iPhone

The chief executive of one of Europe’s largest wireless carriers claims the reason sales of Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone are slumping is because the price is too high. France Telecom CEO Stephane Richard told Bloomberg that European customers are beginning to focus more on prices and are holding onto their old devices longer than before. He notes that the Apple frenzy isn’t what it use to be and it is becoming more difficult to sell a $600 phone. Richard seemed to suggest that without a low-cost iPhone, the company could continue to lose market share, adding that there “are fewer early adopters, and probably with the next release of the iPhone this will be evident.”

While it’s unlikely to ever see the light of day, Apple (AAPL) has apparently been experimenting with a radical new design for the iPhone whose casing looks much more like a fourth-generation iPod nano than a typical smartphone. A recently published patent filing spotted by The Telegraph shows that Apple has been toying around with a device that features a curved display with no side bezels and no buttons anywhere on its case. Apple envisions that the curved display will be made from flexible material that can present “an illusion of depth perception” capable of “mimicking a 3D experience.” Apple also says that users would be able to control the volume on the phone “by holding a finger over the volume indicator” and “expanding the volume control over the entire left side of the device,” thus eliminating any need for a volume button.

The buzz around the budget iPhone has grown deafening, with new reports about the device coming out on a weekly basis. This will be a product launch with a unique impact because of two trends that define the current smartphone market. First, the overall smartphone volume growth is projected to slow down from more than 50% in the fourth quarter of 2012 to about 36% in Q4 2013. Second, the Q4 2012 growth rates of the three biggest Asian smartphone vendors have remained superheated, with Samsung (005930) at 76%, Huawei at 89% and Sony (SNE) at 56%. What made this was possible was Apple’s slowdown to 29% growth during the past Christmas season and the notably weak year-on-year numbers from Nokia (NOK), ZTE and BlackBerry (BBRY). More →