Carnival 125

[slitchfield]

All About Symbian regular Matt Radford is hosting the Carnival of the Mobilists this week, it's here at his All About iPhone blog. Carnival 125 is a bit of a cracker, actually, with discussion about whether content providers should pay the carriers for the data consumed by the end user, with a look at a huge new mobile-related craze from Japan, plus a detailed look at the implications of Google's Android (and the aforementioned Apple iPhone) for the rest of the smartphone industry.

Read on in the full article.

[mattrad]

Well with one post to date, I'm not so much a regular writer as reader of AAS!

I would be very interested to get people's comments on the Carnival articles, whether here or over on All About iPhone. Ajit's submission in particular has got me thinking a lot about how the handset industry works, and how hardware commoditisation will pan out over the next few years.

[krisse]

The phone making industry will resemble the PC making industry, where we don't care who makes it as long as it's cheap and it gives us access to the connected services we want.

[mattrad]

True, but commoditisation will only go so far I think. I could access my online services from any el cheapo computer, but I choose to do it from my Mac, for which I have paid a premium (now awaiting "you're a Mactard" comments). Why? Because I prefer the software interface and the hardware design.

I'm sure there will still be space for plenty of luxury / high-end / other niche mobiles even when handset commoditisation takes off. One of the possibilties of Android is that it can be run on generalised hardware, with the handset design and software look customised as the manufacturer (or customer) wants.

[krisse]

True, but commoditisation will only go so far I think. I could access my online services from any el cheapo computer, but I choose to do it from my Mac, for which I have paid a premium (now awaiting "you're a Mactard" comments). Why? Because I prefer the software interface and the hardware design.

The vast majority of phone users will not have that option, because most of them are in the developing world where there may not even be a reliable electricity supply let alone desktop computers.

As many people have pointed out, the most common form of computing device now is not the PC but the mobile phone, and as smartphones get cheaper and cheaper it will be phone-based platforms that become the main way that people access online services. Features like TV Out make this even more plausible, as television sets and phones are far more common than PCs.

To put the drop in smartphone price in perspective, the N95 cost 600 euros at launch, a year later the similar-spec 6220 costs 300 euros at launch. I would speculate that in as little as 5 years time we'll see even the lowest-end handsets being N95-spec smartphones. (I'm not saying they'll necessarily be Symbian or S60, that's difficult to predict, but they will have equivalent computing power and hardware abilities.)

To put the importance of the developing world in perspective, Nokia's top two customers are China and India, not just in unit sales but in total dollars too. Nokia inked a deal with one Chinese mobile operator recently whose customer base is apparently larger than the entire population of the United States.

I'm sure there will still be space for plenty of luxury / high-end / other niche mobiles even when handset commoditisation takes off.

Of course, but they will just be Perrier, the kind of thing that only a tiny percentage will ever use, and which makes little difference to the world.

The lowest end phones will be humble-but-truly-revolutionary tap water.

I did a feature about this while ago which hardly anyone read, but represents my views on this matter:

http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/featu...Smartphone.php

[mattrad]

Well I read your article, even if no-one else did. And I think we're agreeing here.

Yes, low-end phones are having a massive impact, especially in the developing world. And right now those phones don't have much functionality as compared to a smartphone (although this has forced people to innovate around those limitations, such as sending cash via SMS).

Hardware costs will continue to fall - those low-end phones were once high-end Western wow phones. What I was ineptly trying to point out is that Android - running on low-cost hardware - is an enabler for the software to move out of the expensive end of the market into the cheap and cheerful, so that pretty soon the developing world phones will have as much basic functionality as the high-end devices that we nitpick the arse out of. Smartness will trickle down, on phones at least.