Tag Archives: smart phones

The recession only dampens mobile web growth

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As The Economist points out for Mobile telecoms in the recession, it is Boom in the bust.

Despite the recession, the mobile industry is enjoying a promising transformation.  At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, although many bemoaned the downturn, on the show floor it was hard to keep track of all the new “smart” phones and services.

Makers of handsets will be hard hit: unit sales are expected to fall by at least 10% this year, having increased by 6% in 2008 to 1.2 billion. But at the same time the industry is going through a transformation that promises to fuel rapid growth in the years to come. To draw a parallel from computing, it is as if the personal computer (PC), its graphical user-interface, high-speed internet access and open-source software had all taken off at the same time.

The momentum has been created by a newcomer to the mobile industry: Apple. By the end of 2008 it had sold more than 17m of its elegant iPhones, and there have been over 500m downloads from its “App Store” since its launch last July. Others are now following in Apple’s footsteps. In Barcelona, for instance, Microsoft and Nokia, the world’s largest software firm and handset-maker respectively, announced their own application stores. Research in Motion (RIM), the maker of the BlackBerry, and Google, the world’s biggest internet firm, have done the same.

It is likely that the current operators will not be the ones who control the mobile internet.  Others such as Apple, Google or Nokia, are more likely to become the gatekeepers.

Informa, a market-research firm, projects revenues from content and data services of $240 billion by 2012.  Despite the economic turmoil elsewhere, the industry seems justified in its confidence that the smart-phone is finally emerging as a powerful, innovative and lucrative new computing platform.

One interesting question to ponder in all this is who will come through the recession with the best resources to capitalize on this inevitable growth in the Mobile Web.

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Screen Size Trends

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Hot Mobile News

BluEye links iPods and mobile phones
Easily take mobile calls when listening to music. Gear4 has released a headphone set for the iPod that works as a hands-free kit for Bluetooth mobile phones.
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3Q 2006 Mobile Device Shipments Top 245 M, On Target for 1B by Year-End
The second quarter was softer-than-expected in terms of handset shipments and prices, says ABI Research, and the fourth quarter will prove a bumper quarter for mobile operators and handset vendors. The market topped 245 million mobile devices shipped in the third quarter and the global mobile devices marketplace is on target to reach one billion handsets by the year’s end.

Russell Buckley has recently suggested that PDA’s will disappear in favour of smart phones and other commentators seem to be agreeing with that. This is the trend for handsets in Asia and Europe seems to be following the same pattern. Now Palm is confirming the trend with the launch of the Treo 700wx Smartphone. Timo Poropudas points out that 52 companies are now producing Windows Mobile devices. So is ‘Smaller Is Better’ the new trend?

One expert who would agree heartily is Graham Brown-Martin of Handheld Learning. In a talk he gave at the Edinburgh Interactive Entertainment Festival (EIEF06) this year, he stated that desktop computing will be dead by the end of the decade and laptops will be following shortly after.

Does this mean that the inevitable trend is smaller and smaller and we will all end up using our smart wrist watches to access the Internet? Jakob Nielsen would certainly not agree. He feels that productivity increases with screen size. Within the next 10 years, he expects monitors of, say, 5000×3000 to be in fairly common use, at least among high-end business professionals. Presumably this trend leads eventually to a smart wall in your workspace. The whole wall will be your screen. The keyboard and the mouse will be replaced by voice-controlled input devices.

Are we then looking at two trends in screen sizes? Mobile devices become smaller and smaller. Desktop devices become bigger and bigger. That might certainly be the conclusion if you apply only product-driven technology-based judgements. However different people have different needs and different preferences. What seems likely is that there are different and appreciable segments of the population who are strong adherents of each of the major alternatives, including PCs, PDAs, SmartPhones, CellPhones and even smart wristwatches. Combinations of two or more of these will have their own adherents, provided that devices meet real needs and are available at satisfactory prices. This future with a multiplicity of devices seems much more likely than that we will all choose the same sized handset whatever that might be.

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