Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

The first national study of mobile phone users has found 34 per cent of Australian women bought ringtones in the past year compared to 27 per cent of men.

As for games, 15 per cent of men had bought them in the last 12 months, compared to only 10 per cent of females.

A whopping 97 per cent of respondents used SMS and over half used pictures, music and sounds on their mobile phone.

Sexes divided on mobile phone use - Breaking News - National - Breaking News

I really like Pantech's way to design phones. This model looks more like a digicam with an added numeric keypad. The camera is 2 Mp, and the display is 320 by 240.

Pantech�s two megapixel Dica PG-8000 due out soon - Cellphones - cellphones.engadget.com

64% (3.8B, up 12%) of all phone calls in Finland were made via a mobile phone 2004. Also, 2.2B (up 33%) SMSs were sent.

eFinland | Finland: 64% of phone calls made from mobiles in 2004

Or maybe at least what kind of mobile phone user you are. Not too serious.

Guardian Unlimited | Quiz | Mobile phone quiz

...the latest report from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said new 3G technology
... will overtake sales of tracks through the internet before the end of the year.
I doubt it. It's still very expensive to download songs that way. 3 must price 3G traffic quite differently for this to fly.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Sony and 3 target iPod market

Large alphanumeric keypad (that looks really useful) and large display (resolution 640 by 480, touchscreen). Supports UMTS, GPRS and WiFi. Runs Windows Mobile 5.0 on a 520 MHz CPU (yikes!) and has an integrated 1.3 Mp camera.

The drawback is that it's rather pricey, but it's seemingly a really nice mobile office device.

the::unwired - RELEASE: T-Mobile Germany will launch the HTC Universal aka MDA Pro next month [UPDATE]

IDC claims US camera phone users learn digital photography that way and some then get interested in buying a dedicated and more high quality digital camera.

The study said that over 30 percent of camera phone owners plan to purchase digital cameras because they learned about digital photography through camera phones, IDC said.

"We are a pretty traditional culture here and we identify with traditional form factors like camera, and we still use phones (primarily) for making calls," Chute said.

Camera phones boosting digital camera sales-study - Yahoo! News

Ringtones, SMS, centrex/switchboard etc are mentioned.

Most DECT/wireless phones already are enabled for SMS, but few operators support it for some reason. Odd as it would increase ARPU (read: increase profits).

It probably takes an Indian (and hangup-free) operator to do this. Especially European operators show a clear lack of creativity and interest to experiment with new services, which hits back on themselves.

Fixed lines'll dance to ringtones, SMS- The Economic Times

It's the good old "people use voice and text messaging, but nothing else" syndrome that prevails, and hurts mobile gaming among other things. There's a big gap between the reality of everyday people and the outlooks of research institutes and the mobile industry. Anyway...

One reason for mobile gaming not taking off (even though I personally think it's the mobile content with the most value) is almost complete lack of marketing, also that game download sites are too hard to navigate, etc.

I don't think the door-opener is flat rate, as mentioned in the article, as the cost of mobile games is already very low compared to PC and console versions (even when comparing to GBA and similar devices). Maybe rather that you buy the "pig in the sack" not really knowing what you will get. Hence, game review sites, that also tell users how to actually download games, and where users can discuss what they think about different games, would be beneficial. Gamespot has a section for mobile games (mainly Java-based): Gamespot Mobile

For the last point I've started a discussion forum at Abiro - Forums where you can discuss what you think about the games at Abiro - Mobile Fun.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Uphill struggle for mobile gaming

At the blog HobbyPrincess Ulla-Maaria Mutanen describes how she put an RFID tag on a beanie hat (?), wrote a URL to it (pointing to the blog) and then read it. All via Nokia's 3220. It worked, after some trial and error.

HobbyPrincess: Annotating things with the Nokia 3220

Boys are for different reasons more likely to do so.

It doesn't say if this also means a focus on phones with alphanumeric keypad, but I guess not. There are not so many low-cost phones with a full keypad, but the question is why not. Too bulky? Cost is not an issue. Keypads are very inexpensive to make.

� 35.9% of US teens bought cell phones just to use text messaging | IT Facts � Your Daily Research Synopsis | ZDNet.com

Gartner:

Nokia increased its market share (29.6% to 31.9%). Motorola did too (15.7% to 17.9%).

"All the regions recorded growth this quarter, apart from Japan,"

"The healthy performance was mainly due to strong demand for handsets in emerging markets such as China, India, Bangladesh and Vietnam," said Ann Liang, a Gartner analyst based in Taiwan.

Both Nokia and Motorola are well prepared to handle low-cost phones. Oddly local players haven't had that much success. Some claim it's because customers want known and high-status brands.

Nokia, Motorola Gain More Market Share - Yahoo! News

The TV/DMB functionality seems to be working independently of the rest of the phone, as it's claimed to support calls and messaging while watching TV. It also has dedicated buttons for playing music and a 2 Mp camera, making it a nice multimedia phone. Pity it's only available in Korea at the moment.

??? Digital Device? ?? ??!!

Nokia provides 17% of the total shipments. This despite Nokia being late with 3G phones.

The study notes, however, that the market for 3G phones is small, with only nine million of the devices shipped in the second quarter of 2005.

It is worrying for a cluster of aspiring Asian vendors that Nokia has already become best in class.

Nokia Grabs Lead In 3G Phone Market - Yahoo! News

CDMA Trade Association reports:
- 185.6M worldwide (up 73M, 27%)
- 68% users worldwide have cdma2000 (as opposed to "normal" CDMA)

cdma2000 is touted as a 3G technology, which is arguable. Yet, cdma2000 1X supports up to 150 kbps, which is enough for downloading Java games and highly compressed audio/music. EDGE is somewhat comparable to 1X. GPRS is considerably slower. EV-DO can go considerably higher than 1X.

Asia-Pacific remains the largest region for CDMA technologies, representing 43 per cent of the total CDMA subscriber base worldwide. The region also leads in CDMA2000 penetration
Not the least Korea and China contributes to this.

Digital Media Europe: News - CDMA2000 base exceeds 185m users in Q2

As reported by Ziff Davis:

The number has jumped from 16.3 million people last year to 27.9 million this one.

Cash wise, they’ve spent $13 on average on these types of games in the last 60 days, while hard core gamers have spent slightly more at $19.
This is high, considering a mobile game is typically $3 or $4 a piece.

Mobile Phone Gaming On the Rise - Video Games News - Designtechnica

I hope/believe this is just a bump in the road, but a survey performed by Pocket-lint.co.uk indicates that almost 3/4 would not play music on their phone even if they could.

As adding music capability to a phone is relatively inexpensive, except for the much larger memory, it's not really an issue for the manufacturers, yet it would mean slower migration to new phones unless something else would make users do that at the same pace. Also, the operators' music services might not yield expected revenues.

Fingers crossed...

Pocket-lint.co.uk Pocket-lint.co.uk finds users don't want MP3 mobile phones news story

So guesses Juniper Research.

Interesting note: 3G’s benefits derive more from its ability to accommodate greater numbers of users and network traffic, especially voice, than its support of advanced services delivery.

Well put: ‘They (the users) want useful services tailored to their needs that can be accessed at the push of a button, at a price they can afford, and on a tariff structure they can understand, and they want someone to set it all up for them before they switch on.’

Digital Media Europe: News - 3G subscribers to exceed 300m by 2010

The reason stated is cultural: Americans prefer to talk to people, while at least English people are claimed to rather try to avoid talking. Also, the general uptake of mobile phones has been slower in the States, which probably is a factor too.

Telegraph | News | Why mobile phobic Americans are slow to get the message

Probably the most video-centric Nokia phone with tiltable display and a 2 Mp camera with Carl Zeiss optics. Based on Series 60 / Symbian OS.

Edubourse.com - Nokia N90 voted European Media Phone of the Year

This note talks about Vodafone's/Sagem's new simpler phones that only support the basic functions most people use, gives clear user notifications, and comes with a seemingly well-designed keypad, and a stand that also charges the phone.

Even though I have no problem with phones with a zillion features, I still mainly make calls and send SMSs.

textually.org: In Mobile Phones, Older Users Say, More Is Less

They are though counting ringtones as part of this, so the figure is not accurate.

To phones: 108.9M
To music players: 2.2M

ringtonia.com: Music downloads to phones dominate Japanese market

Celebrating this occasion and testing Mobile Blog at the same time.

Posted via Abiro Mobile Blog (at wap.abiro.com)

OMA DRM, Windows Media DRM and Apple Fairplay I've ranted about earlier. Also Napster is using Windows Media DRM. All in all this makes it impossible to use purchased music on any other platforms/devices than what the provider in question has chosen to support. This is of course not good if you compare with a CD that is much more open. Of course also CDs are more or less copy-protected today, so it seems the music industry is inhibiting rather than enabling music distribution, which will hit back on both them and the music lovers.

A big issue in this discussion is that the music industry (not counting the artists, but the middle-men) are getting a way too big margin on music. Considering digital/network distribution of music takes away all the logistics costs, there's anyway a lot of money to be made, and even if there's some 'not-so-legal' distribution as well.

Incompatibility slowing growth of digital music - Yahoo! News

This is a nifty new way of providing real web browsing to Java-enabled phones: Download an applet that acts as a frontend to a Web gateway that converts the web pages into a format that can be easily transferred to and shown on the phone. I have yet to see how well this works.

Overall the trend is towards surfing the normal Web on a phone, not mobile-specific services.

Opera Offers Web Browsing For Low-End Mobile Phones - Yahoo! News

At least ABI Research claims this will occur within 2 years, and I believe it. There will always be an enthusiast market with higher requirements, but that will be a smaller part of the whole market.

Camera Phones to Steal Low-End Digital Camera Market within Two Years

The article claims that digitized ringtones called realtones, truetones, silly tones etc can become the next big thing after MIDI ringtones, as a way to stand out. Of course Abiro offers a wide range of such ringtones.

Ring tones that bite and zing | CNET News.com

This is a very important cooperation, as Montavista is the de facto standard Linux flavour for mobile devices.

PalmSource will then complement with an application platform and applications, in part from China MobileSoft.

PalmSource will join MontaVista's Open Framework partner program and MontaVista in turn will join PalmSource's Palm Powered Mobile World (PPMW) program.

PalmSource to partner with mobile Linux provider - Yahoo! News

23% (~ 30M) of US users have downloaded ringtones at least once since 2002. A year ago this was 5%, so the growth is significant.

ringtonia.com: Ringtone Downloading Jumps Fourfold In Past Year

Still a rumour, yet one wonders where the rumour comes from. Nokia denies there's such a discussion going on. Cisco's main interest must be the infrastructure side of Nokia's business, so maybe the phone business would be spun off to a separate company. Just guessing of course.

Cisco Dialing Up Nokia? - Yahoo! News

No pictures are shown. I'm sure Engadget will have some up soon.

Is said to have gaming controls, and a button for launching the music function, even when the phone is in flight/radio-off mode.

Noted cons: too little memory (only 256M; maybe there will be models with more), and only GPRS. At least EDGE has been preferred.

Digital Media Europe: News - Sony Ericsson expands Walkman phone portfolio

15-fold increase since beginning of 2004, probably from a very low level, but impressive just the same.

J'son and Partners: 'In 2004 the share of games in mobile content market was six per cent, whereas in the first six month of 2005 it climbed to 12 per cent.'

Java is dominating, with mophun and BREW far behind.

Digital Media Europe: News - Mobile games sales grew 15-fold since start of 2004 - report

Interestingly this applies to both emerging and established markets, indicating there's a general interest for simpler, lower cost phones.

IDC: Worldwide mobile phone shipments totalled 188.7m units in the second quarter, increasing 7.3 per cent sequentially and 16.3 per cent from the same quarter one year ago

Digital Media Europe: News - Entry level devices drive 16.3% growth in handset market � report

It doesn't say where (worldwide?). 5% is not that bad though. Is there even 5% that uses WAP or MMS? Still this indicates games must be made for the masses, but there are also clear signs of immature market and users.

"The survey of 2,500 cell phone users in the U.S., United Kingdom, Italy, Spain and Germany showed many people aren't even aware their cell phones can play games.

textually.org: Only 5% Have Downloaded A Mobile Game

Nokia has had a tough time lately, but signs show that they are in the game again.

Nokia: 60.8M, 32.2%, 33.9% growth
Motorola: 33.9M, 18%
Samsung: 24.4M, 12.9%
LG: 12.1M, 6.4%
Sony Ericsson: 11.8M, 6.3%

"Despite all the interest and excitement over cutting edge devices, there continues to be a demand for simple voice-only phones that appeal to broad customer segments, even in mature markets like North America," said Ramon Llamas, research analyst for IDC's Mobility Group.
You better believe it. Vodafone earlier indicated that a considerable volume will be low-featured handsets.

Nokia stays ahead as entry-level phones boost world handset sales - Yahoo! News

A confusing thing with the telecom world is that existing standards are never enough (even if they actually are). See e.g. MMS that mimics e-mail, WAP that mimics HTTP/HTML etc. The same goes for IMS. The difference here is that it's based on SIP that's already somewhat established for digital corporate telephony (even though H.323 leads that market, and then of course you have Skype...). They wouldn't have to wait for IMS if they instead acquired existing SIP infrastructure (not from Ericsson primarily, but from Cisco, Nortel etc) and forced manufacturers to implement VoIP over SIP etc. The possible issue is interoperability, as each operator would go its own way in terms of application dialects. OMA is the vehicle to coordinate that. Yet, at the moment IMS is clearly a market for the infrastructure providers, and they of course do everything they can to convince operators they should deploy IMS.

The market seems to "self heal" in the sense that in at least US there's more talk about e-mail and full web browsing via HTML, than MMS and WAP. That's a very good sign.

There are yet no killer apps in sight, so the operators continues to take big financial and time-window risks on things possibly few will use, similar to MMS and WAP...

A new Analysys report predicted that most mobile operators will implement an IMS system within five years, but its authors warned that many of the services they hope to support, such as mobile voice over IP and instant video messaging, might be better served by proprietary solutions in the short term.

textually.org: IMS warning to mobile operators

Boston Herald guesses that this could become a trend, as younger people spend more and more money on ringtones, and CD single sales has decreased substantially.

Also - something no one talks about but is very important to point out - the distribution costs of ringtones, even if we talk MP3/AAC-type, is much less (actually close to 0 if looking at volume sales) while the costs for CD distribution, stocking etc are very high.

The cost of a CD is very little contributed by the CD "hardware" itself (which is evidenced by the fact that a CD-R costs around 30 cent today, which is a more expensive technology than the one used for audio CDs). Most of it is actually distribution costs, so it's painfully obvious the music market must move to network distribution overall. What I don't like is that the technical quality (signal-to-noise ratio, frequency response and other geeky factors) of the currently available music is clearly lower than CD quality. Yet I believe most consumers don't care.

In Korea and Japan they've tried to sell music on memory sticks. That's a very expensive carrier for music, so better would be if music stores introduced "music player loading stations" for those that don't want to buy songs and albums directly via the phone or Internet.

ringtonia.com: Artists release new songs to cellphones before they hit radio

He will be replaced by Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo on June 1, 2006, Nokia said in a statement.

Over the past several months, Nokia has replaced several key executives in a move to bring in fresh talent as the company battles increased competition, particularly from manufacturers of low-cost handsets in Asia.

This and other things indicate that there's been a lot of resignations and role changes within Nokia lately.

Nokia to replace CEO next year | InfoWorld | News | 2005-08-01 | By John Blau, IDG News Service