.

In terms of price alone, Rittal’s price of tens of thousands of dollars is obviously a few streets ahead of Mphone, but from the perspective of overall revenue and future mobile phone development direction, Mphone is clearly far ahead.

No one can guarantee which direction mobile phones will develop in the future. Zhou Xin's reputation and the success of Mphone have proved to colleagues that the application of mobile phones equipped with Internet may be the right way.

Therefore, Nokia has invested a lot of effort in the iphone, hoping to create a sufficiently good Internet mobile phone, which is also for Nokia to capture the market of more than 500 US dollars.

At present, among the global mobile phone brands, only Matrix can be said to have gained a firm foothold above US$500. Even if there are other mobile phone brands that sell such expensive mobile phones, their sales are also very impressive.

Finland time is five hours behind Yanjing time, so when Zhou Xin woke up, Nokia's press conference was over, and he found the summary email about iPhone sent to him by the Matrix market analysis department from his mailbox.

The iPhone is equipped with NFC function for the first time, providing users with a new choice, users can bind their credit card to the mobile phone through NFC function.

In this way, users can complete the payment through the iPhone. This is because the electronic payment in the Europa region is only open. NewPay just obtained the electronic payment license in the Europa region last month. The electronic payment in the Europa region is far less mature than that of American.

Just as the NFC chip designed by STMicroelectronics has a place to use, Nokia and STMicroelectronics have built the NFC function. Nokia hopes to use this function that Mphone does not have to realize overtaking in the corners of the Europa area.

Zhou Xin thought it was a bit funny when he saw it, and now the NFC function is somewhat whimsical, because for the NFC chip to work, the POS machine that needs to swipe the card also has an NFC chip.

What's the use of having an NFC chip on your head now? Of course, it can also be promoted, but for supermarkets, changing this also requires cost.

When NewPay promoted the QR code, it took a lot of effort to replace the scanning equipment of the manufacturer with a camera that supports QR code scanning. This is based on the fact that NewPay has tens of millions of users in American.

Of course, iphone is also pre-loaded with NewPay, and like Mphone, it supports all functions of NewPay.

At the same time, the iPhone is equipped with applications similar to Weibo and WeChat. The WeChat on the iPhone is called Nokia Chat by Nokia, and the Weibo is called Nokia Show.

They understand Weibo as a show, a display of your life.

Although Weibo is more like this now, Jianzheng enthusiasts are still in the minority, and the influence of Jianzheng has gradually grown after September.

When Nokia designed this function, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were still alive, and their understanding of Weibo was to display.

The last is the application store. Nokia has launched a store similar to Mphone, which can replace mobile phone applications on the computer. At the same time, it has asked EA, Ubisoft and Nintendo to help them create several high-quality mobile games.

A lot of space was devoted to games at the press conference. It can be seen that Nokia quickly grasped the focus of Internet mobile phones. At least just for games, many users will pay for it.

The early promotion of personal computers, one is commercial office, and the other is video games.

After reading it, Zhou Xin felt threatening, but not strong.

Because iphone's native application design is far from perfect as Mphone, more importantly, it is the chip. Mphone's chip is at least three years ahead of the entire era in the field of commercial mobile chips.

About a month before the iPhone launch, Zhou Xin knew the specific parameters of the Nokia mobile phone chip, Intel's XScale chip designed based on the ARM v5 architecture.

This chip is to fill the gap in Intel's low-power processors, and Nokia uses the first generation of products in the XScale series: PXA25x

PXA25x has three frequency versions of 200MHz, 300MHz, and 400MHz. According to Zhou Xin's speculation, the high probability is the 200MHz version, the small probability is the 300MHz version, and it is almost impossible to be the 400MHz version.

Because of power consumption, the higher the frequency, the higher the power consumption.

Zhou Xin knew Intel’s XScale series of chips very well. Later, when he chatted with Intel’s engineers, Intel regretted this series of chips. He thought that it was because he missed XScale that he missed the bonus of the mobile Internet for more than ten years. Expect.

PXA25x is Intel's first mobile chip product. Intel is originally built for handheld computers, so it will pay attention to power consumption, but not so much.

Mobile phones and PDAs have completely different requirements for battery life. Mphone’s 6 hours of high-frequency use and 10 hours of low-frequency use have been criticized by users, and it is also the main reason for Mphone opponents on online forums to attack Mphone.

"No one in their right mind would pay $599 for a phone that only lasts six hours."

This is like attacking ideal users, focusing on the fact that they buy trams to buy sofas, refrigerators and color TVs, and attacking Weilai users, focusing on buying JAC.

As for Xiaopeng, there is no need for opponents to say anything more just because of the name.

The battery life of a handheld computer is generally about 3 hours, so PXA25x does not do well in the balance between battery life and performance.

Therefore, Zhou Xin estimates that the power consumption of the iPhone is likely to be 200MHz, which also determines that there will be bugs that support loading too many apps due to insufficient performance when it is first launched.

But Zhou Xin knew that he could not relax his vigilance at all, because a giant like Nokia reacted very quickly.

From a historical point of view, Nokia's collapse in the mobile phone field seems to have been a flash. Facing this era, Zhou Xin still feels a lot of pressure.

Because of the hurricane effect he brought, it is very likely that Nokia will pay more attention to the mobile Internet than later generations, so that he has little first-mover advantage to speak of.

Of course, Zhou Xin knows that with Samsung's chip technology in his hand, he will definitely be able to occupy a place in the mobile Internet era. What he worries about is that he will not have the status of Apple in the future.

Judging from the product design of the Nokia version of the iPhone, Zhou Xin did not read Nokia's arrogance at all. They borrowed a lot from the successful experience of the Mphone in the app.

Zhou Xin put down the Mphone and frowned. He was thinking about whether to launch a touch-screen Mphone this year.

Or wait until the technology is more mature next year before launching.

Because the sales of Mphone are very good, there are some competitions in the face of competitors, and Matrix's patent accumulation in the field of touch screen is not enough. This year, it can achieve the effect he expected, but it is not so interesting.

Therefore, Mphone can still last for another year. If the second generation Mphone is launched next year, it will definitely beat other mobile phone brands to the ground.

In addition, American will not launch 3G until 2003, so Zhou Xin believes that next year is a good time point.

But the update frequency is too slow, and there is such a big change from the first generation to the second generation, which will cause users to have higher and higher expectations for Mphone, which is not a good thing.

Seeing Zhou Xin's sad face, Li Jingyi asked, "What's wrong? Nokia's new product works so well that it puts too much pressure on you?"

Zhou Xin returned to Huaguo this time and brought Li Jingyi back together. Originally, Zhou Xin wanted to go to Shen Hai to meet and chat with core backbones of Xinxin Technology such as Hu Zhengming and Lin Benjian.

They all ended up going back to American for Christmas and New Years Day.

This is a good thing for American's executives in China. They can take both Christmas and Spring Festival, which is equivalent to two long holidays.

Zhou Xin said: "No, Nokia is not putting too much pressure on it, at least not now.

I was thinking about something else. "

Li Jingyi: "Well, last semester I took a course on the history of technology at Berkeley, and the professor who took this course spoke very highly of Mphone, thinking that Mphone represents the future direction of development.

Then ask everyone in class, which is the best application for Mphone?

There are various answers, Weibo, WeChat, NewPay, including "Prince of Persia", "Doodle Jump" and so on. "

Doodle Jump is a mobile game developed by Flamingo itself. It is completely their own idea, and Zhou Xin did not interfere.

It’s just that after seeing this game, although the game’s art is different, the gameplay is very similar. Zhou Xin quickly associated it with Doodle Jump, and then decided to call it Doodle Jump.

This small game, priced at $2.99, sold 500,000 copies within half a year of its launch, making it the best-selling app on the Mphone.

Li Jingyi asked: "Do you know which application the professor thinks is the best?"

Zhou Xin said: "Obviously it is an Mphone store, and only with the Mphone store can there be subsequent applications.

I can even know what he's trying to say. "

Li Jingyi opened her eyes wide, with an incredulous look on her face: "What do you want to say?"

Zhou Xin said: "He definitely wanted to compare Intel's 4004 chip with the Mphone.

It is believed that Intel's 4004 chip opened the era of the personal PC, and the Mphone store opened the era of the mobile Internet. "

Li Jingyi was completely shocked, because Zhou Xinquan hit the mark, "Did you take this class?"

Zhou Xin thought, this is hard for me, "No, but this is a logic.

As a professor at Berkeley, he is obviously well-informed. He believes that Mphone represents the future development direction. If it wants to reach such a high level, shouldn't it be compared with the Wintel alliance that Intel and Microsoft dominated the PC era?

Then I asked which application is the best. There are other applications only if there is an Mphone store. If there is no Mphone store, then there is no essential difference between Mphone and other mobile phones.

The Mphone store is similar to Intel's 4004 chip. Before the 4004 chip, the functions of the chip were well defined. If you want to change the function, you can only change the hardware first. After the birth of the 4004 chip, users only need to change the instructions to make the chip realize different functions.

And thus the software industry was born. Mphone stores did something similar. "