Dean Bubley

Mobile Phone Industry in Denial About Economy

The iPhone example is an interesting one - but coupled with other factors it's still quite a US-centric model that doesn't work quite so well elsewhere.

Bear in mind that in the rest of the world, the majority of people use prepaid cellphone plans (often with unsubsidised devices), not monthly contracts. iPhones can be $500-1000 upfront in those cases.

SImilarly, "ditching the landline" is unlikely in markets which tend to use ADSL rather than cable for broadband, especially if there is no legal imperative to sell unbundled DSL without an associated PSTN telephone account. Generally it is only the economically disadvantaged that "cut the cord" - it's not aspirational, except in a few countries like Finland.

I'd certainly agree that Apple is better-placed than the Android ecosystem at this point in time. Slightly less true of non-US markets where people generally buy high-end Nokias because of brand, or basic preference for their voice and SMS user experience.

Also, worth noting that in many parts of the world users would rather have a mobile broadband USB modem for their notebooks, than a smartphone.

Dean Bubley

Complete Web Browsing On Your Cell Phone? Not Yet

KenC

Yes, I take your point about standards, but there's a lot about the PC-oriented web which is based on de-facto rather than de-jure standards. There's a lot of websites with Flash, there's quite a lot of websites with Java, there's a lot of websites with questionable Javascript implementations (yes, I know the difference). PDF wasn't an open standard until a couple of months ago, either, yet most people have viewed it as "must have" for years.

Many websites are "long tail" ones that are unlikely to be bothered about how well they render on mobile for many years, if ever. Based on the numbers I'm seeing & predicting, mobile access will remain a minority or secondary consideration for many website developers, especially in areas like B2B. I wouldn't expect Boeing's webmaster to be too worried about someone downloading 747 specs to a mobile phone, for example.

The market evolution will be defined more by "public expectations than published standards", to use your terms. If a given customer's favourite website doesn't work on a phone, when it does on a PC, it's unlikely to be poor standards compliance that gets blamed.

It's also worth bearing in mind the Flash Lite is already supported on a lot of phones, notably most of the current higher-end Nokia devices, plus it's being blended with Java by SonyEricsson. I certainly don't think Flash is the be-all and end-all of the mobile web, but I don't think it's going to suddenly evaporate either.

Complete Web Browsing On Your Cell Phone? Not Yet

...and more importantly to get this back on topic: The whole point is that the Apple browser experience (which as stated is currently very good but not perfect), or the Nokia browser experience (which OK but quite a long way from perfect) are likely to trickle very slowly through the rest of the market.

In other words in 5 years' time, *most* mobile users will still have either no, or sub-standard, web performance.

Complete Web Browsing On Your Cell Phone? Not Yet

Brewer - I'm an industry analyst. I look at the way the industry as a whole is developing.

You completely misread that "I don't use an iPhone because I want Flash".

My post isn't about my personal device decisions. What I'm using personally is irrelevant to my analysis of the wider market.

I'm not a particular fan of any brand of handset or OS and I also don't give advice to other people on what devices to buy, nor do I recommend investments. And I certainly don't need advice from other anonymous people on what devices I should use personally - as I'm in the industry I'm quite aware of the options and their pros/cons.

What my clients pay me for is to look at the way the mobile industry will *most probably* develop, or sometimes other scenarios, or how they could influence them. My blog & the syndicated posts on SeekingAlpha are adhoc comments on the way I see certain trends developing - hence this one about mobile browsing.

I'm currently surrounded by about a dozen devices of various types, I switch between them regularly, and I have used an iPhone a fair bit (I even bought my father one as an Xmas present). Some of them are paid for by me, some of them are sent to me for evaluation - such as the E71 which I'm using as my main work email/web device at present. If O2 send me an iPhone, I'd probably use that more, and to be honest it's been ages since I used a BlackBerry, so ideally I'd play with one of those for a month or two as well.

Complete Web Browsing On Your Cell Phone? Not Yet

I'm continuously amazed by the attitudes of iPhone fans. In this post I go out of my way to point out that the device has the current best-in-class web performance but still get flamed because I mention its (few) limits.

Not only that, but in a previous post of mine I pointed the finger at network problems (ie not the phone) for the lacklustre reported 3G performance in the US, and yet I still get comments such as XamaX's.

Don't you realise that this almost religious over-reaction is counterproductive? I know people who specifically don't want one because of the uncool "enthusiast" connotations.

The fact is that many websites have Flash. Currently, the iPhone doesn't render them. Java is missing, too. Hence the UK Advertising Standards Authority recently banning one of Apple's ads for being misleading when it said "all the parts of the internet are on the iPhone."

In terms of the perennial question of "Do people WANT the real PC Internet on a mobile device?", the answer is some do, some don't, for some sites, some of the time. In certain cases a mobile-specific site is convenient and more useable, but in other instances it's incredibly frustrating if you're trying to use a familiar feature and it's not there. The best sites (eg Google) offer you both an optimised version and the "real" PC one.

DB

Are Global Smartphone Sales Poised For Takeoff?

Thanks for the comments.

To the first poster Papita with the rant "you people are coming out of the woodwork" - you're talking gibberish. I've been a technology industry analyst for 17 years and advise clients (mostly non-investors like manufacturers and network operators) on trends in a variety of mobile sectors. The content here is syndicated from my own mobile-industry blog.

MightBuyOneNow & others - This is something on which I've done a lot of research. In my view, this notion that smartphones will be substitutes PCs for people in developing markets is wishful thinking by people in the mobile industry. It's not supported by observed facts, although obviously there are occasional specific exceptions.There are numerous reasons, not least the fact that PC prices are falling rapidly, and PCs have (typically) a 2x or 3x working life compared to a phone. They can also be shared more easily among families. Further, kids in education get access to PCs as governments wish to encourage future computer literacy for business, and develop local software industries. I'm not aware that anyone *writes* software on a phone, or runs their company's accounting system on one either.

Then there are hidden factors - for example, many people in developing countries use PCs to watch (often illegally copied) movies bought on video CDs or DVDs. And it's difficult for teenagers to have 15 separate IM chat windows open on a phone.

This doesn't mean that people won't want Internet access on mobile devices as well - that will certainly be a growing trend, and indeed is probably the main thing driving smartphone sales.

In China, according to official stats, about 73m people access the Internet on mobile phones... but virtually all of them also access it on PCs. The vision of "mobile-only" Internet users is a myth, with a specific exception for Japan, and to a lesser degree in India.

For more detail, please see:
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Thanks

Dean Bubley

Google CEO on Mobile Advertising: A Golden Goose or Dead Duck?

I certainly hear a lot about the notion that the phone is "a device for interacting with the real world". But I don't believe the hype - it's all wishful thinking, particularly on the part of mobile network operators.

Sure, some people will use a phone as some sort of digital assistant, but I can't see it becoming ubiquitous. I'm also extremely doubtful about using a mobile for payments - it's a solution looking for a problem, with too many people in the value chain hoping to take a slice of revenues.

I meet far too many companies & people in the mobile industry who take the view that the phone (or whatever it turns into) is the answer to everything. Sorry, but here, as in all areas, divergence will be more important than convergence.

DeanB

Handset OS Fragmentation is Here to Stay

Baba

Of course arbitrage is not a networking term. It's a general concept in business and commerce, whereby *users* or *customers* can play off differential pricing of what is essentially the same good or service.

It applies to handsets where there are multiple ways for the *user* to choose between to achieve a specific objective, be it making a phone call or downloading/sideloadin... an MP3 file. For a music download, realtime is (usually) not important, so the user can look at exploiting the differential pricing between an operator-mediated portal and transferring a file from a PC.

The *user* or the *user's software agent* is starting to call the shots, facilitated by ever-more powerful devices which when combined with IP networks & the Internet can decouple access from service.

Increasingly, real-time services are becoming less important than non real-time capabilities in terms of the perception of user value (and also payment). This is already true in the fixed line/Internet world, with the exception of voice. But to deliver scalable realtime voice it clearly is *not necessary* to have IMS. Existing circuit services, over-the-top VoIP, and standalone operator-managed SIP VoIP app servers work well enough already and scale.

In any case, we are already starting to see voice calls fragment between QoS-essential (999 / 911 calls, important B2B communications, medical etc) and QoS-optional calls (phoning a mate in Australia for an hour's chat). There's no point "wasting" QoS and network resources - consumers already know this, which is why they use Skype or SMS or VoIP callthrough instead of needlessly expensive cellphone calls.

Real time mobile video is near-irrelevant. There's no massmarket business model in mobile, and I haven't seen anything that even remotely demonstrates that this is likely to change. Video should be treated as an add-on, not a core design objective for mobile-centric NGNs.

Conversely, non-realtime applications - SMS, web access, email, music/content downloads, social networks, filesharing and so on - are becoming proportionately more valuable in mobile.

*Therefore* future network investments will start to become more *optimised* for non-realtime capabilities. Realtime will still be valuable, but over time it will become secondary. This in turn will drive network capex and handset architecture decisions.

Sure, we will probably always see some form of QoS-managed network for the stuff which absolutely, positively has to be realtime. But it won't drive the overall investment decisions & certainly not define the underlying architecture for the majority of traffic for which that would be over-engineered.

This is why various of the radio-access network evolutions are evolving to some form of split-access mechanism. The stuff that matters goes to the QoS-managed operator core. The stuff for which best-effort is good-enough gets piped straight out to the Internet.

And in many cases it will be the handset (& its software & above all the user) that defines any instance of communication in terms of whether or not QoS or realtime is important.

Dean

Handset OS Fragmentation is Here to Stay

Let me clarify - outside N America I don't see the iPhone being particularly important in shipment volume terms, especially compared with high-end Nokias, and especially given the lack of subsidies. The revenue-share model also means that I can't see it easily being sold to the 70% of customers who prefer prepay to monthly subscriptions. It's also too large for many people who live in countries in which it's socially unacceptable to use a hip holster for phones.

On the other hand, I agree that the iPhone has had a fair amount of impact in terms of the industry's expectations. And yes, it has certainly driven more browser usage on handsets than most earlier phones.

Let's see if v2 or v3 iPhones are more appealing to people beyond the current fashion/tech-driven group, though.

Baba - interestingly, I've had a lot of discussions recently about the possibility that in future, yes, handset capabilities will drive the network rather than vice versa. There is already more "intelligence" at the edge than in the core measured in raw compute power - 3bn devices x maybe 150MHz processors on average, moving to 500-1000MHz in high-end devices.

In this case, the tail wagging the dog is inevitable, thanks to Moore's Law, especially where the devices now have multiple ways of routing voice, data or content (cellular, WiFi, Bluetooth, USB, memory card etc) and can act as a hub for arbitrage and least-cost/best-perfor... routing.

Obviously, those markets with greater operator control over handset architecture & distribution will be able to retain more network-centric control, compared to those where the device & service provision are decoupled.

No, Web 2.0 won't "ride on top of IMS". In most cases, it is more likely to be the other way around. I'd expect to see an IMS Rich Communication client as a good FaceBook plug-in, for example.

Thanks

Dean