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CHINESE ELECTRONICS MAKER Huawei has enlisted IBM to help it come up with a branding strategy to sell tablets, smartphones and cloud computing services.

Huawei is one of the largest telecoms equipment providers in the world and wins numerous contracts, but it wants to get into the consumer electronics business and has shown off impressive looking smartphones. Now it wants IBM, a company that has very little direct involvement in the smartphone and tablet markets, to help it build an image that will make punters lust after its kit.

Bloomberg is reporting that Huawei will seek 25 consultants from IBM to come up with answers by November. There is no information available about how much Huawei is paying IBM but Ross Gan, a spokesman for Huawei said, “It’s not a traditional branding project where they tell us how the brand should be positioned … It’s more from the management-of-the-process point of view: How do I manage the brand function within the organization? Who is responsible for what?”

IBM and Huawei have a long standing relationship and with the Chinese vendor wanting to triple its revenues in the next decade, that relationship is getting stronger. One way for it to hit its target of 0bn annual revenue will be to get into the smartphone and tablet business.

Huawei’s chief rival in China is ZTE, which has enjoyed considerable success with its range of cut priced Android smartphones. Judging by Huawei’s devices, it looks like the firm is not only going for the low end but also the more aspirational end of the market.

IBM will have its work cut out for it to help Huawei market its devices to consumers who already have Apple, HTC, LG, Motorola, Samsung, Nokia and ZTE to choose from. µ

ANALYST OUTFIT IHS Isuppli claims that smartphones will make up the majority of mobile phone sales by 2015.

Isuppli’s forecast puts global smartphone shipments topping one billion in 2015, a doubling of the current figure, which stands at 478 million. The upshot of this is that smartphones will make up 54.5 per cent of phone shipments in 2015 while presently accounting for just 32.5 per cent.

According to Isuppli the rapidly growing low-end smartphone market will fuel the rapid growth. Francis Sideco, senior principle analyst of wireless communications at IHS Isuppli said, “With their affordable prices, low-end smart phones are attractive to first-time users and to consumers in emerging economies where subscriber levels are rising at the fastest rates of all regions of the world, such as China, India, South Asia and Africa.”

Last year smartphone newcomer ZTE scored a big win with its Blade low-cost handset. Rebadged as the San Francisco and sold for around £100, it was an very compelling Android smartphone. More recently the incredible price cuts on HP’s Touchpad and Pre 3 have shown the appetite there is for cut price smartphones and tablets.

Isuppli claims that Samsung has benefited the most in recent times with its smartphone shipments going from strength to strength. The firm pegs Samsung’s shipment growth at 600 per cent for the second quarter of 2011 but interestingly puts that down to low-end smartphones that were popular in China and Latin America. However it can’t hurt to have the ultra-desirable Galaxy S II headlining its range, either.

What Isuppli’s forecast goes to show is that smartphones are becoming mainstream. The expensive devices that were purchased by early adoptors will still remain but mass market consumers, the ones who do not particularly care to spend the best part of £400 on a device, will be catered for between now and 2015. µ

UNDER ITS FRESH naming strategy, Samsung will bring a line of Galaxy branded phones to market including the W, M Pro, Y and Y Pro.

The smartphone maker has confirmed a set of smartphones along with a naming strategy. The Korean company is sticking with the Galaxy brand and splitting the phones into five categories which are ‘S’ for Super Smart, ‘R’ for Royal/Refined, ‘W’ for Wonder, ‘M’ for Magical and ‘Y’ for Young.

Other branding includes three tag on names that are ‘Pro’, ‘Plus’ and ‘LTE’. Pro simply means the phone has a physical Qwerty keyboard, Plus means the device is an upgraded version and LTE is short for long term evolution and means the handset has 4G connectivity technology.

JK Shin, head of mobile communications at Samsung said, “As Samsung continues to innovate, our goal is to provide consumers with an experience uniquely tailored to their needs. We have introduced steps to ensure users can simply identify the device designed to deliver the perfect experience for them,”

We already have the Galaxy S II and the R will be upon us ‘soon’. This morning mobile operator Three also confirmed that it will be selling the Galaxy W smartphone soon. That is in the middle of the range with a 1.4GHz processor and a 3.7in Super LCD touchscreen.

Samsung has confirmed that all four devices will ship running Google’s Android 2.3 Gingerbread operating system.

Next up is the Galaxy M Pro which is Samsung’s version of a Blackberry with a 2.6in touchscreen, full Qwerty keyboard and optical track pad. The device is 9.97mm thick and “designed with professionals in mind”.

The Galaxy Y Pro is a budget version of the M Pro which also will have a touchscreen coupled with a Qwerty keyboard. Details are light but the handset will come with Think Free mobile office.

Lastly, the Galaxy Y is your classic budget Android smartphone, similar to the Galaxy Ace. Again details are light but the phone will have an 832MHz processor and will come pre-loaded with the Swype keyboard.

Samsung will unveil the four smartphones at this year’s IFA conference in Germany. µ

Electronic noses that can check blood/alcohol levels and detect gasses in the air will be coming to smartphones in the next three to five years, delegates at Semicon West were told.

Luc Van den hove, president of nanoelectronics research firm IMEC, said that the technology had now reached the point where the necessary sensors could be built simply and small enough for the technology to be widespread in the smartphone sector.

“It’s a logical step,” he told the Inq.

“You’ve already got a lot of sensors in a smartphone and electronic noses are a logical addition. You can already get the devices as an add-on for regular phones.”

Within a decade advances in nanoelectronics will make holograms an integral part of modern communications he said. Micro-mirror technology and advanced processors will bring down the cost and increase effectiveness of holographic technology and bring it mainstream.

Plastic processors are also going to become increasingly common. In February scientists demonstrated a plastic processor that could be printed into flexible labelling on foodstuffs or be built into a flexible health monitoring patch that can be worn in hospital. There will be 400 million such medical devices by 2015 he predicted.

“Plastic will never replace silicon, but if you look at these designs and the first microprocessors there are some very real similarities,” he told delegates.

It also has the advantage of being relatively cheap, and could play a vital role in the health of people in developing economies, by linking ‘body area networks’ into mobile and Wi-Fi access points. There are many more phones than doctors in most of the world he said, and such sensors could significantly help global health.

Overall the industry was in no danger of running up against manufacturing problems for at least the next decade he said. The limits of scaling down traditional transistor technology reached its limit around ten years ago, but advanced materials design and 3D stacking technology were making it possible to get around this.

Intel’s tri-gate technology could take up the slack and would be scalable all the way down to 10 nanometres. Beyond that tunnel field-effect transistors (TFETs) were looking very promising, but more work needed to be done he said. High-K metal gate took ten years of research and the learning curve is only getting longer.

Flash memory has a solid roadmap to to scale down to 11 nanometres by 2020, and DRAM technology would go down to 16-20 nanometres within the same time period.

As for networking technology all the pieces are in place for silicon photonics – linking optical pickups directly into the processing heart of computers. Intel has been investing heavily in this technology, which will drastically increase the speed and efficiency of data transfers.

KOREAN ELECTRONICS GIANT Samsung has announced it has sold over 3 million of its Galaxy S II smartphones, having previously announced 3 million pre-orders.

Confusion has set in over the sales figures since we can’t work out whether this new figure is the same one as the old one, which suggests that since the pre-sales no more have been sold, or whether we should be writing that Samsung has sold six million of the handsets.

We asked Samsung, which, given a day to work out the maths for us, failed. In the press release, where things are much simpler, JK Shin, president and head of mobile communications at Samsung said, “This milestone reflects the continued strong support from our carrier partners around the world who have chosen the GALAXY S II as their flagship Android device.”

The phone has a dual-core processor and a 4.3-in screen with Super AMOLED Plus technology. The phone is a major rival to Apple’s Iphone, but we are expecting to see the next version(s) of that device later this year.

The two companies have been locked in legal battles over their mobile devices recently. The latest development is that Samsung has dropped the lawsuit against the fruit themed firm in which it asked to see the Iphone 5 and Ipad 3. µ

Nick Farrell THE INQUIRER

Spells it out for the Grauniad