Tuesday, April 9, 2002
Smart phone market projected to grow slowly
Posted by Ed Hansberry in "ARTICLE" @ 04:28 PM
http://allnetdevices.com/wireless/news/2002/04/09/smart_phones.html
"So-called smart phones that combine handheld and wireless telephony will be a small part of the overall market for wireless devices for the next few years, but they will be an important one, according to a market study released Tuesday by In-Stat/MDR." The article goes on to mention that price, interoperability issues and convincing the consumer of the benefits are the big hurdles.
Price is a big issue. 8MB greyscale Treo's are at least $399 with a contract. Add color, 32MB of RAM, a 32bit processor and a small case (the Treo is not small by phone standards) and you could easily hit $600 for the phone with a two year agreement.
Interoperability in the US? HA! What interoperability? The mix of CDMA, TDMA and GSM make enough of a mess as it is, but you cannot even roam a Verizon CDMA network with your Sprint PCS CDMA phone without dropping into analog mode, a no-no for data services.
Finally, convincing the consumer of the benefits. On the face of it, smart phones offer HUGE benefits. But until the infrastructure is in place, and I mean the IT infrastructure, it is going to be difficult to sell the story. Those of you in big companies supporting PDA's may well have wireless access where you can VPN into your corporate network, sync against a server with products like Mobile Information Server or XTNDConnect Server allowing the sending and receiving of emails and data. But users in small companies and SOHO users do not have this ability. The question is, will carriers see this and offer "cloud" services to these smaller clients? Will these customers trust their carrier to house their precious data and not lose it or peek at their email address database?
Personally, I think smart phone devices offer tremendous potential. Those companies like Microsoft and Nokia going full head of steam with genuine well thought out smart phone products will be rewarded versus those that just glue an ear piece and antenna to their PDA and call it a smart phone. PDA functionality will be in the hands of people that would never consider buying even a $100 PDA. I think the smart phone market will dwarf the PDA market in a few years. The question is, will they be properly marketed and supported, enabling them to catch up to the dumb phone market share?
"So-called smart phones that combine handheld and wireless telephony will be a small part of the overall market for wireless devices for the next few years, but they will be an important one, according to a market study released Tuesday by In-Stat/MDR." The article goes on to mention that price, interoperability issues and convincing the consumer of the benefits are the big hurdles.
Price is a big issue. 8MB greyscale Treo's are at least $399 with a contract. Add color, 32MB of RAM, a 32bit processor and a small case (the Treo is not small by phone standards) and you could easily hit $600 for the phone with a two year agreement.
Interoperability in the US? HA! What interoperability? The mix of CDMA, TDMA and GSM make enough of a mess as it is, but you cannot even roam a Verizon CDMA network with your Sprint PCS CDMA phone without dropping into analog mode, a no-no for data services.
Finally, convincing the consumer of the benefits. On the face of it, smart phones offer HUGE benefits. But until the infrastructure is in place, and I mean the IT infrastructure, it is going to be difficult to sell the story. Those of you in big companies supporting PDA's may well have wireless access where you can VPN into your corporate network, sync against a server with products like Mobile Information Server or XTNDConnect Server allowing the sending and receiving of emails and data. But users in small companies and SOHO users do not have this ability. The question is, will carriers see this and offer "cloud" services to these smaller clients? Will these customers trust their carrier to house their precious data and not lose it or peek at their email address database?
Personally, I think smart phone devices offer tremendous potential. Those companies like Microsoft and Nokia going full head of steam with genuine well thought out smart phone products will be rewarded versus those that just glue an ear piece and antenna to their PDA and call it a smart phone. PDA functionality will be in the hands of people that would never consider buying even a $100 PDA. I think the smart phone market will dwarf the PDA market in a few years. The question is, will they be properly marketed and supported, enabling them to catch up to the dumb phone market share?
