The Smartphone Gulf and A Look Ahead

[slitchfield]

It's..... AAS video podcast 17, in which I muse on the gulf between opposite ends of the smartphone spectrum, despair over trolling fanboys and look ahead to hardware coming up in the second half of 2007. If you want to get all our podcasts, here's the RSS feed.

Read on in the full article.

[krisse]

Very good Steve!

Another big thing that tech fans seem to miss is price, the kind of people who buy a Nokia 6120 are paying half of what it costs to get an N95. Those are two completely different audiences with different aspirations.

In the S60 world alone, you only have to compare the 5500 and the E61, two smartphones which came out at the same time from the same manufacturer yet were clearly made for two totally different purposes.

Saying a phone is best is like saying a film or a book is best, it's a meaningless statement unless you say who it's best for.

If Apple is serious about getting market share, they'll have to get out some low-price keypad-based phones pretty sharpish, perhaps their answer to something like the Nokia 5300. I suspect though that Apple is comfortable where it is making a small number of high-profit low-selling models just like they currently do with the iPod. They've never really been a truly mass market commodity company.

Before anyone says the iPod is high-selling, it isn't, at least not compared to mobile phones. For every person that buys a separate music player there are over a dozen that buy a phone, and an increasing percentage of new phones have built-in music players and mass storage. Apple had to start selling music phones sooner or later, or it would have ended up suffering the same fate as PDA makers today and pager makers yesterday.

since apple sold 1,000,000 iphones in a week in the US only, i would not worry that much for their market shares.

this iphone is only the first version( remember the first ipod ? ), they are well on the way to get the same success that the ipod that has with something like 80% of market share in the US.

i dont know how long it will take for nokia and others to react as they do not have a tight control over the software, symbian neither control on the highly unstable apps that are sold.

Symbian phones look quite uglish/previous generation now, i bet Symbian/Nokia will not be able to get out something that is integrated and competitive with iphone before 2 years.

Why has everyone concluded that the iPhone is the only good looking phone out there ?

I can only go on pictures, but I did not think it looked that different to the countless other devices around. After all, it is only a rectangular screen with a bit of material round it. It is quite slim from what I can see but that is about the only 'significant' thing I can see. Not exactly new to have a slim phone is it ?

Also find it strange why people get go excited by a bit of eye candy. I can understand that people are saying the interface is easy to use etc. But to go on about how pretty the interface looks. Can someone explain this ?

I mean we are just talking about a few rows of icons arn't we. Perhaps with a bit of nice animation in between ?

Kind of a bit like Vista coming out. Wow it looks fantastic. But then you realise that essentially it is just doing the same things with a few updated graphics...

I get the feeling most of this is just dumb sheep, jump on the bandwagon fall for the hype type stuff. The only real valid point appears to be 'it is very intuitive'. Though I suspect a few more features would soon add a few more Settings and Options screens and that would make it a little less intuitive.

After Apple have done a few more itterations and perhaps added a whole load more features and done it in a manner that makes them stand out somehow, I'll get excited about getting one. But at the moment, I just don't get it.

Come on. someone explain to me what I'm missing here. Beyond the 'it is Apple therefore it is brilliant'.

Zuber

[slitchfield]

>>Though I suspect a few more features would soon add a few more Settings and Options screens and that would make it a little less intuitive

Yes, this is the crux of a lot that I've been saying in my Smartphones Show - what Apple has done is great, but a lot of the intuitiveness comes from limited functionality and there not being much you can add or change. The challenge for them will come as features are added.... and added.... etc. On my current S60 smartphone, everything has been tweaked just how I like it and I've added around 20 third party native and Java applications. You have to accept a few extra clicks to get to a greater choice of functions etc.

Steve

i was quite skeptic about the iphone, i love my e61i and my 9300 but after watching the 20minutes video " iphone guided tour" on the apple' website :

i want one and symbian look to me very ridiculously non-user friendly and unstable.

No doubt Apple will release more applications, probably a ILife for the iphone, they have just jumped on the phone market and they are there for years.

[ratza]

Originally Posted by Unregistered

since apple sold 1,000,000 iphones in a week in the US only, i would not worry that much for their market shares.

Compare 1 million iPhones with 100 million Symbian devices sold only last year, 38 million only from Nokia. It pretty makes a difference, doesn't it?

Originally Posted by Unregistered

this iphone is only the first version( remember the first ipod ? ), they are well on the way to get the same success that the ipod that has with something like 80% of market share in the US.

Agree to the fact that is just the first phone, not smartphone. As somebody already mentioned on AAS forums, Europe and Asia were conquered by Nokia. Different needs, different phones. iPhone is not the ultimate device.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

i dont know how long it will take for nokia and others to react as they do not have a tight control over the software, symbian neither control on the highly unstable apps that are sold.

Wrong from the start. Nokia and Symbian do not want to control the software. Symbian provides an amazing OS which allows creating third party apps and this is the main characteristic of a smartphone: being able to install other software. This is the case also for Windows Mobile, Palm, Linux. iPhone looks more like Sony Ericsson R380, the first Symbian device ever (as far as I remember).

Originally Posted by Unregistered

Symbian phones look quite uglish/previous generation now, i bet Symbian/Nokia will not be able to get out something that is integrated and competitive with iphone before 2 years.

Wrong again. To name just two stylish Symbian phones: Sony Ericsson W950, Nokia N91. Symbian means features which you use, not a fancy phone to show to your friends. iPhone is not so oriented on features like Symbian and as a matter of fact, the whole iPhone UI can be reproduced entirely on any UIQ device. The other way is impossible. The only thing which I like at iPhone is that is intuitive.

[krisse]

"since apple sold 1,000,000 iphones in a week in the US only, i would not worry that much for their market shares."

1 million is nothing in the phone world, Nokia alone sells 1 million phones every single day. Even that is only about 30% of the total market.

It's also deceptive to look at launch figures for a hyped up device as it is bound to be bought by the hardcore of fans for the first week or two. After that it has to rely on the average consumer to survive, and as Sony found out with the PS3 that's by no means guaranteed.

But I think you're missing the point about what I was trying to say: the market for a $600 on-contract phone just isn't that big.

The average contract phone is free (some of them even less than free if they involve a rebate), and even if you look at sim-free prices the average amount people are prepared to pay is about $100. Very very few people are prepared to sign a 2 year contract that costs about $1500 in total, and then pay $600 on top of that, purely to use a phone.

If Apple is serious about market share as opposed to profits, then they'll have to bring out some extremely basic, cheap models, simply because that's where almost all the sales are.


"symbian look to me very ridiculously non-user friendly and unstable."

Have you actually tried any new Symbians lately? S60 3rd Edition is extremely stable, crashes are very rare (on all but one S60 3rd models I've tried I haven't had a single crash).

As for user-friendliness, you can't do most of a S60 phone's functions on an iPhone. No third party apps, no broadband access, no videophone, no MMS etc. It's also not very user-friendly if you want to use it with one hand, as most people do.