Geeky Peek

I read this article on Mashable and it made me angry about the continued iPhone/US centric point of view of mobile. I’ll recap the Mashable article’s key changes in mobile in the last 5 years, or you can read here:
-touchscreen
-social networking on your phone
-broadband
-mobile apps

My big criticism. Anytime you talk about major mobile trends and don’t mention Nokia & GSM, its like talking about retail trends without talking about WalMart. Apple is predicting about 37M iPhones being sold this year, Nokia is expecting to sell 400M or so phones. Net total, Apple has sold roughly 50M iPhones. 50 million. I want to make sure that number is clear for when I juxtapose it against some numbers in a second.

Here is my list of some big, big, big things that happened in the past 5 years globally:

-on July 10th (two weeks ago), according to Ericsson, the 5 billionth GSM subscriber was added making it basically the most successful technology of all time, there are only 6.8B people in the world… and there are 5B GSM mobile subscribers!!! That is jaw-dropping.

-3 billion people now text… wow… who cares about social networking… 3B texters!!! I didn’t even think the global literacy rate was that high

-3G hit its 500M-th customer, so 10% of the world have “broadband in their pocket”… yawn. If you are building data services and not thinking about the 4.5 billion potential customers who run on GPRS… you are thinking pretty narrow-minded.

-Nokia makes the Nokia 1280, a $15 phone!!! $15! Why did you pay $400 for your iPhone again when 97% of what you do is texting and phone calls????

-BlackBerry sold roughly 100M units in the same timeframe iPhone sold 50M (they had a 10M unit headstart roughly)

-The combo of Texting + BlackBery + mobile email = mobile messaging explosion

-There are now about mobile social network users reaches 250M globally!! I actually agree with mashable that this is pretty damn big, and part of the above mobile messaging explosion.

The future, lower priced devices and lower rates. iPhone and Android get stuck at a few hundred million devices until they figure out how to make devices that work on 2G and cost far less. Somebody else figures that out and takes them out. Maybe/hopefully that somebody is Peek.