Jailbreak Community Battles Apple for Control of iPhone
Wired has an interesting article from Brian Chen in its Gadget Lab detailing the history of the jailbroken (jailbreaked?) iPhone, Apple’s efforts to thwart hackers and even a link to an application that will easily jailbreak your iPhone in two minutes.
And while you’re on the Wired website reading this article, be sure to also check out Brian’s article from August this year, “6 Reasons to Jailbreak your iPhone.”
Bada, Samsung’s New Open-Source Operating System: What’s the Beef?
“Does the world really need another OS?” asks Addy Dugale at the start of this Fast Company article about a new smartphone operating system from a handset manufacturer that already produces devices running Windows Mobile, Symbian, Android and LiMo. With four smartphone OSs in their lineup, why would Samsung launch its own operating system? Perhaps the Apple iPhone’s 17 percent share of the smartphone market has something to do with it? Read Addy’s article to get all the details, and be sure to watch the Samsung Bada video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlUCPcos3o4:
“In case your smatphone/netbook ain’t cutting it” was Engadget’s rhetorical statement last May regarding smartbooks, a new category of devices that are slightly smarter than a smartphone and slightly phonier (as in more phone) than a netbook. Some news out this week from Qualcomm and some Engadget discovered from Mobinnova are profiled in two articles that gives us a little more detail about this new device category certain to make — or at least attempt to make — a splash at next January’s Consumer Electronics Show.
In case you miss it
Verizon and AT&T have been having a war of words that seems to be escalating into a war of attorneys over Verizon’s “There’s a Map for That” advertising campaign. The Verizon campaign, which plays off Apple’s “There’s an App for That” iPhone campaign, shows two maps, a red Verizon map of the US indicating robust wireless data coverage and a blue AT&T map indicating sparse coverage. Eric Zeman at InformationWeek shares a letter that AT&T posted publicly refuting Verizon’s claims. This tit-for-tat battle between the two largest wireless carriers in the US is just ramping up and will certainly produce more fun moments as the two companies fight for new customers and ARPU in a market reaching saturation. When you choose your carrier, TheMoPRBlog wants to know: are you a red stater or a blue stater?
Five months ago we introduced the MoPR 500, an “index” of mobility industry stocks. We selected companies across a broad swath of the mobility industry, and “buying” one share of each, we assembled a list of stocks we could purchase for $500; hence the MoPR 500. We were inspired to create this index by forecasts of the stock market’s impending doom. Certainly a lot of what was forecasted as played out. But five months later, how are our mobility stocks doing?
We began at the close of market October 3, 2008 with an index value of $500.49. At Friday’s market close (March 6, 2009) the MoPR 500 was valued at $358.82, a loss of 28.31 percent.
For some context, at the close of the market on October 3, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) was valued at $10,325.38. On March 6 the DJIA was valued at $6,626.94, or a loss of 35.82 percent. As we watched the ups and mostly downs of the market these past five months, we observed that our mobility index usually though modestly outperformed the DJIA.
Of our 27 mobility stocks, 26 went down in value. Standing alone was Broadcom (NASDAQ: BCRM). On October 3, a share of Broadcom was worth $16.63, and last Friday it closed at $16.97. Only a 2.04 percent gain, but in this volatile market, who wouldn’t take that? For the most part, Broadcom has traded consistently over $16 per share over the past five months. Perhaps part of the stock’s appeal is that Broadcom recently introduced multimedia chipset technology for mobile phones.
The next four best performing stocks in the top of the of MoPR 500 are:
Sybase (NYSE: SY), purchased for $28.76 and trading last at $26.48 for a loss of 7.93 percent.
Syniverse (NYSE: SVR), purchased for $16.11 and trading last at $14.14 for a loss of 12.23 percent.
Verizon (NYSE: VZ), purchased for $31.24 and trading last at $27.28 for a loss of 12.68 percent.
Neustar (NYSE: NSR), purchased for $18.83 and trading last at $15.63 for a loss of 16.99 percent.
It’s sad when three of the best five performers have double digit losses, but these losses are about half the average loss for the index and about a third of the loss of the DJIA.
Four of the five worst performing stocks comprising the bottom of the MoPR 500 cost about $3.00 per share. At such a low initial value, every cent lost makes the stock drop more percentage-wise. The sole exception was Clearwire, purchased for $9.92 per share. Clearwire is in the midst of a much-watched consumer WiMax service roll out.
The five worst performing stocks of the MoPR 500 are:
Powerwave (NASDAQ: PWAV), purchased for $3.32 and trading last at $0.25 for a loss of 92.50 percent.
Nortel Networks (NYSE: NT), purchased for $2.08 and trading last at $0.32 for a loss of 84.62 percent.
UTStarcom (NASDAQ: UTSI), purchased for $2.88 and trading last at $0.70 for a loss of 75.69 percent.
Clearwire (NASDAQ: CLWR), purchased for $9.92 and trading last at $2.82 for a loss of 71.57 percent.
Alcatel Lucent (NYSE: ALU), purchased for $3.54 and trading last at $1.16 for a loss of 67.23 percent.
These last few weeks have certainly been crazy on the stock market. The only stock that seemed to do well the last two weeks was Campbell Soup (NYSE: CPB). It made us wonder how mobility stocks would fare as compared to the rest of the market. So we’re trying an experiment.
We looked at some representative companies across the wide mobility spectrum — from wireless to Wi-Fi, from mobile entertainment to network infrastructure — and we put together a portfolio buying a single shares of as many of these mobility stocks as we could purchase for $500. So yes, the “500″ in the name means dollars, not the number of stocks in our index.
On October 3, 2008 the “MoPR 500 Stock Index” was valued at $500.49. How’s it doing today? See how our mobility stock index is performing by visiting the MoPR 500 Index page here on TheMoPRBlog. You can get detailed information about all the stocks her at our MoPR 500 index pages on Herdstreet and Stockalicious.
