More Mobile Phones Branded By Carriers

We've written before about carriers increasingly lookng to ODMs to build them branded phones, rather than taking a backseat to the Nokias of the world. The NY Times is writing about an Israeli handset maker, Emblaze, that is basing its entire handset strategy on building branded phones for carriers. They claim their expertise is in being able to build relatively small batches of particular phones - which, of course, only seems like an advantage if you don't expect to sell that many phones. Derek counters: Not quite, it's a huge advantage to be able to customize smaller batches of phones for carriers. This is something that has only been offered to the biggest carriers so far, and the smaller carriers (<12M subs) pretty much have to accept the same phones ordered by the big guys. No differentiation possible under that system.

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