Beyond the 3-Minute Call…
“Victory? Victory you say? Master Obi-Wan, not victory. The shroud of the dark side has fallen.” – Yoda, Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002)
You can forgive the news reporter who mistook President Obama’s Shaka wave for a sign to call him during the inauguration. The connected candidate -- who took communications to a whole new level -- would have expected a text message or email…not a call. Doubt if his new phone number is in the phone book anyway!
Mobile phones have come a long way since Motorola’s Cooper showed off his analogue brick back in 1973. Since then they’ve gotten smaller, cheaper, cuter and more a part of your personal identity…just ask the kids.
They:
- take photos
- check email
- watch videos
- browse the web
- use GPS (like they get lost between home, school)
- download stuff
- listen to music
- take videos
- download ringtones, screensavers
- play games
- text, IM
- make calls…tons and tons of calls
But to us they’re still phones. Sales have grown steadily
Mobile World – With a worldwide population of about 7 billion people, it is almost impossible to fathom that by 2013 we might have more than 5.5 billion mobile phone subscribers. Obviously more than a few users will have more than one device. Source – Strategic Analytics
Some people are so attached to their mobile devices they have to have a couple of them.
Smartphones Emerge
The Blackberry (Crackberry to early addicts) started folks thinking they had their hands on more than just phones back in 2000. Thanks largely to RIM a new generation, new classification of mobile phones emerged…the smartphone. That was okay until Apple changed the landscape.
Ok so Apple isn’t a volume phone leader (Nokia makes more units in a day than Apple sells in a couple of month). But demand has been excellent.
The Gotta Have Standard – If you’re a teen or tween or just someone who has to flash around his/her current status symbol then you’re one of the millions who plunked your credit card down at the store and purchased an iPhone. And you also switched from “them” to AT&T. Source -- Informa
It was so sexy everyone brought out their clone(s). Palm “unveiled” theirs at CES.
Palm Pre – Vowing to come back from their near-death experience, Palm introduced their “iPhone killer” at CES. Cute unit and much lauded operating system. Question is how many dollar bills will they wrap around each unit to move them out of the Sprint stores and how many “gotta have” apps will be ready on the day of introduction.
Sorta, kinda cool (of course units won’t ship until June) but they wanted to save what little bit of Palm franchise they had so they used their own OS. Unless you’re “in the biz” you probably didn’t know – or care -- there were mobile OS options. You know – Symbian, Android, iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Palm OS (nope it’s not dead…yet) and loose change cross-platform options.
No one cared until Apple found a secret to making big bucks in the phone industry. They make a few bucks on the iPhone but that’s chump change. They sweet talked our kids into using their iPhones with iTunes. Suddenly they were downloading music, videos, ringtones, you name it.
The AT&T bill went up. The iTunes bill went up. Since it’s only a so-so phone, they figured they’d offer other really cool stuff for the device and…BAM!!! They decided they couldn’t make all the apps themselves – not even Apple people are that smart – they decided “what the h***.” Continued...
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