Making Sense of the Cellphone Landscape

Charlie Stross has a blog post up that tries to make sense of the mobile phone market and where it's going: where Apple, Google, and the cellcos fit in, and what the point of Google's Nexus One may be. "Becoming a pure bandwidth provider is every cellco's nightmare: it levels the playing field and puts them in direct competition with their peers, a competition that can only be won by throwing huge amounts of capital infrastructure at their backbone network. So for the past five years or more, they've been doing their best not to get dragged into a game of beggar-my-neighbor, by expedients such as exclusive handset deals... [Google intends] to turn 3G data service (and subsequently, LTE) into a commodity, like Wi-Fi hotspot service only more widespread and cheaper to get at. They want to get consumers to buy unlocked SIM-free handsets and pick cheap data SIMs. They'd love to move everyone to cheap data SIMs rather than the hideously convoluted legacy voice stacks maintained by the telcos; then they could piggyback Google Voice on it, and ultimately do the Google thing to all your voice messages as well as your email and web access. (This is, needless to say, going to bring them into conflict with Apple. ... Apple are an implicit threat to Google because Google can't slap their ads all over [the App and iTunes stores]. So it's going to end in handbags at dawn... eventually.)"

Comments

Re:I Just Did...

[sznupi]

Yes, and no mention of Nokia in the summary (and quite dismissive in TFA).

It's not only about Maemo, it's about a phone manufacturer that has 40% of total market (of which smartphones are what, 15 - 20% now? Why do you talk only about them?). Over 50% of smartphone market. The only phone manufacturer that keeps itself comfortable financially (others are either struggling or mobile phones aren't their main product; except RIM perhaps, but they sell corporate service rather than phones). Only one their product (1100) is the most popular consumer electronic device in history, it vastly outsold families (like "iPod") from other manufacturers. A year ago there were 3 billion phones in the world, now there are around 4.6, and it's largely thanks to Nokia. Phones, companies which enable this kind of uptake is what's defining 21st century landscape.