Last week Stuart reported on a piece written for The Register by Brendon McLean, titled ‘How the mobile phone biz lost the plot’. In the article, McLean claimed that the mobile phone industry, ‘is a rudderless ship furiously innovating in circles’, with Nokia and the other handset manufacturers crashing into one another and the operators in a desperate bid to develop ever more enticing phones.
To find the truth of the situation, you have to look more broadly at technology and bring a little historical perspective to bear. High-end mobile phones today are a lot like laptops were around four years ago: highly desirable but slightly under-powered for all the things we want to do with them.
The 3.2-megapixel camera in Nokia’s N73 is a good example: the resolution is good but the phone can’t process the images quickly enough to make it a serious option for quick snaps. But as happened with laptops over the last couple of years, the balance in phone design between available performance, battery life, and the complexity of what we want to do with our handsets is about to shift.
Nokia’s great white hope, the N95, is both the best and the worst that the industry has to offer at this time. Amazing specifications, loaded with applications, but crippled by limited battery life. We believe that the N95 represents the ‘tipping point’ in phone technology; that in a couple of years from now we’ll be able to look back and see that it was the high and low point before phone technology passed the same performance- versus- batteries- versus- features shift that laptops did a couple of years back.
McLean believes that mobile phone companies have lost their way, in terms of thinking about what we want from our phones, and that marketing people are deciding what goes into our handsets. It is too easy to point the finger at the marketing bogeymen: it is worth remembering that these people are there to work out what we want to buy. And we want these phones, we are buying them in the tens of millions, and our interest in them shows no sign of slowing down.
McLean also (rightly) criticised operators for interfering with phone features, singling out Vodafone’s unforgivable crippling of the N95’s voice-over-IP features. But with the advent of new tariffs like O2’s Eco Saver, where you are given £95 if sign-up and use your own phone, the new wave of desirable handsets begin to make more sense as off-contract purchases. Nokia offers the N73 Music Edition with a 2GB microSD card for £299 ($600). Less O2’s cash-back it works out to a little over £200 ($400) for a fully-unlocked handset with no operator ties. If operators try to hold back the spread of new technologies (such as wi-fi enabled phones), free market rules dictate that they are likely to be bypassed.
We agree with McLean that the Apple iPhone seems to have brought a fresh perspective to what interface design is all about. It also seems likely to have already had a positive affect on the way other companies are designing their phones. But Apple is standing on the shoulders of giants, with Sony Ericsson, Nokia and others having brought handset technology a long way over the last decade. The iPhone is one part of Apple’s operation: mobile phones are a huge part of Nokia’s business. The war isn’t over — it is just beginning.
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About Caspar Field
McLean did make some interesting points, and seems to have stirred up a lot of debate. Perhaps the most interesting aspect was that he completely ignored the impact of modern low-end handsets. There’s another rebuttal of his article at:
http://www.robinontech.com/2007/06/03/the-best-selling-gadget-youve-probably-never-seen/
Not sure the n95 represents a tipping point – it’s just another underpowered nokia phone filled with good ideas and nothing to deliver them with.
The comparison with laptops isn’t really accurate – if anything, phones reached the point where power and features had an equal balance a while back, and we’re now regressing. My E61 in full swing rivals the battery life of my nokia 2110.
The net result of a market flooded with phones that underperform is good for us, the consumer: ultimately an iphone (or the conceptual equivalent thereof) will come along and drive manufacturers in a specific direction and possibly force a little more consolidation and concentration on features that do make difference.
Doesn’t mean *an* iphone will be *the* iphone, I suspect we all assume it will be because apple has pulled these kinds of rabbits out in the past. Nothing I’ve seen so far make it look any more appealing than a newton.
I wait with interest
Not sure you can compare the iPhone with the Newton… That’s a little unfair. And the Newton came at a time when the PDA was still being defined, a long time before those devices reached their own tipping point. The reason everyone is so excited about the iPhone is because it appears to leave the smartphone tipping point a long way behind; because its design says that over-loaded, under-powered handsets like the N95 are out-dated. On that basis you read more like you should be a fan of Apple’s handset, not one of its detractors.
I think we’re really talking about different sides of the same coin; the N95 represents a tipping point because it is underpowered — that’s the point of the article.
A recently upgrade from a 800Mhz iBook to a 2Ghz MacBook proves the point (to me, at least) that laptops now have the grunt to do most of what I want to do. Both machines run the same/ similar apps, but the difference in usability brought about by faster CPU/ memory/ motherboard is huge. That’s the tipping point phones are approaching – the apps are not going to get vastly more complex, but the rules of technology advancement say that handsets will be hugely more powerful in two or three years from now.