Insight 28 - news roundup, integration and smartphone stats

[Rafe]

In AAS Insight #28 Rafe, Ewan and Steve discuss some of the news from the past week including Trolltech, Mail for Exchange 2.5 and the Symbian Smartphone Show before moving on to the general waffle topics: firstly S60's increasing integration with the PC and web, secondly smartphone statistics and definition.

Read on in the full article.

[svdwal]

... just because comparatively few people put software on their Nokia smartphones.

If you look at the Handango yardstick 2007 [Link: http://www.handango.com/marketing/Ya...007_YE_YE.pdf],
software is being sold for Palm (yes, indeed), Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices.
The only Symbian device listed, the Nokia N95 is tenth in the number of units sold.

It is difficult to interpret this result. Nokia Software Market might be taking away lots of Symbian business from Handango, or Handango might mainly serve the US market, where Nokia has lots of problems in selling their
smartphones.

But whatever the reason(s), selling more smartphones than all competitors combined and then not being number one in software sales means there is a problem with the Symbian smarthpone concept, and not with the smartphone concept an sich.

Rafe, this podcast is not showing up in the podcasting app on my phone.

[Rafe]

Sorry - I have now fixed this.

Sander - perhaps we should talk about mass market smartphones. No-one else really sells enough devices to qualify in that area accept Nokia.

Handango does have a big US bias, but it is true the per unit software sales are better in the Windows Mobile / Blackberry world. I think part of that is because they have a strong enterprise emphasis and secondly because a significant proportion of users have comes from the PDA world rather than the phone world.

I'm not saying third party software (in the traditional sense) is dead, I'm just not sure it will be a banner leader for smartphones. I also think third party software (as in ESD sales) will be just one part of third party activities. Think services, web as a platform, other distribution routes etc. etc.

[krisse]

svdwal, I think the problem is that most Symbian owners are unaware of their Symbian phone's abilities. There's nothing in a Symbian S60 phone's interface which even uses the words "Symbian" or "S60", so it's extremely unlikely that the phone owner will even realise they can install such software.

I just did an article for AAN talking about S60 games, and one of our regular readers was amazed to find out about S60 software. They thought their phone could only do Java and N-Gage, when in fact all N-Gage phones are S60 devices so they can run S60 too (and N-Gage games are really just S60 games).

I'm not saying third party software (in the traditional sense) is dead, I'm just not sure it will be a banner leader for smartphones.

You could arguably extend this to cover computing in general.

More and more people now buy PCs which they never install software on, because they only use it to access online services such as websites, e-mail, IM, Skype etc. Those kind of people will contribute to PC sales but will never buy third party software.

[svdwal]

Well, with the iPhone now very soon becoming a proper smartphone (in the "old-fashioned" sense), at a feature phone price point and with a builtin and well-publicised way of buying additional software, this matter is going to be resolved in the near future. Personally, I expect Apple to release iPhone software sales figures just before the Symbian Smartphone Show.

[krisse]

Well, with the iPhone now very soon becoming a proper smartphone (in the "old-fashioned" sense), at a feature phone price point

The new iPhone is NOT at a feature phone price point.

The $199 figure is the first payment on a 2 year contract. That's very expensive compared to feature phones, most of which would cost $0 on contract.

[bartmanekul]

Originally Posted by krisse

The $199 figure is the first payment on a 2 year contract.

That for everywhere? That makes it really, really expensive.

[svdwal]

According to a number of sources, O2 in the UK is going to offer it for GPB 99 with a 18 month contract at GBP 30 a month.