Category: mobile

The high stakes of Lumia

Microsoft and Nokia have a lot riding on their new mobile phone product

Yesterday Nokia and Microsoft gave a preview of their upcoming Lumia 710 and 800 phones for the Australian market. It’s make or break time for both companies in the mobile space.

The phone itself is quite nice – Windows Phone 7.5 runs quite fast with some nice features such as integrated messaging and coupled with good hardware it’s a nice experience. Those I know who use Windows Phones are quite happy with them (I’m an iPhone user myself).

Whether its enough to displace the iPhone and the dozens of Android based handsets on a market where both Nokia and Microsoft have missed opportunities remains to be seen.

The battle is going to be on a number of fronts – at the telco level, in the retail stores and, most importantly, with the perceptions of customers.

Probably the biggest barrier with consumers is the perceived lack of apps, to overcome this Nokia have bundled in their Maps and Drive applications while Microsoft include their Mixed Radio streaming features along with Microsoft Office and XBox integration.

As well the built in services, both parties are playing up their application partners with services like Pizza Hut, Fox Sports and cab service GoCatch. Although all of these are available on the other platforms.

While application matter, the real battle for Nokia and Microsoft is going to be in the retail stores where the challenge shouldn’t be underestimated.

Apple dominate the upper end of the smart phone market and Android is swamping the mid to low end. How Windows Phone devices fit remains to be seen.

In Australia, if they going to find salvation it will be at the tender hands of the telco companies.

The iPhone is constant source of irritation for the telcos as not only do Apple grab most of the profit, but they also “own” the customer.

On the other hand, Android devices are irritating customers who are bewildered by the range of choices and frustrated by inconsistent updates that can leave them stranded with an outdated system.

So the Windows Phone does have an opportunity in the marketplace although one suspects commissions and rebates will be the big driver in getting sales people at the retail coal face to recommend the Microsoft and Nokia alternatives.

Overall though, it’s good to see a viable alternative on the market. For both Microsoft and Nokia the stakes are high with the Lumia range – it could be Nokia’s last shot – so they have plenty of incentives to get the product right.

Microsoft has consistently missed the boat on mobile computing since Windows CE was launched in 1996 while Nokia were blind-sided by the launch of the iPhone in 2007 and have never really recovered.

To make things worse for Nokia, the market for basic mobile phones where they still dominate is under threat from cheap Android based devices. So even the low margin, high volume market isn’t safe.

For both, the Lumia range is critical. 2012 is going to be an interesting year in mobile.

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The Internet Kool-Aide Machine

Don’t buy the hype when you read about the hot new product

Every few months, the web lights up with hype about the latest technology or website. For a few weeks, every tech conversation mentions this hot new product.

Almost always this hype is driven by the company in question duchessing a few key “opinion leaders” in the tech, social media or other circles. These folk start writing up this product and, if they are lucky, the stories get picked up by the broader media and the product becomes “hot.”

The aim is to find the greater fools, for the investors and founders of these business they want to cash out by selling the operation to a bigger entity.

When you read the hype about the latest user generated, online sharing social media service that’s growing at a remarkable rate be aware you’re actually seeing a pitch to a big company being framed along the lines that “you can’t afford to miss out.”

By all means sign up to the service to have a look but don’t buy the hype and remember you’re not the customer – the gullible big business manager looking for the next big thing is.

Image courtesy of Blary54 through sxh.hu

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Why the Microsoft Faithful are wrong about Windows Phone

Is it too late for Microsoft beat Apple and Google in mobile phones?

Late last year an event organiser recounted how she’d been told to only approaching Microsoft for event sponsorship if the occasion was related to mobile telephony as “all of our marketing budgets are focused on Windows Phone.”

So it wasn’t a surprise to read at the beginning of this year that Microsoft were allocating $200 million for marketing Windows Phone in the US alone.*

The Consumer Electronics Show is the high temple of tech journalism with thousands flying in from around the world to breathlessly report on the latest wide screen gizmo or mobile device

At the 2010 show, 3D television was going to be the big consumer item while at the 2011 event it was going to be Android based tablets that were going to crush the Apple iPad.

Despite the millions of words written and spoken about these products, both flopped. So it was no surprise we were going to see plenty of coverage of Microsoft given the budgets available and it being the last time Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, would give the CES keynote.

Microsoft’s CES publicity blitz kicked off with a rather strange profile of Microsoft’s CEO in BusinessWeek which if anything illustrated the isolation and other worldliness of the company’s senior management.

The PR blitz worked though with Microsoft tying for first place in online mentions during the show according to the analytics company Simply Measured.

After the show the PR love for Microsoft continues with Business Insider having a gorgeous piece about why Windows Phone will succeed and criticising tech blogger Robert Scoble’s view that the mobile market is all about the number of apps available.

Scoble replied on his Google+ page explaining why apps do matter and adding that most of the people he meets hate Windows Phones, the latter point not being the most compelling argument.

The most telling point of Scoble’s though is his quoting Skype’s CEO that they aren’t developing an app for Windows Phone as “the other platforms are more important, so he put his developers on those”.

Microsoft spent 8.5 billion dollars buying Skype and intends to lay out over $200 million promoting Windows Phone. Surely there’s a few bucks somewhere in those numbers to pay for a few developers to get Skype functionality on the new platform.

Since writing this, Robert Scoble has issued a correction from the Skype CEO stating a version is being built for the next version of Windows Phone

The fact Microsoft can’t organise this seems to indicate not all senior executives share the vision for Windows Phone. It’s difficult to image Google or Apple having this sort of public dissent on a key product.

Management issues aside, Microsoft’s real problem are they are late to the mobile party and don’t have anything to gain attention.

There’s nothing wrong about being late to the party – Apple were late to enter the MP3 player, smart phone and tablet markets – but in each case they bought something new that changed the sector and eventually gave them leadership of each sector.

With Windows Phone, there’s so far little evidence Microsoft are going to deliver anything radically new to the sector. With Apple’s iOS and Android dominating, it’s going to be a tough slog for Microsoft and they are going to have to have to carefully spend every cent of that big marketing budget.

At least Microsoft’s PR team is doing a great job, the challenge is for the rest of the organisation to sell it as well.

*As an aside, it’s interesting the author of that article about Microsoft’s marketing budgets boasts how he “been sitting on this information for weeks so that Microsoft can make its big announcement at CES this coming week”. It’s good to know where Paul Thurrott thinks his responsibilities lie – certainly not with his readers.

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The death of the short message service

How SMS revenues are drying up

The New York Times’ Bits Section looks at how in many countries text messaging (SMS) services are declining.

For telcos, the SMS feature was a happy – and extremely profitable – accident with the Short Message Service feature designed as a control channel for the mobile voice networks.

The Short Messaging Service cost almost nothing to develop and quickly became a massive profit centre for mobile phone companies.

Today in markets where smartphones are dominating sales, people are moving many of their communications away from text messages over to Internet based services like email, instant messaging and social media.

Interestingly, in the United States text messaging still growing although at a slower rate than previously. This makes sense as the US is behind countries that have fully adopted 3G networks and subscribers don’t get the full benefit from a smartphone without a reliable and fast data service.

For developing countries, we’ll probably see SMS continue to grow as the attractions of a relatively cheap and simple communications channel like text messaging still make sense in markets where data plans are expensive and smartphones scarce.

As revenues from text messaging drops, we’ll be seeing more telecommunications companies try to replace the lost income with other services. Expect to see more offers for various business and home service bundles and offers to upgrade to the latest phones or packages as providers try to lock profitable customers into cash generating agreements.

The era of accidental profits for telcos is over, the quest for these companies now is to find how they can maintain profits in an era where data services are commoditising their lucrative product lines.

For the managers of these companies, the challenge is on to successfully do this – it remains to be seen how well they do in refocusing their businesses.

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ABC Nightlife: The next wave of smartphones

Paul Wallbank joined Rod Quinn to look at where mobile phones are going.

The world of mobile phones is getting busy again as a whole new range of smartphones appear. Paul Wallbank joined Rod Quinn for ABC Nightlife on October 20 to discuss what the new smartphone wars mean for home and business users.

We’ll be going to air from 10pm, Eastern Australian time across Australia on ABC Local Radio’s Nightlife to look at the following questions;

  • Why were people disappointed with Apple’s iPhone 4S that was released a few weeks ago?
  • The big competition are the Google Android phones, what are they doing?
  • What’s happened to Nokia? They seemed to have lost their domination.
  • Microsoft were the other big player, what are they doing?
  • How are the smartphones changing business?
  • Shopping centres seem to be jumping on board with various social media checkins. What are those?
  • There’s been a push to online payments, how are the smartphones affecting this?
  • Are smartphones going to be the big buy for Christmas?
  • What are the best plans for consumers and business?
  • How do people deal with telco disputes?

The podcast from the program is available from at Nightlife website, and some of the information we mentioned can be found here;

Dealing with Telco complaints

We’ll be adding more resources in the next few days, the next ABC Nightlife spot is on 23 November and our events page will have more details. If you have any suggestions for future programs or comments on the last show, please let us know as we love your feedback.

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