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 $400 for your iPhone again when 97% of what you do is texting and phone calls????
-BlackBerry sold roughly 100M units in the same timeframe iPhone sold 50M (they had a 10M unit headstart roughly)
-The combo of Texting + BlackBery + mobile email = mobile messaging explosion
-There are now about mobile social network users reaches 250M globally!! I actually agree with mashable that this is pretty damn big, and part of the above mobile messaging explosion.
The future, lower priced devices and lower rates. iPhone and Android get stuck at a few hundred million devices until they figure out how to make devices that work on 2G and cost far less. Somebody else figures that out and takes them out. Maybe/hopefully that somebody is Peek.
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Jürgen | 27-Jul-10 at 12:17 pm | Permalink
Dan, I fully agree. As a European, I would not so much see it as being a US centric view on mobiles.,. but anyway all of these hypes are completely neglecting a larger number of user, who do not want or being able to follow the hype.
It’s the same with the explosion of memory usage of compilers and frameworks and a lot of other things…
What should be added is what are the 50M Iphone and 100M Blackberry users are doing with their gadgets. I’m quite often in public transport or watch some students or customers “using” them. In my opinion, at least 80% of them have it because it’s fashion – not more. If you include your analysis of unwillingly attend phone calls of these users, I would estimate, it’s 90% trivial fashion.
Kevin Groce | 27-Jul-10 at 12:32 pm | Permalink
I sure miss the days of PDAs. I was thinking that cellular enabling a device for push email/Text would have me jummping for joy.
http://www.androidguys.com/2010/07/26/7inch-gentouch78-tablet-kmart-150/
K-Mart has hands on a 7″ tablet device like this that sells for 150$. I love the idea of Wifi Data use since hot spots are everywhere now. But I wish I had peek functionality built into a device like this at this price point. I am happy with my peek and everyone asks me about it but I do want something a bit more.
Gary Martin | 27-Jul-10 at 1:39 pm | Permalink
Actually, a lot of technology that was included in the iPhone was first seen in the N770,N800 and N810. Apple is not an innovative company they just know where to borrow their ideas.
As for the Peek, I currently have a peek version 1.07 I really need to upgrade to the new firmware version. I believe that it’s an excellent product. I have a few ideas that may help your marketing efforts when you have some time.
dan | 27-Jul-10 at 3:10 pm | Permalink
@Kevin – I’ve bought two prior “well-priced” Android tablets both with the same result – me returning it.
They were both the same – old version of Android, no market place, crash-y, horrriiiid battery life (like 2 hours), and touch screens that would never calibrate properly. I was quadruple tapping everything.
One of them was a gift for my wife for mother’s day, so I was doubly bitter.
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Chris | 27-Jul-10 at 6:19 pm | Permalink
Dan, I find this post a little ironic. Talking about all of the “major” things that have been ignored by the “major” players. Peek itself has ignored the killer app for a mobile device – voice. I for one will not buy a Peek until you guys recognize the fact that this is 2010 and people don’t want to have to carry around 2 devices to be connected. I love the idea of the Peek, but just want it to support basic things like letting me insert a pre-paid sim card and talking to someone. Sometimes there is no substitute for a real voice conversation.
dan | 27-Jul-10 at 6:37 pm | Permalink
Hmm, I suppose you’re right! But in our defense, if 5 billion people already have voice phones, that means there literally isn’t a person left in the world to whom we could sell a voice phone
Kevin | 27-Jul-10 at 7:15 pm | Permalink
@Chris – I don’t want to talk on the phone. i *hate* talking on the phone. i prefer to communicate via SMS or email. there isn’t a need for me to have voice communications with anyone.
on my “unlimited” smartphone i used 15 voice minutes last month and 4k text messages.
if i didn’t have one already the only reason i’d carry a voice enabled phone these days is for emergencies. 911, etc.
Chris | 28-Jul-10 at 7:26 pm | Permalink
Funny, seems there were probably over a billion devices that could access Twitter, but that didn’t stop Twitter Peek from being developed. All I’m suggesting is the option on one model to include a SIM card slot. If you don’t want voice, don’t put a SIM card in. If you do, then go ahead… With all of the different variations of the Peek, it seems like a valid experiment to me. Just my 2 cents
Joe Mulloy | 29-Jul-10 at 12:56 pm | Permalink
I have a Palm Pre and love it but I do agree that there is a significantly larger market for devices like the peek. The main reason it took me so long to get a smartphone was the cost. I got the original Pre last September and I found Sprint’s $70/month for everything plan to be expensive but manageable. I never wanted an iPhone so I had looked at the G1 on T-Mobile, but the plan was too expensive when you added data and text messaging.
I think the worst thing the cell phone industry does is the SMS price gouging. It costs them practically nothing to send the text messages and yet they charge $0.20 for each message if you don’t have a plan. An unlimited plan is $20/month, $19.90 of which is profit. At least on my old Carrier, Net10 SMS messages were only $0.05/each, but I didn’t text much because I can’t type very fast on a phone keypad.
One of the main features I wanted in a smartphone was a calendar. I actually considered buying a peek, but the lack of a calendar was a deal breaker. If it had that I might have a peek instead of a Palm Pre today, but it’s too late for me to go back now.
At least my brother has a peek. I got one for him with a year of service for his birthday. He’s on my parents family plan and they don’t have a texting plan so he uses it mainly for texting.
Carter Dotson | 01-Aug-10 at 12:55 am | Permalink
The problem with your Nokia/GSM and Walmart analogy is that Apple and the iPhone is more like a trendy clothing store – fewer people shop there, sure, but no one cares about what Walmart’s selling.
Places where GPRS is the best cellular internet available aren’t going to necessarily be places where you’re going to be making money off of data services. It’s taken EDGE and 3G for data services to take off in the US.
[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????]
Chicken and the egg: maybe because most phones aren’t able to do more than this very well?