A Buyer’s Market in Smartphones
Posted by Zealot on 06/30/08 in Business, Smart Phones
Larry Dignan has a great article about the financial changes going through the smartphone market in the Between the Lines column at ZDNet today. He notes the financial pains of such world beaters as Palm, Sony Ericsson and RIM (yes, even RIM) and comes to some very astute conclusions:
While RIM, Palm and Sony Ericsson aren’t exactly comparable their relative stumbles do indicate that there may be more leverage for IT buyers. Handset makers are being squeezed and you might as well join in the fun. RIM vs. Apple’s iPhone. Palm vs. Motorola. Penny saving commodity devices vs. gadget lust. The actual scorecard doesn’t matter. It all adds up to leverage for buyers of all flavors as these parties battle for market share and increasingly discount their wares. Meanwhile, the discounting will escalate if customers balk at those pricey smartphones.
Larry goes on to site many factors shaping the current market, and comes to a set of truisms that define market conditions right now and in the near future, which are right in line with my views (see Content, Content, Content).
According to Mr. Dignan:
- Any smartphone company that is primarily hardware based is going to be toast.
- These handset specialists are in a dog fight for market share and profit margins will suffer.
- The mobile market is increasingly driven by software, which is what makes Apple’s iPhone a hot item.
- The game is to become a platform. Sony Ericsson has no platform by itself. Palm doesn’t have its act together. And RIM has an ecosystem, but its army of developers could fall behind Google, Apple and a host of other new entrants relatively easy. Increasingly, the smartphone market will be dominated by software consortiums–Symbian, LiMo, Android–established platforms (RIM and Apple) and carriers that will collect the tolls. The devices makers will increasingly lose control over their collective destiny.
Right on the money, as far as I am concerned. As so called feature phones gain more and more of the physical attributes of smartphones, and elements such as expandable memory, powerful cameras and high level mobile chips become ubiquitous and prices therefore plummet, things are going to become more and more software based. Applications and content access is where vendors will work to distinguish themselves and gain market share…and thusly profit. The OS won’t be enough anymore, now it will require the synergy of OS, Apps and content that create a platform in order to succeed.
Care to know what Dignan sees in the future, and how he rates the odds for each of the major players in the space? Read the entire article HERE.
Written by Zealot · Filed Under Business, Smart Phones
Tagged:
Did you like this post?
Share your vote!
(No Ratings Yet)
You can also participate in other conversation in our active forums with 200,000 other Members. It only takes 2 minutes to 
i would argue that smartphone success has NEVER been about the hardware per se. its always been about ‘what you can do’ (applications) and ‘how easy it is do use’ (interface - which is both hardware and software).
looks at every technology platform over the last 50 years and it is the same story really. smartphone will probably follow the same patterns.
rim’s scroll-wheel became a defining element of their interface and contributed to end user ease of use. today, apple has stolen the ease of use crown with its buttonless approach and touch interface. and tomorrow…?
let me introduce/propose an idea here: today there are two kinds of mobile application - 1) applications that ease the consumption of information from mobile devices and 2) applications that ease the creation of information from mobile devices. iphones have proven great at consuming info. winmo fans point out how they can ‘get real work done’ creating info from their mobile devices. with time maybe we’ll see a third type of content, which is what i was speaking about in an earlier thread - we might call that contextual and real-time content. that is, where my location, revealed preferences and available contact info is combined to provide contenet that would not exist were my interests nd location are different.
so, when we agree that content is king, keeping in mind that there these three types of content can be useful. i hope. :-)
When you access your mobile portal at 2 Am from the corner of First and Main and ask for restaurants, the portal should be able see your location, note the time and be aware that your last 5 restaurant preferences have been chinese, and show you a list of restaurants near you which are open at 2 Am, with the Chinese ones at the top of the list. When you make your choice, it then can give you its phone number so you can book a table a map to it, including the nearest bus and it’s schedule and the numbers of the cab companies that work that area. Or if you decide to call them for takeaway, you can give the delivery guy’s phone 30 minute access to your GPS signal so he can see your phone on the map, so he can bring the food right to you on your street corner, where you then use the debit account built into your phone to pay for it, then as you are eating go back onto the web portal to write a review of their eggrolls for other late night noshers.
THAT is useful mobile content, and its right around the corner.
Z
z - that’s exactly it. :-)