Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

Quotes:

"It will influence competition. Companies will have to compete more on quality and location than brand,"
My impression is that consumers want brand. According to a study in US, people mainly buy branded mobile games, despite there being a lot of good games without brand connection.

"The first signs of this can be seen in some Web sites which recognize how a consumer accesses a site, either by PC or cellphone. They adjust the size and content of the page accordingly and automatically."
This has been done for some years now, but not very successfully yet.

Yahoo! News - Smart Web to Usher in Host of New Services-Gartner

This note points out that due to high latency in both 2.5G and 3G networks, performance can sometimes be almost the same despite a much higher raw bit performance in 3G. This is not good for web page browsing, but on the other hand might open the market for new technologies to override these problems (e.g. very large local caches, server-side removal of irrelevant data, sending the whole page as one file, etc). Even when downloading one single file can latency be a problem, as all such communication requires handshaking to secure that the right data has been received, and possibly resend sections thereof if not.

Yahoo! News - Is Your 3G Business Model Broken?

Quote: "Billboard Hot Ringtones Chart, will reflect the "Top 20" polyphonic ringtone sales (ed.note: US only) for each week, including song title, artist, previous week's position and number of weeks on the chart."

Billboard: Billboard Bows Ringtones Chart

Expects an increase to $6.4B before 2010. Without actually saying, I make the assumption that most of these games are downloaded and either Java- or BREW-based.

Yahoo! News - Mobile Phone Gaming to Top $1 Billion in '04

Great article confirming that Korean and Japanese manufacturers (as a whole) now drive the mobile phone industry. Interestingly their own countries are also known to be the best ones in using new functions and services for mobile phones. The local market has been a key driver for Japan for a long time (be it cars, phones or whatever) but it shows now this equally well applies to Korea. Both already run UMTS or cdma2000 1X networks, so they are well off speed-wise and hence also the potential for on-line services is good. Much more so than in at least Europe. Rest assured though that e.g. Chinese manufacturers want to control their home market in the future.

Snippet about sales this year:
Mobile phone makers are expected to sell 670 million handsets to distributors this year, up from around 520 million units in 2003.
This is the result of booming demand from first-time mobile phone buyers in China, Russia, Brazil and India, while at the same time consumers in mature markets replace old handsets with new ones featuring color screens and cameras.

Yahoo! News - Korean and Japanese Phone Makers Win -Survey

Interesting anecdote about why RIM's BlackBerry might win over Danger's Hiptop in Europe despite the Hiptop having better features and being easier to use. It seems to be primarily a matter of who's got the money and who's got the need to show off, cynically speaking.

Not mentioned in the article is how a Hiptop accesses corporate email. If anything, that should be different from the BlackBerry, as it relies on a corporate mail gateway connecting to MS Exchange, enabling also scheduling, contacts etc and not just email.

eWeek: RIM, Danger and the Handheld Brambles
RIM
Danger

Another trend speculation:

The next driver for sales will be sampled music (read: MP3 or similar) and quick download of the same (read: EDGE or UMTS).

In the same way, video recording and video telephony will not be major drivers for sales, even though operators want otherwise.

MP3 is of course what users want in terms of sampled music, but oddly that's also what operators specify. The question is how to stop users from uploading MP3 files from a PC or download via "not so very legal" download sites. The industry has to achieve a working security model as well as an attractive consumer pricing model, to stop that from happening.

Singles sales plummet, so this might be its saviour.

Even though primarily younger people have grown accustomed to writing shorter messages on the phone keypad, new Instant Messaging devices with alphanumeric keypads make life easier. These devices also tend to support email, but not with VPN (regarding previous note about VPN being needed for corporate email access without having to install a corporate server).

Mainly describes Ogo, that intentionally (?) doesn't support browsing and telephony:
AT&T Wireless left out the Web browser after the company's studies showed teens didn't care much for it. In the process, it also nixed the phone.
"We didn't want to create a Swiss Army knife of mobile devices," Pemble said. "We wanted to do one thing and one thing well: instant messaging."

Yahoo! News - Wireless Companies Chat Up Teens, Young Adults

Quote: "The original Chaku Uta service has seen 120 million downloads or around 10 million per month." !!!

I'm sure it's not CD quality though, as hinted at, but for the casual "latest hit" listener that doesn't matter anyway.

Yahoo! News - Japanese to download full CD-quality songs to mobile phones

From the article:

"The days of a mobile phone that functions merely as a communications device capable of playing only off-key ringtone renditions are coming to an abrupt end.
A raft of new phones with souped-up storage, bright color screens and stereo-quality sound systems are hitting the market, mainly to compete with an array of PDAs that themselves double as a phone.
Together, these new gadgets have morphed into an entertainment device to challenge Apple's dominance in the MP3 player market, some analysts say."

My comment is that it's hard to compete with things that are free (well, kind of) and comes with much more functionality yet with a smaller form factor. iPods are not subsidised to the same degree and very soon there will be phones with multi-GB hard drives.

Yahoo! News - Is the Mobile Phone the Next iPod Killer?

In the same way as smartphones now more and more make PDA's irrelevant, maybe camera phones make dedicated cameras go away as well. For the pro I doubt it, but for the general public, maybe...

No doubt camera phones already sell much more than dedicated digital cameras, so it could mean even faster price cuts on and development of digital camera technology quickly making analog cameras completely obsolete (which they are close to be already).

Snippet: "South Korea's top mobile carrier, SK Telecom, said it would introduce 10-megapixel camera phones produced by Samsung by the end of this year."

Yahoo! News - Samsung develops world's first five-megapixel camera phone

A not altogether flattering depiction of consumers of mobile content, but still a fun and quite informative read.

What kind of creature are you?

Bango: Mobile Content Buyers are Creatures of Habit

Yet another sign that it happens first in Korea...

"Samsung Electronics expects to market its 5-million pixel camera phone sometime at the end of this month, beating out rival companies in the camera phone industry, such as Casio. "

http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200410/200410080032.html

A nice new general/business phone from Nokia with UMTS/WCDMA, camera (of course), VPN (very nice for office email and intranet access), and an enhanced web browser with Javascript. It doesn't say if this also (like the 6670) uses the Access NetFront browser.

From the text:
Download email directly to your Nokia 6630 smartphone. Plus, it has a special application that lets you view important documents in formats like Microsoft Word and PowerPoint while you're away from the office. The VPN client opens the doors to Virtual Private Networking on a Nokia 6630 smartphone - but only to those who hold the key, of course. Plug into the stylish Nokia Video Call Stand PT-8 (sold separately) for a one-to-one video call.

As the camera is at the back there's no possibility to do video conferencing with this phone alone. Instead the additional Video Call Stand is needed. Ugly solution, as it's impossible to do video conferencing while walking with the phone and it gets expensive too. See V800 and similar for a much better solution to this.

It's not out quite yet.

Nokia: Nokia 6630

Apparently Jules Verne (of '20000 Leagues under the Sea' etc) came up with this idea 1874! Interesting read, but let's hope it doesn't turn out this way.

The Onion: http://www.theonion.com/news/index.php?issue=4041&n=2

As it's in The Onion, I don't trust it 100% (or at all).

Probably not very practical when driving and your boss or spouse sends you an e-mail that gets you agitated, but anyway it looks like an interesting technology for situtations when you have to view both reality and the cyber world at the same time. Looks reasonably light (and brittle?).

Engadget: http://www.engadget.com/entry/8547656110143977/

OQO has released a PDA-like device that actually runs Windows XP, however "impossible" that might sound. It's got a flip-out alphanumeric keypad and 20 GB hard drive. It's very expensive though, so it's certainly not a PDA alternative for anyone but the ones with big spending accounts.

infosync World: http://www.infosyncworld.com/news/n/5374.html
Engadget: http://www.engadget.com/entry/9535533665475287/
Engadget: http://www.engadget.com/entry/1915782823512224/

This is the second example of a device that is as much a digital camera as a phone. It's supposed to be held horisontally in both cases. Very light, lots of memory (for music too?), text-to-speech (now we're talking, literally...) for messages.

This further strengthens the notion that Korea is the technically/conceptually most advanced country in terms of mobile phones, experimenting with new concepts long before Europe and US does. Maybe even Japan is lagging behind.

infosync World: http://www.infosyncworld.com/news/n/5397.html

The 6670 sports a megapixel camera, Series 60 system and most notably/uniquely possibility to view selected email attachments. If it just has UMTS and VPN it would be a perfect business phone for the ones that accept writing emails etc on a numeric keypad.

Thank whatever deity that it doesn't have the distorted keypad of other Nokia phones. Why do they make them that way? That's design before usage / common sense, and Nokia should know better. The 3650 as a glaring example of how not to do things (but 7610 comes close), and that was quickly replaced by the 3660 that has a normal keypad.

Nokia: http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,1522,,00.html?orig=/phones/6670

Not yet practical (the cell is larger than the phone), but showing promise for the future. Interestingly mobile phones might become the driver for optimisation of fuel cell technology, but it has really a general use, so many other gadgets would benefit from this.

Esato: http://www.esato.com/news/article.php/id=335

It's been a while, so here comes a theory:

Music singles sales will increase dramatically within a year.

Why?
- Commercial music download services primarily sell song by song, and they get increasingly popular.
- Mobile phones now get MP3 support so that "real" music (not just crippled-by-nature MIDI files) can be played either in full or as ringtones.

This is not to say that commercial downloads is a major success just yet. Free downloading of songs is a major inhibitor to this, but if it's easy and cheap enough many people might choose this option instead of going for Gnutella, Kazaa and the like.

As always there are things talking against this (lower song prices anyone?):
Engadget: http://www.engadget.com/entry/6325555111154289/

As this blog is sponsored by Abiro (at least the work with it, while the blog service itself is free) here is plugging for new features added to Abiro during September:

Mobile Fun

• Fixed a bug on the ringtone pages that caused broken links.
• Added info links to good WAP sites at wap.abiro.com. Feel free to use this page as your phone home page. I do it myself.
• The Mobile Fun home page now highlights some of the content available via SMS or WAP.
• Added a collection of pictures (photographs) for free download.

The Lab

• Updated the Visual Basic page with more information about why to use Visual Basic and the Olympus camera project that is now close to completion (if now anyone would buy it).

See respective Updates page for more information.

Have fun with the new features and feel free to provide feedback!

Links:

• Abiro - Mobile Fun: www.abiro.com
• Abiro - The Lab: www.abiro.com/lab
• Abiro WAP page: wap.abiro.com