Consumer electronics is one competitive market. Even before the global financial markets had caught pneumonia and gone hemorrhaging, makers of mobile phones, TVs, and other electronic toys and gadgets were engaged in some serious levels of competition. In some cases, duels for market shares are matters of life and death for these companies.

The economic slowdown, referred to by some quarters as a depression, has only made matters worse. With consumers deferring their gadget purchases and upgrades, vendors have seen their sales plummet faster than the president's approval ratings. Still, some segments miraculously retained their shimmer.

People kept on buying iPhones and other smart phones. The lowly netbook, much maligned by Steve Jobs and his cohorts, helped turn the barbarian tide otherwise known as plunging sales and leaky bottom lines. Microsoft's release of the Windows 7 operating system completed the recovery scene.
Things turning roses, however, does not mean that, all of a sudden, electronics vendors are now chummy with each other and ready to embrace a mutual admiration and support society.

Missing iPhone

By now, everybody should be familiar with the case of the missing and found next-generation iPhone. That the misplaced phone adventure took place at a California bar was only fitting, the way a similarly seedy rendezvous would be cinematically right for a cloak-and-dagger B movie.

Yet, amid the hoopla, some observers who might or might not have been reading too much conspiracy novels raised their collective eyebrows over what they perceived as a crass marketing ploy. As if the promotion plot was not convoluted enough — a smart phone's prototype accidentally left behind at a bar by an Apple software engineer, found by an unscrupulous bar habitué who promptly sold (fenced?) it to an equally unprincipled owner of a technology blog — some other IT blogs also published photos of the smart phone, the Apple gene of which was later confirmed by an anonymous Cupertino insider.

Our take on the issue? This corner believes that marketing and hype are two necessary evils that essentially are saddled with diminishing returns. In turn, this forces their practitioners to up the ante, with every market cycle.

Mobile North Korea

While the total of 600,000 mobile subscribers forecast for 2010 in North Korea may seem quite modest when compared with mobile subscriber data from other countries in the region, it nevertheless represents one giant leap for the reclusive country's consumers. In a country as closed and as tightly ruled as North Korea, flow of information, especially those coming in and going out of the country, is not something taken lightly by the government.

A previous try at adopting mobile communication in 2002 was inexplicably discontinued 18 months later. Six years later, the government green-lighted a 3G network.

Where would this lead to? Nobody dares make a forecast.

That's all for the meantime, folks. Join me again next time as we keep on watching IT.