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Cell Phones Becoming Profitless
saccade.com writes "EE Times has a fascinating article
on how electronics companies are being sucked into a profitless
spiral by the cell phone market. More and more of the small consumer
gadgets are being folded into the phone: camera, music player,
PDA, GPS, etc. So the market for non-phone gadgets is slowly
going away as the phone picks up more functions. However, consumers
don't buy most phones; they are given away (or sold very cheap)
by the service providers as hooks to get people to sign up for
mobile service. So the service providers are demanding (and getting)
rock-bottom prices for fancy phones they can give away, and the
micro chip companies are forced into brutal competition for a
market that is shrinking into a single commodity gadget, the
phone."
Maybe the cellphone companies will all go bankrupt and we won't have to put up with annoying idiots blabbering away in every place imaginable.
In the article, it was suggested that disk-based media players like the iPod aren't immediately threatened by this "death spiral" (unlike flash-based players which could rapidly become toast as phones eclipse their abilities) and that got me thinking about the root problem of customer expectations. The cell phone companies clearly blew an opportunity when they initially treated the hardware as a loss leader. It's hard to get that genie back in the bottle. People today will pay for a crap flash MP3 player or low-to-medium-end digital camera, but balk at paying a premium for a mobile phone with loads of features.
Perhaps a marketer like Apple can break through with an enhanced phone product that will create a demand that outweighs the current expectation on the part of consumers that phone hardware is free (as in beer) or nearly free. This is right up Apple's alley.
The Motorola deal may be a trial balloon for Apple. Imagine the full capacity and function of the mini iPod married to a full-featured phone. Add to this the stylish design that Apple would strive to achieve and I think you have something that can break this "death spiral."
"...all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness..." yada yada
Whats that? The market at work?
This is similar to the cr industry in the late 20's-early 30's and the rail road industry. Both of them commoditized and competed themselves into fewer companies until the last ones left were profitable.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
But if the summary is right, the let me be the first to say BULLSHIT!
No way in hell I'd trade my 4 megapixel camera for a shit 320x240 phone picture JPEG'd to hell.
Well, maybe this is true for the PDA part.. but most PDA users have gadget fetishes anyways.
p.s. fp?
I welcome this trend towards ONE peice of equipment to do everything. This will allow me to carry one peice instead of a camera (and it's respective bag, accessories etc.), a phone, a pda, a computer, a music player, a note taking device etc...
Look, a digital camera that's decent might cost a pretty penny, but the digital camera I get with a cellphone doesn't get the resolutions of a digicam I can buy separately (yet). Then there's the issue of storage - the "storage" for the phones I'm not sure about, but then there's bandwidth issues in that, last I checked, they still charge for bandwidth.
This sig no verb.
A PDA on my phone just makes my phone bigger/bulkier..no thanks.
I can fit my phone in my pocket, I dont want to have a huge slab of metal in my pocket, just a small thing that is portable and unobtrusive.
If I wantd a PDA I would have bought one..same w/ digicam and music player.
Anyway integrated devices are usually inferior to their standalone counterparts.
Who's with me? Keep those devices separate!
Most cellular services providers take the loss on phones NOT the manufactuer - they make this up by locking you into a contact and hoping you either go over in minutes or buy a plan that makes them money - which 75% + do.
I know this because I had a girlfriend that worked for phone acquistion and deployment for Cingular. THEY almost ALWAYS paid full wholesale price for the phones. The Ericcsons they used to give away cost them $45 each. They cost Ericcoson something close to $19 to make.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Ughh so this is the reason I can't get a phone thats _just_ a damn phone?
I was all ready and willing to buy the Kyocera 7135, a Palm-based phone that retails with service for $499, until I found that only two really expensive services supported it in my area. By itself it would have been almost $700, and that wasn't worth it, and most of the services that I was interested in couldn't use it anyway. If you think about the way that people use cell phones, as address books, entertainment devices, and information stores, this idea made sense back to the old Qualcomm pdQ Smartphone (built by Kyocera even) and if more readily available would make sense. Something like that might even help the manufacturers, since they could charge a premium for a high quality phone that would be usable for many, many years, instead of these crappy ones that break easily and are more of a commodity trend than anything else.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Hmm. I get raped every month by my cell phone bill, and I think that millions of other people do as well. Its good to know that it isn't just the consumer that the cellular providers are squeezing! Maybe the providers will eventually stand up for themselves... but that makes me worry that the providers will pass the cost on to me.........
Ads? What ads?
Cell phones are in the process of crossing the chasm between phones and replacements for your PC. Until this job is complete, margins will be way down.
In three years, I will bet anything that you will be able to connect a bluetooth mouse, keyboard and some sort of monitor to your cell phone (probably via it's charging cradle). For most users, these devices will be powerful enough to toss their PCs for good.
But to get there, the industry is running uphill at a breakneck rate - features and technology are going nutz - it is EXPENSIVE to make this transition.
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
I was just talking about this with an Australian friend. Here in the US most phones are pretty cheap but over there the prices are horrible. A very low end and basic phone will run around $700. Now I am not sure on exchange rates of if they were talking in Australian/US money but the point it the prices are much higher.
Hopefully the cell phone companies do not start raising the prices of service. I can stomach a new phone if I had to but the current trend of inexpensive phones that you replace frequently works for me.
Do what I did - get prepaid wireless (T-Mobile has a good plan). Besides only paying the carrier when you feel like it (rather than every month), you also don't have those pesky bills coming in the mail telling your girlfriend who you were on the phone with ;-)
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
boo hoo hoo.
Oh valiant corporations, I cry for thee, stabathed in the heart by consumers ugly greed.
boo fucking hoo.
Sales in the horseless carriage market is declining due to this new-fangled device known as the "automatic mobility", or automobile. Horseless carriage manufacturers are crying foul as many features of their products are getting integrated into these new all-in-one devices.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
So, what you are saying is competition causes a decrease in price and an increase in product features which benefits the consumer? Looks like the free market is still working.....
Remember when you had to BUY a sound card for your PC? What about paying $200 for modem card? NIC? Video card. Now you get the kitchen sink on most motherboards. And the components are pretty decent.
This seems to be par for the course. If the process can be put on a chip then function consolidation will surely follow.As a business model this works while its still profitable for the phone companies to discount the phone and expect profit from the contract. But what about when everyone already has a contract? (as will happen when all people who want a phone have one. IE - When the market reaches saturation). (And this isnt as far off as you'd thing). People are far more likely to upgrade their phone than their contract, so theres no additional profit to be made for the telco in discounting upgrade handsets.
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
the micro chip companies are forced into brutal competition for a market that is shrinking into a single commodity gadget, the phone.
Free country, free market, free economy. If you don't like the heat- get out of the kitchen. Nobody's forcing you to sell low-margin products, and they have nobody to blame but themselves if they're only making stuff for cell phones. It's not like they woke up one morning and said "oh my gosh, someone changed our product lineup to be just stuff for cellphones!" Furthermore, I don't really believe it- plenty of semiconductor companies make stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with cell phones.
If it -is- true, who's to say this shakeup is a bad thing? That's the wonderful thing about a competitive market- if a company can't make a profit on a device, they won't make it. If there are too many companies making a widget, the price will go low and only the strong companies will survive.
The fantastic thing is that if the strong companies start to suck, well- a market forms for an competitor because there will be something to differentiate their product. Not only that, but if it's better- they can price it higher, and (gasp!) make more money!
Please help metamoderate.
It's not that the market is "shrinking", it's that the low end devices that aren't very good and only sold because of their price can be easily replaced. It will be at least a few years before people's cellphones replace their digital cameras on vacations or give up their iPod minis.
And note that no one is claiming that the GBA is going to die because of cell phones. They may have games and such, but the GBA is a whole other calibar. Well made devices have nothing to fear. The portable games that are going to suffer are the little Tiger handhelds and such.
Consumers, by and large, only stand to gain from this. Survival of the fittest garuntees that most of these devices will be around for a while, and the substandard stuff will fall off the market. Which consumers lose?
And to those of you that say "I just want a phone that's a phone, dang it", we're in the gadget phase right now. It's all new. Wow, I can get a cell phone that can do THAT? As novelty wares off and people see that the extra features aren't that great by and large, you'll start to see simpler phones. Just because I might be able to get phone/camera/MP3 player/PDA/etc for free with my contract doesn't mean I want the thing around. Bulk and interface often suffer. The "cell-phone-only" will come.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Of course cell phones are profitable - if they were not profitable, the cell phone manufacturers would create more profitable products.
And in fact, that's what they do.
Of course, for tax purposes, it is best if they show on the books that they lose money. As we've seen in many industries (manufacturing, healthcare, defense, MLB, etc) it's rather easy to show enough loss to avoid paying taxes. It is fact that corporations (at least in the USA) pay many fewer taxes as they did 5 years ago. The primary reason? Tax avoidance through "magic" accounting techniques.
If there was no money in the business, the shareholders would put a stop to it - after all, most cell phone manufacturers make many other products. But amazingly, looking at the past 5 years, share prices remain fairly stable compared to the overall tech sector.
Here's a simple solution. Build a camera with a cellphone in it. Build a music player with a cellphone in it. Build a PDA with a cellphone in it. Build a GPS with a cellphone in it. And quit your kvetching.
Seriously though, all of these cellphone toys are such crap. This is what I want. A cellphone that makes phone calls. And when it rings I want it to sound like a phone ringing, not Paris hilton getting fucked to german techno porn music. And I want it to be black and white. With no camera, games, or web browser. That has excellent reception and battery life, that does not accept text messages, that is easy to set to vibrate mode, that does not take 20 seconds to start up and shut down while playing an animated movie that is impossible to disable. Can someone please point me to this phone?
Verizon saleslady: "That cameraphone is just $amount more than the one you selected"
Me: "No thanks, high end digicam for that."
Granted, I WOULD like a small portable digicam, but EVEN then im buying a small camera, becuase it will still be better quality than a cameraphone. That, I believe is the reason all-in-1 phones are so successful. Most people don't really, totally give two shits about whether it does anything WELL, so long as on the surface it seems as if their phone does alot of nifty stuff. Nevermind if it takes shitty pictures (which cost a mint to txt to someone) has a million crappy ringtones (which cost to download) and plays shitty games that have been around for decades on a pad thats ill-designed for gaming
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Hey..I paid full price($200each) for the pair of T616s that my fiancee and I use. Most of the higher end phones are really expensive. When are the phone companies going to start lowering the cost of the higher end phone?
picture this== pda phones that require connectivity for PDA and computational function..
yes, a dumb terminal (vt100ish) cell phone PDA.. something that goes on quickly, and just passes button presses to the service, and the service passes video to the phone.... HMM..
bandwidth needs jump a little sure--
is this any crazier than a neat slashdot post about 10gig ethernet supplying full screen video to a 'dumb' pc?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
i intentionaly got a phone with bluetooth, but not much else. at my school they have this fettish about stealing cellphones from students, however, they arent too worried about palm pilots. i can connect the pda to the phone through buletooth, and keep the phone safely hidden in my bag. (internet - not like i have anybody too call)
Nathan Friedly
The universal chip will be installed in every device then 'underclocked' so it only exposes the functionality that a consumer has paid for.
If it happens, it might make for some interesting hacks.
The article states... "PDAs, cameras, GPS receivers, MP3 players, DVD players and game consoles" are all components of phones now...
HOWEVER, I would say very few people think to themselves "Hmmm... I'm want a camera, let's go buy a phone" or "Hmmm... I really love my gaming, I'll go buy a phone".
Perhaps the features of these new phones will affect a purchaser's decision, but in my opinion second rate features (i.e. low res camera, low everything game console, extremely bare bones MP3 player, non-optimized battery life, etc.) found in cell phones will never replace other non-phone sales unless the features are BETTER on the phone, which will never happen, because IT'S JUST A CEL PHONE!
Anyone who tells you "hey, I won't buy a camera, I'll just use my cell phone", was never seriously in the market for a camera to begin with, or is ignorant to quality and ergonomics. This would go for pretty much all of those features...
Remember that one? When everyone would use e-mail exclusively (since it was FREE!) and the post office, fedex, and ups would be out of business in 5 years. I don't have stats to back it up, but I suspect the Internet has actually helped the postal industry a ton. Okay, maybe people write and send fewer snail letters, but mail-order shopping and e-bay resulting shipments (more shipping $$$) have gone through the roof!
I can't predict how the gadget consolidation will play out, but I suspect there will be wonderful surprises in store down the road. Shouldn't all of these portable technical gadgets glob into one utility-pod anyways? Why should I be forced to fumble with seperate gadgets? What if they could get to a point where they build stackable phones with interchangeable camera modules, MP3 modules, holo-projection modules, etc... You could click 3-6 of these lego-like bricks togeather and have your own custom utility-pod that best suits YOUR needs.
Besides, once they get all the gadgets figured out and have nothing left to worry about, maybe they can finally provide unbroken signal coverage between my house and my office: A 15 mile commute in a frickin Atlanta suburb with a county population of 2.4 MILLION people. Incompetant bastards.
This one gang kept wanting me to join cause I'm pretty good with a bo staff.
Unfortunately, we might not have much choice. If the cell phone gadget market kills the other markets and then is squeezed itself by vanishing profit margins, then we'll all pay the price for getting "free" phones many times over. Unfortunately, short-term price always seems to trump long-term quality in commodity markets.
Disclaimer: I work for a company, but I don't speak for them.
This actually makes sense, as I don't really think the economy right now (north american at least) can bear the cost of supporting so many gadgets.
... for most mass consumers, they can pay for their phone bills, and not much more. Many of those gadgets are products looking for a market that doesn't exist. Ie advanced colour pda's ... etc ... aside from execs earning large bonuses, who is going to spend $600 + on such things?
The market pays what it can bear
The cell phone companies clearly blew an opportunity when they initially treated the hardware as a loss leader.
An opportunity for what? Remember, it is the service providers that treat phones as loss leaders. They do it to ensure customer lock-in. If phone are sold instead of given away, the profit will go to the retailers. The service providers still won't make money on phones and their customers won't be willing to sign up for a 2 year contract.
The current situation is bad for manufacturers because bargaining power is concentrated in a handful of service providers. If they sold to consumers, there would be more room for product differentiation, marketing, and profit.
too bad it'll never happen, back to work....
This, in my opinion, is a pretty good indication that Bill Gates could be right; hardware will be free. As software gets more complex and requires more devs, it's viewed more and more like a service. What we're seeing is an industry that's already gone the route of realizing that the material costs are miniscule compared to those of the labor/service, and thus include the hardware in the service package.
"There are no such things as mutual fantasies. Yours bore us and ours offend you."
- Bill Maher
. . unless the phone manufacturers allow themselves to be shot in the proverbial foot by the major telcos by crippling the functionality of their devices with draconian DRM restrictions.
You better believe that ALL of the telcos are very keen to make you pay for every music file you load onto your phone, regardless of whether you already legally own the song on a CD or not.
You can see the marketing opportunities now, can't you? Just wait and you will see them advertising this "great new service" to their long suffering customer base.
"Dial 013013 followed by your selected song number from our extensive* catalog and your song will be delivered to your phone instantly!" (and billed to your phone account accordingly of course)
New phone? Well just dial 013013 again to re-order! It's that easy, and you'd better believe it baby!
From the perspective of your major Telco, there is no money in it for them when their customers can transfer mp3s from their PC's to their phones, and seeing that the phone manufacturers sell their phones to the Telco's (and not end users) the Telco's have significantly more control over the functionality (and therefore dysfunctionality) of phone devices than Microsoft will ever have in the PC world.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
People today will pay for a crap flash MP3 player or low-to-medium-end digital camera, but balk at paying a premium for a mobile phone with loads of features.
Personally, I'd be happy to get a good phone for free, but there's not a chance in hell i'd sign one of those long-term contracts they have on offer. Your circumstances change, your free phone ends up costing you a lot of money. Happens to most ppl i know that sign up.
I think I'll pay for my phones thanks...
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
but when i do decide to get one, it will be just that, a phone. i dont want functions up the yang, especially ones that will probably need patching from script-kiddies. hell, i dont even want text messaging! gim'me a phone with nothing but unbelieveable reliability.
You are confusing me with someone who cares.
Does a photographer use his phone to take his pictures? Does a person replace their iPod with their phone? Not likely.
When I was in Japan last Fall looking for a cell phone, I only managed to find a single plan that came with a free phone. Pretty much every plan required that a person either purchase a phone ($75-$250) or already have a compatible phone to use. They were remarkably nice phones, though, with very large, bright displays in extremely thin packages. While I don't have a phone in the US, I haven't seen anything like what I saw over there here.
A basic lesson in economics. Call me jaded, but isn't convergence what everyone has been -hyping- for a few years? You'd have to be a bit thick to be in the phone or chip business and not seen this coming.
High-end cameras won't go away anymore than my Canon 35mm died when 110 film and later disposable cameras went away.
Non-phone audio players will continue, though maybe not so many portables.
PDAs? Ok, so I can see the phone and PDA market completely converging someday except for government spec'ed devices that can't have a phone.
Maybe some companies just got spoiled by being able to sell us a new latest-greatest-doodad every year or two?
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
Cell phone companies should be forced to label their "phones" to help people make better decisions. They should show 1) Antenna gain, 2) Standby battery life and 3) Talk time on every phone, very clearly, just like mileage on cars. If cell phones are going to be important parts of our communication system, people should make decisions based on criteria that MATTER instead of mindless feature creep.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
I'm all for that, but since I also need a PDA, what do I do about the contact lists? Does the PDA have the definitive list, or does the phone have the definitive list?
Obviously the phone needs the list, otherwise you have no phone numbers to call. But if you only use the phone to enter all contact information, you're constrained to the tiny screen. And manually syncing the two every time one or the other gets new information is a horrible idea.
Since a PDA-sized phone is about as undesirable as a phone-sized PDA, I figure the only true way to solve this problem is to get the Bluetooth working so well that you can configure the phone to pull the list from the PDA if it can find it in its vicinity. That way, you only have to manage the list on the PDA, but the phone still has complete access to the list.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
There's even one of those folding keyboards with bluetooth coming out that I'd love to buy next for it.
And if that's not enough, how about all the neat Symbian programs you can buy for it, like turning it into the ultimate universal remote control
And the camera in it feeds my addiction to mobog.com.
Anyhoo, sucker cost me $420. Someone made some coin on it.
I've owned a few PDAs including a Casio E100, E110, and a Dell Axim. Junk basically, and using imap or pop with pocket outlook is ultra painful. Too big and that resulted in me never carrying the thing. To get wireless internet access through the thing was another hassle.
This (nokia 6600 phone) puppy is just the right size for me.
You don't buy a cell phone from Cingular, you buy it from Bob's Cell Phone shack THEN you get a rebate from the manufacturer who gets reimbursed from Cingular.
Bob's Cell Phone Shack gets subsidies from the providers based upon the numbers of signups.
In it there is a device that does everything for you (yes, even that) that's very much like the evolution of the modern cell phone. Interestingly, there's an underground society of poor people that can not afford to pay their Joymaker fees, and have to resort to that quaint alternative to electronic credit: cash, which is, of course, only used by such poor "untouchables", and thus accepted in only the grimiest of places. Without a working Joymaker, you literally can't communicate with anyone except face to face (and even then, it's a desensitized experience, execpt, perhaps, for "natural-flow girls"). Read the book. It's fun.
The second novel in "Bipohl", "Drunkard's Walk", is the better of the two, though, IMHO. Basically, people who solve a statistical riddle related to human populations get mysteriously driven to suicide. It turns out that the solution to the riddle involves accepting the premise that there are some people who do not die.
You could've hired me.
This is bad for the consumer..how? I for one would love to see the day when all the necessary electronics one uses in everyday life may be compacted into a single small gadget to be carried and used anywhere and everywhere. Perhaps, out of stupidity, the companies have started us down that road.
Cell phones don't work in basement apartments. Cell phones don't provide DSL. So, for me, folding all these functions onto a cell phone base is about as pointless as trying to sell a houseboat in the Sahara. A GPS enabled Palm, now that's a different story.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
The last time I checked a reasonably priced low end mp3 player was more than a hundred bucks. A cheap snapshot digital camera, ditto. A voice recorder - same thing. And don't even get me started with Palm. And those features on phones are not that dramatically worse than standalone devices.
And who wants to walk around with Batman's utility belt anyway?
What all those gadget makers are discovering that all their gadgets really aren't worth that much.
Now if we could just nuke all the phone companies and send their employees straight to hell it would be GLORIOUS.
I do not need a camera, voice memos, video games, downloadable polyphonic symphonic psychedelic ringtones, an MP3 player; barely functional text messaging, even more barely functional email, or a "web browser" that makes driving to the New York Public Library and looking up what I need to know seem efficient (I live in Virginia); Bluetooth, Compact Flash, color high-resolution display requiring exponents to describe, inaudible speaker phone, or a multi-billion dollar ad campaign that causes seizures in small children and house pets to tell me how this new phone is going to Change My Life Forever! (TM)
I do need good signal handling and audio; a phone book designed for people who actually a) read, and b) make phone calls; maybe a vibrating ringer available at every ring volume, not just the top and bottom; and a user interface that doesn't remind me of the very first freshman programming project of the year. For fancy occasions, an alarm clock can be nice.
A provider network that wasn't engineered by beauty-school dropouts would be nice, too, but that's another issue.
-Edgar
Up until the 1960s America still had a viable shoe industry. Next thing we know, Maxwell Smart comes along with a little thing called the shoe phone, and within 20 years shoe manufacturing was practically extinct in this country.
Cell phones are to a large degree a commodity product. I can get basically the exact same services from AT&T Wireless, Cingular, Verizon, T-Mobile and any other carrier. Plus the carriers give the phones away as a loss leader. In a market with what economists like to call perfect competition, we should expect to see prices drive down to marginal cost by competition. (note for the nitpickers, I'm well aware the cell phone market isn't actually a market with perfect competition) The handset manufacturers sometimes can create a differentiated product (like the Treo 600) which gives them a chance to stay ahead for a while. The service providers don't really have that opportunity for the most part.
Right now Nextel actually is the only service provider I can see that really has a sustainable advantage of any kind in wireless. They've basically hooked the contractor market witht their "push to talk" feature. Yeah, other companies are trying to follow suit but Nextel already has the lions share of these customers who aren't likely to switch and they can charge more as a result.
make sure you get the real phone companies and not the downtrodden outsourced :p
Ignoring connectivity for a moment, sure, people would rather carry one thing over four, but people also have their own requirements for this stuff. I have my mobile phone, an iPod, a Pocket PC and a digital camera that I use at least semi-regularly. The mobile is with me all the time, the iPod almost all the time, the Pocket PC is used a lot at home at the moment and the camera is taken with me when I know I'm going to be taking photos. These devices are all of varying vintages, ranging from 5 years to 10 days old. Invariably, you get used to how they work and you don't feel the need to replace them while they still do. You'll make do with multiple items even if there is an integrated solution that's just as good in all the aspects that matter.
Anyway, if my phone was my camera, how would I lend my camera to a friend for the weekend?
Who would've thought that in the 24th century the communicator and the tricorder would be the same damn thing!?!?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Well, I think what the article is really stating, is that the competition between cell-phone providers is high. The providers, like Sprint, are trying to provide the same or equivalent phones cheaper than say Verizon, so they're demanding the phones at a lower and lower price from the phone manufactures like Nokia. The problem for the phone manufactures is that in order so one of their competitors doesn't "take" the market, they all have to keep their phones at a VERY low price to Sprint, so low that it costs them money and does not generate them a profit. The "loss" is a real and virtual loss. The real loss or very low profit margin is from selling the phones cheap to the providers. The virtual loss is from people saying that they'll just use their low-cost cell phone that can take pictures or play MP3s instead of buying a stand-alone digital camera or mp3 player.
Its a thing were all phone manufactures have to raise their prices or none of them can.
It seems to be the case of a monopolistic racket is causing problems for another monopolistic racket.
You are free to do as we tell you.
We want your soul.
www.wewantyoursoul.com
I got a job at Nextel right out of the Air Force, and enjoyed learning the technology. Nextel had a great niche with the wireless 2-way, and a lead on the competition. However, I worked for an overbearing boss and they didn't do diddly squat for training.
Sprint PCS wooed me away with training. I finished my MBA while working at Sprint, and they started sending me to classes. I learned all about wireless, packet data, network admin, etc. But the more I looked into the business itself, the more strongly I believed there is no way they couldn't fall into becoming a commodity. For the uninitiated, a commodity means consumers really don't recognize a brand as distinguishing. Walk down a toothpaste aisle, and you'll see a market kicking and screaming to NOT become a commodity (when after all, it's all just PASTE).
The words were there and the media hype came out in droves during 2.5 G (circuit switched data, 56k max) and 3 G (packet data, games, cameras, etc). However, I knew from my days at Nextel, that consumers were fickle and really just looked at the bottom line. I had a VP at Nextel explain it this way, 80% of the market are consumers, yet they're 20% of the revenue. If you hike the price they jump to a competitor. The business niche will not jump because of the costs of switching, plus they're 80% of the revenue.
If you look at Revenue per User (RPU), Nextel has been leading every year, without exception, since wireless started taking off. So what does that leave the competition with? Consumers who drive up costs by: Switching, calling customer service, wanting new phones, etc etc.. My source of prices are quite old, but I'll approximate the costs from the late 90s. The cell phone cost the original manufacturer about $800 to build (R&D, manufacturing, etc). The sell it to the carriers for about $500. The carrier in turn sells it to you for $250. So the carrier and manufacturer are banking $550 of goodwill.
From the consumer's standpoint, they really don't care who their service provider is. They just want to dial 7/9/10 digits (don't dial 1, the switch just strips it off...dial using 7 or 9 digits) and hear a human voice at the other end. More importantly, they want the call to stay up. So the phone doesn't matter, nor the service. This is a receipe for a commodity. Now factor in there are 5 or 6 players in the market. Each has identical networks that costs billions to manage. Imagine if you had 5 runs of twisted pair, from 5 local telephone companies, running into your house. One will make money, while the other 4 lie dormant. It's not a straight analogy, but my point is that the market can't bear these many providers.
This is why you saw the mergers around 1999/2000. I really think we need one or two more for efficiency reasons. However, even with a merger, it's still becoming a commodity with intense pressure to keep costs down. In my opinion, wireless is heading down the dead end which the wirelines are already going down....
[/police]
When phones become more modular, their manufacturing industry will become less costly, less risky, and more profitable. That will allow competition on human features, as core features like their radios become commodities. Real core HW breakthroughs, like cheap "universal radio", will offer profit opportunities. But a broader, stable platform will offer much opportunity for software, both logic and content. Their ubiquity and interconnectedness, will multiply their integration of personal multimedia including phone, messaging and entertainment. The landscape will offer P2P, client/server and other architectural features that will keep people exchanging with one another. Mediating those exchanges, and measuring the exchanged value, is economics, and therefore money. Profit abounds, but it's not for everyone.
--
make install -not war
Why do people in here lately have no sense of foresight?
Right, state of the art consumer cellphones these days are limited to 1.5 to 2 megapixels.
But it was just 3 or 4 years ago that digital cameras were in that range.
You really think that cellphone cameras will stay at sub-par resolution for much longer? Think again. I give it 2 years max before you can buy a cellphone with a 4 megapixel camera... and along with it, an MP3 player and a 4 GB memory card. All for under $300 likely.
im bitter because some fuckhole on a cellphone hit me today
I have a Tracphone. I pay for minutes as I go. I can choose from about 15 ringtones (not expandable), store addresses and numbers, check voice mail, and it looks sexy. Oh, and I can play video poker. Aside from the calling area (half an hour north or west and I'm screwed,) it's perfect.
I hate these people with their flashy "LOOK AT ME BEING AN ATTENTION WHORE" phones who play P-diddy in the middle of class while I'm trying to learn cross product for an upcoming test.
Or the phones that act as walky-talkies. You're walking along, and suddenly this annoying-loud beeping comes from behind you, and you think you've tripped something. Instead, you hear some garbled speech coming through the phone, and the person behind you trying to shout into it so the other one can hear what they are saying.
In class this week, someone was doing... I dunno what he was doing on his phone, but it was hard for me to keep from making a crack about him trying to send an S.O.S.
I'd much rather have a simple phone and pay less for my phone plan.
I own a P800, and was very excited when it first came out. However I don't think that the 'super' phone market will replace/destroy the indevidual component market.
The camera doesn't work in dark places (e.g. pubs and nightclubs), you end up with near black images (it seriously needs a flash).
The PDA functions are adequate for my needs, but are far from complete.
The MP3 player is good, no playlists though, I have the 128MB memory stick, so get about 2hrs of music, which doesn't compare to my iPod in any way.
The phone part is ok, the microphone has trouble picking up my voice when its windy, so I tend to use the hands free a lot, the problem with the hands free, is that the headphone socket is on the side, so now the cable is all twisted and cracked because the phone lives in my pocket.
At the end of the day, it's a handy tool, having said that, if I know I'm going to be taking pictures, I'll take my 4 mega pixel digital camera out, if I know I'm going on a long trip I'll take my iPod.
The phone will never kill off these markets as long as they provide inferior capabilites.
Andy.
On the whole, this trend is a GOOD thing. Consider:
;)
First of all, the ultimate result of this process is going to be a device about the size of a current PDA that is simultaneously a cell phone, music player, camera, and hyper-powerful PDA. It'll do just about everything and it'll run on whiskey (remember those fuel cells?). That's almost as good as magic, folks. And I can thank my phone company for being ruthless and forcing the cell phone suppliers to drop their skirts and spread their legs. It's about TIME the phone company did something for me.
Second, the people who are taking it in the shorts are a bunch of suits who don't care one little iota about me. You can't claim this is going to hurt my fellow programmers; the suits already outsourced us. You can't claim it's going to hurt secretaries or clerks, because they'll find plenty of work elsewhere. The ONLY people getting hurt here are the suits -- the managers in charge who can't make their companies profitable under the phone companies' terms. So who cares if they stay rich? Who cares if their profits drop? Who cares if they live or die?
All this means to me is, a bunch of rich, arrogant SOBs who never did anything for me are going to take it right in the shorts while I watch and revel in the action. And, I get a new, fancy cell phone in a couple of years that does everything but get naked for me.
Sounds like a winner! Hoist a pint, boys!
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Cell phones are one of the few pieces of technology that is truly global. There are 1.5 billion cell cell phone subscriptions in the world and only 140 million are in the US.
While many people in the US can purchase better cameras, music players, & PDAs than what's on the cell phone, people in most of the world cannot. The cellphone has become their electronics center and they otherwise could not afford those accessories if they were not on the cellphone.
Text messaging is annoying to do, I'd rather take my laptop to a hotspot, or just connect via modem through my cellphone, but in some countries it is the primary form of electronic communication (cellphone air times are too expensive, and many places do not have traditional internet access). The 1Mpixel camera phones take poor quality pictures, but for people in 3rd world countries, its the only digital camera they have.
I know many americans complain that cellphones are getting to annoyingly complicated with 2nd rate gadgets, the reason is the cellphones are not being designed for the US market, they are being designed for what much of the rest of the world wants.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
I've always been irritated by gimmicky devices such as cameraphones. A device should serve its purpose, and serve it well, without any bullshit. A telephone is a telephone. Those who want to play games should go buy a GameBoy. Those who want to take pictures should go buy a $25 digital camera. I guarantee it'll take better pictures. The biggest problem with today's whiz-bang mobile phones is that the manufacturers try to squeeze in so much useless extra functionality to attract narrow-minded consumers that the device actually loses functionality as a phone. I've used others' phones on many occasions when I didn't have my personal phone with me. Just turning the damn things on involved listening to a tinny little musical jingle, then waiting several seconds for the phone to boot up, followed by a mandatory splash logo before I could even start entering a phone number. When a device is so packed with irrelevant features that it cannot effectively fulfill its basic purpose, it is useless.
This is the exact reason why Nokia 3310 and 3315 phones are so predominant in Australia. These phones went for about $150 a pop last time I checked and came with a pre-paid plan, Optus phones were network locked IIRC but Telstra phones were not. So now there is a massive market for 3310 covers because every teenager who didn't want to get locked into contract bought one.
Now phone companies are having a really hard time trying to flog off MMS phones, no one can see the point of buying a new phone so they can send 95 cent messages to each other.
As a side note it has also resulted in whats called a "Nokia salute" at teeniebopper concerts where cigarette lighters are not allowed. Just press enter on the phone and hold up the phone for the band to see.
In the US there really isn't any "postal industry". The post office is a government-regulated monopoly, and it's (technically) illegal to compete with it. UPS and Fedex get around this by providing guarenteed delivery times. The post office can and does sue companies for using UPS or Fedex when they don't have a legitimate delivery time requirement.
The USPS gets a very large portion of its revenue ($37B) from first class and metered mail, which is mostly bill payment. If everyone started paying bills online, revenue would collapse. I suspect the reason this hasn't happened has more to do with ineptitude on the part of banks than any permanent advantage to postal mail. When consumers expect free internet bill payment, and merchants are tied into some sort of national clearinghouse first class mail will virtually cease to exist. Grandma only writes so many letters.
The other large portion of revenue ($17.2B) is from all that garbage they stuff into your mailbox. That will eventually become such a large portion (percentage-wise) of revenue it will become USPS's only reason to exist (aside from the dreaded registered letter and jury summons).
Most internet retailers use Fedex and UPS (USPS does only $2.2B in packages). I've always wondered why.
So why should I care? Should I want them to "differntiate, market and profit" so they can get more of my hard-earned cash for esentially the same product?
Who do you think reads EETimes? This article is not speaking to consumers. It speaks to those who make thier living designing, manufacturing, and marketing products. If there is no money to be made in cell phones and no future for portable devices that are not cell phones then companies should considder not designing new products in this area.
A one year contract isn't so bad, in my opinion, only a handful have two year contracts and that is only for special perks they throw in, like unlimited night and weekend calling. I think they charge the same whether you take their phone or bring your own in, so it is cheaper if you just take a free phone.
Even if your circumstances change, with the carriers I checked, you can "relocate" the phone number to your new area code. I was able to get a number not in my current area code, so I was "local" to certain people.
The only plans where you benefit paying for the phone and service separately are pay-as-you-go. The pay-as-you-go plans cost a lot more per minute. Last I checked, if you use more than 100 minutes per month, you are actually better off with the lowest rate plan contract where you get 300 daytime and 1000 or unlimited night and weekend.
What a load of crap! A Nokia 3315 is less than AUD100 (USD60) to buy with no plan, contract, nothing, just the phone.
Sure, there's no colour screen, no camera, no poly-frickin-phonic ringtones, just a phone that you make calls with.
sigh...
Don't they become lower end phones when you lower the price?
No matter who makes the phone I get to walk into who sold me the phone and in front on the masses I play Dance,Dance Revolution on said phone.
Perhapos you consider me abusive, but *I* feel better about swearing abpit Spint while jumping up and down on a cell phone.
I need a camera, I don't need games, I don't need websites, I don't need an mp3 player, I don't need a bowie knife, I don't need scissors, and I don't need a bottle opener.
I just want a phone that I can talk on. Oh and maybe something with a battery that lasted more than an hour.
If I wanted all those other things I would go buy them, and for less money combined than one of those things (they aren't phones anymore). Why would anyone in their right mind buy a $400 phone with a shitty 1 megapixel camera in it that can only take 1 picture at a time, when they can buy a decent 3 megapixel camera for $150. Hell you can even get a better camera in a box of Cheerios.
Who's idea was this anyway?
Add a phaser, and I'm sold!
If I could own the phone and switch providers, I'd be more inclined to buy a fancy phone at a higher price. But since a phone usually only works for the company that issued it, why would I care about who made the phone?
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
But I can't make sense out of these godawful service plans. I was going to get a phone a couple of weeks ago, but the madness of hidden charges, extra service charges and everything else that interferes in me figuring out HOW MUCH A MONTH, and comparing to other companies just made me lose interest.
I'm ready to pay for a phone and service, but I'm tired of the 'rebate economy' that cell phone providers hide behind.
When I can: pay the same, reasonable amount that isn't padded with unadvertised charges, and talk as long as I want, when I want - I'll get a phone.
Until then, phones are moot. Cameras, mp3 players, video games, internet access be damned - I'm not going to suddenly start paying to take pictures, listen to music, play games and surf 'per use'.
Yup. Very Cold Day in Very Hot Hell. But it's what I want.
Its a gimmick to grab as much subscribers in the shortest amount of time, or the keep very few entrants as possible into wireless service providers as they dominate in subscriber base.
Its the same ploy that telecos did years ago, give away sturdy as hell landline rotary phones. Then once they had enough customers this service slowly just disapeared as will free cell phones as most Americans start adopting cell phones. Actually its already happening I remember it used to be virutally all cell phones were free nowadays only the original Nokia's are free whereas the newer models include a rebate and one is still expected to pay between 49.99-149.99 depending on model.
While a cell phone might have a camera, it will never compete with a dedicated device, if nothing else for lack of good lenses. Same goes for MP3 player- your iPod has way more storage space. My phone has a calendar feature, but paper or palmpilot is far more usable. Looking to the future, a cell phone with credit card features is still going to be larger than a thin, regular card.
Dedicated electronics have their place, no matter how much functionality is rolled into the cell phone.
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
Telcos driving manufacturers into bitter competition because they're demanding more for less money? This is a self-correcting problem.
If increased competition turns profits into losses, eventually manufacturers will begin to leave the market, leaving fewer manufacturers. Fewer manufacturers means that those who remain are in a market with decreased competition, which drives prices up.
Sorta "Symbian Dater", but works on many OS.
http://www.net-cell.com/MP/index.html
...I think our next phones will have to look like this.
-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!
Capitalism is too damn efficient. This is precisely what happens with Chinese suppliers and Wal-Mart. The suppliers are forced to operate on razor thin margins and even a loss because Wal-Mart demands it. Of course, it's the Chinese workers who ultimately get the giant shaft, toiling for pennies 15 hours a day every day of the week in order to eek out a subsistance living. Fuck it, right? If you don't see it happening, it probably doesn't exist.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Omigod! Its' a friggin TriCorder and communicator in one package... Captin! It's brilliant!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Indeed. I bought the kick-ass Sanyo SCP 5500 (Sprint's VM4500) phone with camera, video, ringtones, organizer, etc. for my SO. It's a fabulous phone for only $179 with rebates on a 2-year plan.
Sprint really really wants you to pay $15+/month for PCS Vision where you pay them for picture and video mail, and buy your ringtones and games from them. It's convenient and you can see Sprint PCS wanting to be like .mac for your phone, but the fees add up.
Meanwhile, in theory the phone is expandable. So you can go to Radio Shack and buy a USB cable, and then go to FutureDial and buy SnapSync and SnapMedia, and jack your phone into your PC, and transfer your contacts, pictures, and ring tones. In practice you've just spent more than the phone cost you to get some poorly-written Windows-only software with all kinds of limitations. Likewise, this phone runs Java so in theory you can download your own MIDlets. In practice, I've yet to figure out how, and Sprint has no interest in telling me. As the parent posted, this situation is exactly how the telco wants it. Premium phones have the checkboxes for PC connectivity and Java, but in practice it's so painful most users will pay Sprint for their easy service, and Sprint only has to support a closed device.
I think the telcos' self-serving focus will actually save the PDA-phone market. If you buy a Treo 600 or a Samsung sph-i500, it is going to sync fine with your PC out of the box, and you can easily install third-party Palm software like media players, e-book readers, etc. But that expandability, media access, and user control makes PDA-phones a lot less appealing to telcos. Maybe that's why Sprint is dragging their feet on the greatest (for me) PDA-phone-camera-music player with SDIO expansion yet made, the Samsung sph-i550: announced in 2003, approved by the FCC early in 2004, but Sprint won't sell it in the USA until 2005.
=S
For me personally, I balk at the idea of expensive cell phones because they generally only work with one provider. What if I get pissed at sprint and want to terminate my business relationship with them? My super phone needs to still operate all the other functions and I need to have other providers to choose from.
I have the Treo 300 now with Sprint. Sprint has decent cell coverage but generally their service is crap. BTW, I hate this Treo 300/Sprint combo . Other than syncing to my PC it's useless because sprint suppossedly strips out caller ID from SMS messages so not only do I not know who the messages are from, I can't respond.
What good is this giant keyboard then? I can still use it for palm apps, but I bought this phone so I could do SMS and now I can't.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
My cell phone is a roll of quarters. Find a pay phone. Find a shop, ask to use the phone, and pay for the call. Slower, yes. Can't recieve calls, yes. But far less annoyance, and I don't need to carry around more than $5 at a time, instead of a $200 cell phone. Which would you rather have if you need to go through a bad neighborhood?
Not a sentence!
I don't want to hold a really really heavy device to my ear to hear the phone because it has a gigantic hard drive built into it.
Then why not just unplug the CF Microdrive when using your camera phone as a phone and plug it back in when shooting pictures?
my cell phone to do one thing, and I expect it to do it well: be a telephone.
You mentioned "10-15K/sec download speeds." Is that 10-15 Kbits/s (about the speed of a 14.4 modem) or 10-15 KBytes/s (ISDN speed)? If the latter, then I've finally found how to break the Clear Channel monopoly: Vorbis at 64 kbps over RTP over Sprint Vision.
To massage your back with a mobile phone, set the phone on vibrate and test the ringer several times.
Shouldn't all of these portable technical gadgets glob into one utility-pod anyways?
So what your saying is we will probably have a single tool which will take the place of the following:
Cell phone
On-demand information network
Memory
PDA
Universal communicator
Telephone (Land Line)
Encryption dongle.
Real-time video
That would be really cool -- wonder what they would call such a thing?
Seriously, this is just another case of things going full circle. During the 90's, I distinctly recall the cry for task specific networked appliances (remember those?) which only performed a few simple tasks well but communicated with each other as needed. So now we're saying we need a universal device which might not have the best interface for every task it does, but does a bunch of stuff.
This is a fad. Client-Server versus terminal (thin-client, whatever.) Talk to the elders, they've seen it before.
Face it. We have too much technology for the engineers/hackers to stay under the radar and solve real-world problems in private. Now we have to have marketroids and C-level execs dreaming up crap to distract us from the real task at hand. Problem solving. Well, I guess someone needs to create problems too, the same old problems, over and over and over again. Ugh.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
I'm just avoiding the whole cellphone thing altogether. I have and use all the other toys, but I am actively remaining cellphone-free.
So far, it's working.
I guess that explains why T-Mobile just turned off free internet access. Last month (even a few days ago), you could go to any WAP site from a T-Mobile phone, without signing up for a special program, and with no cost. It was great! Too good to last, I guess, as they need another way to make money.
Starting today, when I try to go to my favorite sites via phone, I get a "friendly" message saying that I can't get to the sites unless I sign up for the $4.99/month T-Zones service. This move is bound to be unpopular, and might even be illegal, since they removed an actual (but not advertised) service from existing service plans. My feelings are mixed: "Corporate Greed" or "gee, they gotta make a profit" and "it's still a good deal". Sigh.
I thought about what else could be added into a phone some time ago and here is a list. Some of these features are already in some phones, but not all of them combined.
Tri-band GSM - So that the phone works in europe, australia and the US.
GPS - with maps so that you can use it like one of the purpose built devices.
Camera Phone - which uses GPS to add where the photo was taken to it.
MP3 Player
10-20Gb of Disk space using one of those tiny hard disks that have been developed.
802.11G wireless networking - allowing the user to link to thier mobile phone in there pocket. This would allow them to use it alot like the USB Memory keys now except without having to plug it in.
An Environment that can run programs that have been saved to the hard disk and use all the features of the phone (possibly java).
Easy Syncronization with outlook or some other calendar program. + Easy to expand syncronization technology for other purposes. eg Automatic backup of work files to home with each trip.
Bluetooth - to allow connection to various external devices like keyboards and the like.
A earphone the size of a hearing aid that links via bluetooth to the phone, that allows it to stay in you ear all the time.
A feature that would allow a signal to be transmitted to the phone to automatically put the phone in to silent mode. This would be good for cinemas and other public venues
color screen
good games - need I say more
Barcode reader and RFID scanner - so that you can do price comparision shopping + other industrial uses
Universial remote control.
Battery life exceeding 1-2 days, after which it doesn't forget all its settings like alot of the pda's do.
When I first started thinking about this, by using external components it would have costed about $10,000. Now I think it would be under half that, and still dropping. Thats if you could get a phone like that though!!!
Also the security implications of a device like the above would have to be well thought through.
PLEASE tell me why I would spend a few extra hundred dollars to get an Ipod when I could get a $70 cd player that will read rewritables and play MP3s?
If you own and have encoded more than 10 or 20 original CDs, then swapping discs after each song is no fun.
I have a Riovolt MP3 CD player, and its MP3 CD player has two annoying flaws: a five second or so gap between tracks (ruins seekability in continuous mixes) and, when jogging, a tendency to jump forward or back a couple seconds in a song rather than properly error-correcting a miscue while filling the 2 MB antiskip buffer.
With the game consoles, you have the control problem.
What control problem? If you're referring to the fact that gaming phones don't have a quality direction pad, that's more of a patent problem than a technical problem inherent in integration of gaming and mobile phones. However, Nintendo's patent on the cross pad is set to expire soon.
Now that all products are being rolled into one, I'd like to suggest that any product with a screen and four input buttons be required to have Tetris on it. Phones, TV's, music players -- all of it. You could probably put Tetris on a chip (TOC) using the tiniest amount of space and power, and just roll it into everything. It should be as essential to chip design as a clock.
There have been countless times that I've been stuck somewhere for hours, had an electronic device with buttons and a screen, and could not play Tetris. So much boredom could have been avoided.
When I worked at AT&T Wireless, people would sTILL complain that the phones cost too much - they had no idea (and sometimes refused to believe) that a lot of the cost of the phone was eaten by AT&T Wireless already, and they were already getting a substantially discounted price.
Too many people want everything for nothing.
I just want a damn phone that works in my apartment - or within a 1/2 mile radius. Dead zones are teh suck.
I just wanted to point out the obvious (but apparently not so obvious for many) that almost all of the mobile providers offer phones without some degree of features such as cameras, MP3 players, and the kitchen sink. It makes me wonder if anyone's actively looking for one...
T-Mobile - Nokia 6010
Cingular - Nokia 3595
AT&T Wireless - Nokia 2260
Alltel - Nokia 3585i
Verizon Wireless - Nokia 3589i
OK - now perhaps you're one of those who feels that color screens are over the top for mobile phones... so what to do? Why not look around on eBay?
With that said, I wholeheartedly appreciate the trend of adding features to phones.
Rotary phones "just worked." Why did they even bother adding that newfangled touchtone button dialing or even eliminate operator-connected calling? They always "just worked." The reason: progress.
I love Caller ID and SMS... they're infinitely useful and convenient. Sure... features like Push-to-talk and loud ringtones are annoying... but only when they're blantantly misused or inappropriate... like for personal conversations and in classrooms, respectively.
I just had to say this because I really dislike comments like "just give me a phone that works" because if telephone tech never evolved and never incorporated any new features, we'd all be using AMPS. We've come a long way from the days of car phones. And I, for one, LOVE being able to check my eMail on my 3650. Granted, network reliability should be paramount, but I've never had any lingering issues with my T-Mo service.
I guess I'm less spiteful of the industry than I used to be.
First, there will always be a market for professional-grade gadgets.
Second, electronics manufacturers will get the cash one way or the other: the connection providers will pay the phone manufacturers which pay their subcontractors who made the necessary chips for, for example, the camera.
Third, at least here in Finland it's against the law to join phone and service: you are free to use whichever connection provider you want and whichever phone you want. And you are free to change the connection whenever you want. Ok, you have to pay the phone by yourself but it's yours to keep from the moment you bought it - the connection provider won't have anything to say about it.
They're really close. Samsung sph-i500 is a Wireless phone/PDA/digicam/mp3 player. Runs PalmOS and has an SDIO slot. By the time it's actually available in the USA (lazy-ass Sprint -- grrrr), multi-GB SD cards should be cheap, so it should be comparable to the Flash-based MP3 players. As other posters note, the camera quality will still be lame, but it's great to have a camera with you 24x7.
That leaves a better screen. I don't see a fold-out screen coming any time soon. I'd rather have a cyborg-style floating "eyepiece" display, but Microvision has promised one for over a decade.
=S
I work for a major company in the cell phone industry.
There are two figures that cellular service providers want to increase. # of subscribers and Average Revenue Per User (ARPU).
They believe the way to increase ARPU is to offer additional services with additional charges. So they want to sell phones with gaming capabilities so they can charge to download games, with mp3 playback so they can charge to download songs, with camera capabilities so they can charge customers a fee to send photos to each other, etc etc.
I think there will always be a market for devices that don't charge users a fee everytime they are use, so I don't see cell phones destroying the market for additional gadgets.
Seriously. Most of the money a companies makes goes to paying people for their work. Even corporate "profits" are usually dumped right back into the corp and not given to shareholders. Those profits go to pay someone else. Sure, CEOs use the corps as their personal piggy banks, but the shareholders tend to make very little.
Take a look at the graph here.
Shareholder dividends dropped like a rock from 1981 at 6% to 1.5% in 2002.
Most corp revenue goes to for materials and employees. Most corp "profits" are never given to shareholders (the owners).
So, I say again, businesses in general are close to profitless anyway.
What I think this article REALLY implies is that decreasing REVENUES are making impossible for some businesses to even stay afloat.
No revenue means no employees.
Eliminate the corporate income tax. Then companies have no incentive to hide their income to avoid paying taxes.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
Sorry if this is flaimbait or anything, just my views.
a friend of mine is holding out for a Treo with Bluetooth support. he says he doesn't want to carry around all the cables all the time, so bluetooth is his answer.
personally, i find these fancy phones rather distasteful. every month, some company comes out with a new cellular phone that has all these widgets and doo-dads and massive color screens...
but since what we've got now is basically a gunch of hand-held game systems with IM and SMS and all that stuff.... starting with Motorola's flip phones as a base, what i want out of a current cell phone (before i will consider buying one) is this:
* tri-band GSM. i don't want to be locked into one provider for each area i go to, or for each country i visit. i want the freedom to use my phone where i want, when i want, on whatever network is available, and pay one bill.
* standard web connectivity at no extra charge, with some basic web tools like SSH and a graphical browser (like Opera). (and by extension, it would need a good, low-power color display - OLED, maybe? not too big. and i say i want free web connectivity for one and only one reason: a WAP "hotspot" will not always be available. period.)
* consumer-ready, free, and open development kit. i don't want to pay $1,000 for a dev package that i might use once to develop a program i'd rather give away anyway.
and at this point, i'm reaching for more ideas. i don't want a phone that does absolutely everything. a phone should be just that. a phone. it should just work when i need it to work. it doesn't need to be burdained by all of these useless features i don't want anyway.
if i need PDA functions, i've got a PDA. if i need a high-end portable game system, i can get the Nintendo DS or something.
if i want to watch movies or listen to music, i'll just grab the PowerBook and go.
i don't need all this cruft in one package. i just want something that works, is wireless, and gives me the features i need, not the features i may want.
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
This is horrible. Just terrible...i feel like crap. This has really ruined my day...please excuse me while i slit my wrists.
stendec@gmail.com
So thats where the Tricorder comes from - it began as a mobile phone and in 30 years it will be an all purpose device as seen on Star Trek!
I don't *want* my cell phone to have all these features. It's expendable. I carry the thing everywhere and they get broken. They are utilities for placing/recieving phone calls on the road.
I don't want my MP3 player, camera, and lord knows what, in my phone. It's too liable to be dropped, broken, lost, or stolen. With my expensive MP3 players and my expensive cameras, they stay in my pocket or bag 99% of the time. The phone is in my hand, in the dashboard holder, a lot more.
I'd just have a cheap phone with good battery life and easy menu system to store phone numbers. I don't need anything more then that.
And like one of the other guys mentioned above, the cameras in these things are crap anyways. Who cares if they are 3MP; the tiny optics prevent a great picture no matter how big the sample rate is.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I think they call this 'market economics'. There is a demand for something, and companies must compete with pricing for sales of their product.
Nifty when it actually works, huh?
What the heck is a 'sig'?
how about this?1 .htm
http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/00231
What I find interesting is that no one in this thead has yet pointed out that not one manufacturer has given a damn about the quality of voice at both ends of the phone. I still use my five year old Qualcomm 2700 (made by Sony) becase even though I have tried *every* other cell phone on the market today, not one sounds as good (either at my end, or to the other party) as that old 2700. I've seen some explanations of why this is so, the main one being that the latest compression algorithms are all about squeezing as many people onto a tower as possible, regardless of what it ends up sounding like. One would think that after all these years cell phones would sound like a frigging high end stereo system, but instead all the tech has gone into blinking lights! The phone part has SUFFERED for all the tech. I just think it's weird. It's not just me, either -- I have had dozens of people try my old Qualcomm and they are always amazed at how good it sounds.
The word "profitless" does not fit in this case, since even this year Nokia has its operating margin more than 19% in their Mobile Phones Group (2Q 2004)./ Q22004pdf.pdf
http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/NYS/NOK
It's clear that the margins are narrower than during previous years, but not profitless! Many other businesses aren't even dreaming of such numbers.
The low-cost manufacturers must be kept away with bringing constantly new features. Nokia has a flood of new models coming. We'll see if they lift the company to previous profit-level. Motorola is bringing 30 new models this year, but they have a longer way to top profits. Some manufacturers have been struggling with low profit for years, but for instance Samsung is doing well.
You don't have to. Buy the simplest (and cheapest) model. Stop whining if someone else wants the bells and whistles.
Wow, it's cool to have a cell phone so that everyone around me knows that I'm important enough to have one.
I like to turn up the volume and use special ring tones. This further reinforces my already shaky self image which causes me to think about what other people might be thinking about me on the bus and especially that goddam driver that always leers at me like he knows something I don't and that other goddam bitch who...
Sorry.
and aint the online dictionary in yer pocket such a fucking great thing.... same as with you, this is pretty much the only thing i use web functionality on my phone (SonyEricsson T610 - gorgeous lil phone, oh yeah, it was free with a c ontract).
I thought i was the only person sad enough to use the phone for this reason.....
bah!*@%!
I think I'll pay for my phones thanks...
Well - you do that either way, you know. Pay it all up-front, or pay it through somewhat more expensive service over a period of time. Either way, YOU pay the phone.
Point in case - a few months ago I got a new Nokia 3100 with a 6 month contract. 15 EUR upfront, 15 EUR per month subscription and then subscription drops to nothing and the contract is, well, over. That would give 7 times 15 EUR, or about the price of the phone. Could I have bought it for that price with no contract, and gotten a zero subscription rate? Yes. Did I choose to? No. YMMV.
Black holes are where God divided by zero
Consumers can be so hartless some times.
Your remarks make me wonder if the providers are worrying less about churn than they used to.
About a year ago, after AT&T Wireless finally sporked me for the last time, I went with T-Mobile because they were the only provider here in Sacramento which offered a one-year contract, as opposed to 2-year lock-ins...
<grrr>
You can't buy a simple phone anymore. Even the simplest one has too many shitty features in it (downloadable tones, graphics, games etc), while the quality of the phone itself reaches record lows.
If I could get a battery for my 4-year old cell phone I'd ditch in a second the shiny and crappy 2-months old one.
Serban
The problem here is the phone carriers. They are blood sucking assholes who would charge you 40p a minute to breathe if they thought they could. These hoes make a tremendous profit because they just set up towers and reap in the cash. They dont give a crap if your call sounds like ass or your text message takes 24 hours to deliver. The only thing they've ever conceded to is carrying free emergency calls and i bet they charge you for that behind your back! Get rid of them. They're the middle men and like the RIAA they should soon become obsolete. Phones starting to come with wifi could potentially create free or super cheap networks in some areas and people are used to fast free (flat rate) net access so we'll be demanding that off the phone companies soon too!
Its a shame because we've come so far and yet we are so far away from the ultimate dream - connecting to anyone anywhere - its been possible for years tech wise but you still pay dark age prices. Fuck them totally. (Im extra pissed because o2 is charging me half a quid per text even tho im still in the bloody EU and i paid them _extra_ to get cheap roaming).
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I hope nobody here has a compaq... but if you know someone who does you've seen a failure of this same premise. Compaq thought it would be the best thing since sliced bread to put buttons on your keyboard that would launcha a browser, play music, feed your dog, etc. Long story short - Nobody uses them (And compaq is horrible). Cell phones will NEVER replace cameras. Why? Because a camera of equivilant size will always be better at taking pictures than a device that has to incorporate a small PC into it.
I love my phone - I have a Sony Ericsson P900 and it does everything I want at the moment aprt from be a 20GB MP3 player which is what I have my Creative Zen for. I only paid £140 for this £600 phone.
The next generation will have Wi-Fi built in AND be a megapixel camera - with flash. Maybe even GPS (although I don't want it).
Sod the companies that might go under - inovate or die.
My Portfolio
Most recent phones can do IMAP/POP/HTTP some even IM protocols and SSH. Not too hard a stretch to imagine how the phone could soon become your primary communications device.
Is it secure? You have no control over the hardware in any meaningful sense. Would you trust a PC with the case welded shut and an OS you could only guess at? Because that's what a "smartphone" really is.
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
'nuff said.
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
Nothing is worse than competition making the things I want to buy cheaper.
paintball
Until someone else gets the reference?
paintball
How many phones do you usually have to smell before you can find one with a good scent? Is there any way to tell if the chick who used it was fat or not?
paintball
Is there a bunch of people signing up for lifetime cell phone contracts that I'm not aware of?
paintball
I've never considered myself as retard but, as You should know, you're self the last one to notice!
To the subject:
Nokia 1100
http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,,42112,00.html
Phone Features
Phonebook with up to 250 names on SIM card and up to 50 in internal memory
Distribution lists and concatenated text (SMS) messaging
Date and time screensavers
Built-in alarm and reminders
Stopwatch and countdown timer
Full-size animated screensavers
Two built-in games
Internal antenna
Automatic keyguard lock
Keyguard lock with security code
Fixed ringing tones (1 Nokia tone and 34 monophonic buzzer tones) "
Is that too much for features ?
Mobile phone cameras suck compared to real digital cameras. Mobile phone MP3 players suck compared to real mp3 players. Mobile phone games suck compared to real handheld games consoles. Mobile phone applications suck compared to real applications. Web-browsing sucks compared to real web browsers. Mobile phone ringtones suck compared to real music. Mobile phone vibrating alarms suck compared to a real vibr.. Well, anyway, you get the point. But, and it's a J-Lo sized but, it does mean people who would not normally use these technologies may well like them and then go out and buy the 'real' thing. Unfortunately I am a geek and therefore already have a digital camera, MP3 player, games console, palmtop, web browser and battery powered marital toys. All I want from a phone is a phone dammit. The phone manufacturers have been so busy jumping on the bandwagon that they didn't bother to look where it was going. When it goes over the cliff I just hope it takes their hideous polyphonic ringtones with them.
~ Better a freak than a sheep. ~
That EEtimes article missed out one set of people who will never get sucked into the black hole: Battery makers. - an absolute prerequesite for anything to do with portable electronics, particularly where RF is concerned... Build a better battery - you do that and you will never need to worry about anything ever again...
I don't believe that the current trend of providers giving away phones as "hooks" to sign up for service will have much of a future. Here in Europe, the system is almost entirely based on pre-paid phone cards. There are no contracts, no commitments (of course, if you want to sign a contract, you can, but most people don't). This means if you have no money, you just can't make calls. Its much more inexpensive.
But you do have to buy the phone outright. I got my old motorola for $15. No features, but I hate cell phones so it works for what I need. The cell phone market will trend AWAY from contracts and commitments, and toward specialization, until we finally have an all-in-one communicator which includes all current (and probably future) forms of communication.
-Dave
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
I want a phone... just a phone.. I don't want a gameboy... or camera.. or PDA... I don't care about whether or not I can surf the internet from my phone. Quite frankly, I don't see what that is so "cool" in so many peoples' opinions. I tried it once - surfing the web on this little tiny screen - just a bunch of text links that I could barely even read - and don't get me started on the keypad interface and trying to type. GAH! Why "texting" is so cool escapes me, as well as how nouns somehow become verbs. Just give me a goddamn phone. I hope I never lose the one I have because before long, all you will be able to buy is a swiss army phone with phone, camera, gameboy, wifi, PDA, can opener, fish scaler, paint scraper, laser tissue zapper, garage door opener, toilet paper dispenser, and sharpie all built in.. .
If you walked past a dozen shops on the way to work every day, and had to enter every single shop, scan through each one's price list, and keep an eye out for things you like, you would be pretty tired before you even entered the office in the morning. Not to mention, you would potentially need to leave for work a whole half an hour earlier, in order to have the time to do this.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Just to add to the parent's comment about the death spiral, Nokia is already doing the higher end (than Apple would). Check 'em out:
:-P
www.vertu.com
Dandy features like a one-button 24/7 global consierge service included, but otherwise surprisingly simple gadgets. Regardless, the platinum model sets you back a cool GBP 17,050. The merely gold plated models are a little cheaper...
Yep, these are made by Nokia. Or more precisely, the technology is Nokia, but it's a separate business unit designing, assembling, and distributing these. I've read some articles on Finnish (dead tree) mags about these; Google maybe gets more. All in all, they have kept a surprisingly low profile! Maybe the celebs and filthy rich buying these don't want any association with the phones of common people
I have been thinking for a while now that mobiles are becoming more and more like the ubiqitous terminals people carry round with them in Iain (M) Bank's Culture. In the Culture, Terminals are a lifeline which no-one leave home without, albeit perhaps for safety reasons rather than the other uses of the devices (screens, recorders, light-source, etc, etc.). Anyone else had similar thoughts?
Batman: "Slake your thirst. You'll have worse than a parched sensation when we're through with you!"
The market for digicams won't be eaten up by cell phones. It's like comparing an instamatic pos camera with a Nikon F4. Cellphones have low res webcams built in, not much more.
The point of a phonecam is to be there, all the time. PDA, iPod, digicam might or might not come with me on any given trip, but the phone is something I'm guaranteed to have at all times. If something I want a picture of shows up while I'm out buying milk, those 4 megapixels won't do a damn thing for me.
market that is shrinking into a single commodity gadget
It is amazing to me that a device that has so much opportunity for differentiation and amazing opportunity for innovation that it is so quickly turning into a commodity. Bluetooth, cameras, pda's , Internet, and who knows what else is all possible, yet to most people a phone is just a phone. Nobody has been able to successfully sell features in a phone. Well except customizable colors from nokia. But that was 5 years ago. So I am curious why is a platform with so much innovation going into it becoming a comodity? And what would be a must have feature that would get you to pay a premium for a phone. Keep in mind you can probably find a bluetooth, Internet, camera phone with a plan for ~$50. What would be something new that would get you paying ~$250?
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
This is slashdot, I would have awaited the article to end like this:
"[..] that is shrinking into a single commodity gadget, the communicator."
The cell phone companies clearly blew an opportunity when they initially treated the hardware as a loss leader. It's hard to get that genie back in the bottle. People today will pay for a crap flash MP3 player or low-to-medium-end digital camera, but balk at paying a premium for a mobile phone with loads of features.
Since people (generally) can't keep their hardware if they switch providers, they don't love/value their hardware. They expect that they'll have to switch plans next year and that they'll have to have a new phone at that time. That, as much as anything but the breakage rate on devices that, frankly, we abuse, is why people don't think an investment of cash in an uberphone is going to be worth it in the long term.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
But when I buy cellular service I just want one thing in my phone, a freaking phone.
:)
I dont care if it surfs the web, why do I need content if I'm not at home?
I dont care if i can get Brittany Spears ring tones, WTF is wrong with a standard ring?
I dont care if the display is monchrome or color
I dont care if it has Grand Turismo as the video game, or even if it has games.
I dont care if it has gps, if you dont know where you are your fscked anyways.
All these things are not gadgets, they are gimmicks. It is an effort by manufacturers to seperate a fool from his money.
To all the fools taken in, thatnks for increasing my marketshare.
For the record my cell, is a LG TM510 and it does the job it was intended, for getting and sending phone calls.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
I don't really want a combination mobile phone/(pda|camera|gps|video game|food processor). What I really want is a mobile phone that works well, a digital camera that works well, a pda that works well, etc., and I want them to talk to each other in useful ways.
I want my gps receiver to imprint a location on my digital photos. I want my PDA to access the internet wirelessly via my mobile. I want to dial my mobile using the address book on my pda. I want wireless access to maps for my gps. I want to be able to add and subtract devices from this group conveniently, to change my functions at will.
I don't want a half-arsed device that does a couple of these things poorly, and has a bulky form factor to boot.
I want my Personal Area Network!
--
bachiatari na torisetsu o yome!
My 6 months old Motorola just-plain cell phone, internal non-replacable battery, run just for 6 to 8 hours before starting beeping "low-charge".
Guess if I want to pack PDA, camera and phone in one single device.
The Model T lagging in sales behind New F150, some analysts cite lack of features as the cause.
Yep. In Japan, the wildly successful DoCoMo phones have sound quality that is metallic and barely acceptable compared to a nice old analog cell phone. People just don't know when they are getting the shaft.
What I hate about the providers is they know for a fact that this segment has a demand for hardware, i.e. the early adopters are definitely willing to pay premium for phone hardware. The Treo comes to mind. But they've concluded that: a. they want and know how push their services as its easy money and b. lock-in to their services will allow them to change rates as needed based on their competitors and trade group analysis--NOT based on THE CONSUMER. In the end, I see service plans eventually being regulated--hello, Mr. federal government...and the viaous cycle we jump into...
Also, when you have developer memberships like the one with SonyEricsson Core+ being $1000US on up + the premium price of a smartphone ($600-900US), it shuts out a lot of independent developers. And that arena is where the killer apps will be created, later to be exploited by the big guys (that's acceptable). Currently, spending a lot on development and then selling at basement prices to the service providers is putting you between a rock and a hard place--reason why I've temporarily jumped out of the mobile development industry :(
Everyone here on /. keeps whining about how they only want their phone to make calls. And everyone else keeps moderating this shit up. With the intent of getting some cheap karma, let me repeat the same boring lie.
A soundcard in my computer just makes it bigger/bulkier, no thanks. If I wanted a music player I would have bought a stereo, if I wanted to play movies, I would have bought a VCR, if I wanted to play games, I would go into arcades or buy a console. If I wanted to make cheap phone calls I would get a better long-distance contract, if I wanted to write a document, I would have bought an electric typewriter. And if I wanted to read news, I would have get a Reuters/Minitel/whatever terminal. Of course, if I wanted to read books, I could have gotten a microfilm reader. Did I miss anything? So, as it stands, computers are evil and have no realistic reason to ever be useful. It is stupid to include extra functionality in it, while it's obvious that separate devices are better.
Convinced? The same is true for the phones as well. While at the moment it makes sense to buy some separate devices, it will not last forever and everyone will benefit from convergence. Currently I use a cheap old phone that costed me 30 euros, but has great battery life, reception and voice quality. I also use an old Palm IIIxe and a new digital camera. I might get an MP3 player too. But this doesn't change the fact that in five years I will be extremely happy to replace all this great hardware with one small communicator device that will be better and cheaper.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
You mean, the tri-corder.
= 9J =
the way the market is setup on my part of the planet, the phone becomes obsolete when the customer changes phone companies.
if a phone could be useful, even after its not needed as a phone, then it will have value beyond the initial use.
some initial ideas would be:
1. proof of concept robotics processors, and communicators.
2. gps location devices that can take a picture of where you are at in case that should have some value.
3. data storage, and retrieval devices.
4. parallel processors for a bayowulf cluster.
5. 'walkee-talkee' devices at a large facility.
but all of these would be AFTER the initial sale of the device. what the manufactures need is a way to make more profit from their initial engineering investment. which brings up an interesting question. what were the profit, and sales numbers for these devices?
Add a phaser, and I'm sold!
They had a model like that for awhile, but in field use they had too many star fleet personnel accidently activating the phaser while it was pointed at their head;->
> we're in the gadget phase right now.
Right to the point !
When was the last time that you saw a digital watch with integrated pocket calculator ?
This was a big thing 15 years ago.
Now that the additional cost of integrating a calculator has dropped to 50 cent, nobody wants one any more.
I no longer have to carry around a Phone, PDA, MP3 Player, and Walkie Talkie?
Whatever, some guy out there will always want to have his tech toys be separate items and he'll have a bag o' clutter full of one function gizmos. But the rest of us who have busy lives, dress well, drive sports cars, and have virtually NO ROOM to hoarde our "Phat Loot" around we'll be happy to purchase and use all-in-one devices.
Thats why our work has a Xerox Scanner/Fax/Copier/Printer machine and at home I have an Epson Scanner/Fax/Copier/Printer as well.
Sure there is a printer out there that is only a printer and has 2400dpi instead of 1200dpi, but it's not what most people need.
Ave Molech Setting
I am sorry but even if your phone can make the best sound, by your estimate, everybody else' phone suck so you still hear lousy voice. No?
Your Qualcomm sounds good by basically not supporting decent compression. Which means that it wastes as much capacity as 2-3 modern phones. Which means that you are leeching capacity from the operator (who is too kind to stop supporting older phones, or doesn't care because there are too few leeches like you). And you keep complaining.
Meanwhile everyone enjoys much cheaper cellular service, albeit with a minor drop in quality. As for you, happy piggybacking.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Who's whining? Me because you disagree with me? That's what I thought. So typical.
/. if you can't handle it.
I'm just stating my opinion, which is what this forum is about, so you can go cry in the corner and stay away from
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
All I need is a simple phone that works well and handgun to kill all the idiots who talk on the phone while they drive cars, are in restaurants and other public places, and in general are just rude and stupid "Obliviots".
See my journal, I write things there
You mean you can't make money by buying a business from somewhere else and sitting back while someone else does everything? What ever happened to pushing up profits by buying all the means of production from overseas?
The guys who research, design and make cell phones, the guys in China, do quite well I hear. It's the pure consumers, the Motorolas, who are hurting.
over here in the uk we have (though i think it may be changeing atm) a simple system
the royal mail has a virtually monopoly on letters which is kept up by setting a minimum charge on anything sent by courior services (70 pence iirc)
this means there is compertition in parcel and high seepd delivery while still maintaining the efficiancy of one postman down your street for ordinary mail
The 1100 feature set makes me believe it's still just a crappy new generation phone. Not only because the extra things a normal phone doesn't need, but also because just being new it probably has a more ruthless channel compression, meaning a worse voice quality, and a latest generation one-chip RX/TX which means bad reception range.
I am really pissed off by the fact that old cell phones (3-4 years old) run circles around the newer phones in terms of phone function. To add any new feature (Distribution lists and concatenated text (SMS) messaging/Date and time screensavers/Built-in alarm and reminders/Stopwatch and countdown timer/Full-size animated screensavers/ Two built-in games)), they had somehow to sacrifice quality of the main functions. My experience is limited to the Nokia phones over a span of about 4 years, but everything I read makesme believe the same thing happens to all cellphone makers.
Serban
Do any in Sydney do that, as I've never noticed them before.
Is a full-fledged computer that's small enough to fit in a large pocket with a keyboard and a high bandwidth cell connection. It should have a headphone jack that supports a set of earphones with one of those dangling mics. That way, it's a full-fledged palmtop computer that can be used as a phone without being forced into that "phoney" form factor.
And all I have to do is wait until it's available. heh.
Retired from software... maybe. Sort of.
Yes, it's so true. My old "lollipop" qualcomm phone was so good sounding and clear that it was just as bit as good as a land line. The new phones all sound like garbage.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
See TI's OMAP 2 amongst others. Plenty of people are putting 3D acceleration into high end cellphone chips.