Thirsty Rock

One in very five humans has a phone in their pocket. Yet only five companies in the world account for the GSM chipsets found in all GSM phones around the globe. Of these, more than half are powered by technologies developed by one company: ST/Ericsson. Such is the death grip on the mobile handset market by a handful of companies that there is little incentive to innovate around the GSM chip, the baseband processor. Any innovation would meet with some steep challenges. For starters, programming information (API) for the chip is a very closely guarded secret . This secrecy guarantees licensing fees to the G5 for the GSM protocol stack software. Hardly surprising that smart phones, which boast a second (more 'open') application processor, enjoy more creativity than their drab cousins the feature phones. Closed proprietary GSM hardware implementations could also be responsible for the rapid loss in market share to the new kids on the block - Android and the iPhone.

Nam Yong, CEO of the third largest mobile phone manufacturer LG Electronics, offered his resignation 17 Sept 2010 barely a week after the exit of Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo. The two executives are victims of a combined onslaught from Apple and Google. The latter grew its market share by 1500% selling almost 11 million handsets by Q2 2010 from only 0.8 million in Q2 2009. Android is on target to unseat the Blackberry (Research in Motion) from the #2 slot by the close of 2010.