The $85 Smartphone and the imminent extinction of non-smartphones
asymco.com
asymco.com
Non-smartphones aren't going anywhere. Not until smartphones are given away for free and you can pick one up without being forced to add a data plan.
If I ran an American cellular phone carrier, I would be remiss not to push my customers toward using phones with higher profit margins for me. If I needed to get customers to use smartphones by giving them away (with the realization that I would make the money back over the course of their contract), so be it.
Consumers may want non-smartphones, but if their carriers are giving them incentives to buy smartphones, I am not sure that mandatory data plans will prevent them from succumbing.
Based on that, I'm pretty sure we'll be seeing smartphones offered at roughly the same subsidized price point as a dumbphone by 2012, and I'd actually call that a pretty conservative estimate; they could definitely show up in the first half of 2011. Giving someone a $100-200 phone with a 100mb data cap is nothing, provided you can upsell a reasonable number of them to a 1GB data cap by the end of their contract.
I could also see data/text-only phones showing up with 250MB-1GB caps in the near future, possibly rolled in with some VOIP app that bills voice as data. (It's an accident of a minimally competitive marketplace with minimal regulation that we haven't seen these already.)
I average about 200-300mb/mo. If I could get a significantly cheaper rate in exchange for a 1gb cap, I'd probably do it.
As for those bemoaning the demise of feature phones, that too is inevitable. It suits the usage pattern of some. Also cheap phones will live for a long time due to markets in developing countries where price is a more important factor.
Also for those saying the data plans and service costs are a barrier: the US is a mobile backwater (compared to any other OECD nation). Service is woeful, costs are ludicrous... It's simply ridiculous. Being charged for receiving calls? Receiving SMSs?!? Huge data costs. Lack of data Goering (eg a small woeful 100-200mb plan and then an unlimited or 2-5gb plan with a huge step up and nothing in between).
In the US you're paying realistically $60/month minimum (more if you want to tether!). In Australia I'd pay as little as half that for superior coverage and service quality. In Asia it'd probably be even less.
I expect in the developed world dmartphones will outsell feature phones within 3 years.
I've been looking into US contracts in preperation for a move and was shocked at the rates people are willing to pay.
Compare this to France for example where the plans easily exceeds 40 euros for "unlimited" data plan where you're not allowed to download more than 500Mb...
Now, this is not all of Asia, it's mostly because China is still not a very expensive place to live (although the price of housing in Shanghai is starting to look more and more like any international capitals...). When I lived in Japan, I paid 60$ for a phone subscription with 3 hours calls and no data plan (this was 4 years ago) and France is not much better than the US, plans easily exceeds 40 euros for "unlimited" data plan where you're not allowed to download more than 500Mb and with this you don't get much hours of call either... It's true though that the US is one of the only country I know where you pay to receive calls and to receive SMS.
The same thing with non-smartphones (dumb-phones, feature-phones, whatever you want to call them). They fill a purpouse for a lot of people. Not only in developing countries, but with people that don't need a smart OS.
To be fair, outside of apps, most dumbphones can do a lot of things a smartphone can, but people don't know or don't want to use those features.
It's not for everybody, but it's a very visible sign that there is a lot of air left to be let out of high end mobile.
- Most part of the world are still fairly not developed to support the data requirements of smartphones, especially in Africa and Asia.
- There is still a need for non-camera/non-storage/non-smartphone in certain defense/government related jobs.
- A large part of the population is over 35 ages of years, most of them uses a non-smartphone, they use the phone just to make calls most of the time.
* Most of the population in developed countries, much less the world, do not work in jobs that require their phones to not have cameras.
* Do older people not have smartphones because they do not want/need them, or because of the perception that it cost too much?
I think the point of the article is that as smartphones begin to cost the same as regular phones, we will see a dramatic rise in adoption.
ps: I own a iPhone 4 which come heavily subsidized with a 2 yr data plan and a $35 non-smartphone which I bought, without any long term contract.
Also, another issue with smartphone is the battery life. They drain out really fast, finding a charger recharge a mobile twice a day just dun make sense in quite a lot of places in the world.
Till these issues are resolved, and unless countries are willingly to upgrade of their telecommunication infrastructure, my guess is that smartphones and non-smartphones are likely to coexist for a quite number of years. Sure, developed countries will continue to upgrade to something like Japan and South Korea.
The contract freebie "dumbphones" today are better than the $300 phones from 5 years ago. The oldschool Nokia candybars that placed calls and played Snake aren't even carried in stores anymore. Current smartphones may not dominate in the next two years, but at some point, carriers will just stop offering the current crop of dumbphones and the freebies will provide feature parity with current smartphones.
You would be surprised. Where you can find a cellphone network, you will find a data network. Data is often a place where carriers know they can make money.
What is more, a lot of the equipment is newer (i.e. not as much legacy equipment) since a lot of the networks are new.
For starters, it just works. A good friend has a Motorola Droid X. Android is a useless piece of shit -- his alarm clock keeps crashing with NPEs. This was one of the premier android phones when he bought it, and he left it completely stock. I, along with many friends of my generation, use our phones as our alarm clock and watch, so this is obviously pretty useless.
Second, my three year old motorola krzr is robust. It's been face down in my pants pocket while sliding down 500 feet of ice when I wiped out on some really icy moguls last year. That shattered the front. It's survived prolly 100+ impacts in my coat while snowboarding, though none as brutal as the above. The paint is peeling off the entire back. It's dented, prolly from a different fall snowboarding. It fell out of my coat pocket and hung out in the snow for 8 hours next to our car last year whence I fortunately saw it before driving off. Through all of it, it still makes / receives calls and makes / receives texts. I'm pretty sure I'd kill a smartphone inside 5 snowboarding days, tops. I still get 30 hours of standby battery life, though I'll probably have to replace the battery soon. My friends w/ iphones and the like seem to rush between charges, and last weekend at the ski house, there was a rush to find the one person who brought an iphone charger. I didn't charge all weekend.
tl;dr -- dumb phones are robust, have great battery life, and generally work well at their limited functionality
Now I have the Americanized version which has a color screen which hurts the eyes, terrible software, and a cheap feeling case.
About the only actual benefit I can think of using a smartphone for is the ability to look up maps/directions.
Fortunately, I can easily solve the map/direction problem by: 1) looking up directions ahead of time (which I'd do with or without a smartphone) and 2) using a GPS which I already own that costs me $0/month
So there you go: a use case that doesn't involve maps or directions.
* even though I lived in San Francisco few years, I still find maps great and use them frequently * public transport directions within the city * reading books on kindle while on bart * listening to my vast music collection while on bart * yelp to check if an unknown restaurant is good and find nearby places * check twitter * make photos and save them instantly with instagram
It's also a robust PDA, MP3 player, syncs with my Kindle, a [weak] game system, a decent enough camera for quick and dirty snapshots and a great source of information on the go. I also use it for dozens of other things you can't do with a dumbphone which may or may not apply to you (scientific calculator, lookup tables, brewing calculator, recipe management, backup USB stick, etc). It has supplanted my need to carry a laptop in many situations too, and when it hasn't, it has provided tethered internet access.
It may not outperform dedicated devices for each task, but to carry all of those devices you'd need a backpack of gadgetry with you at all times. The extra cost per month for me is easily outweighed by the convenience of having all those options in my pocket at all times, and cancelling my home phone basically negated the extra cost (although cost isn't really a factor, it's about the same as a decent meal in a restaurant).
It starts with the phone, the iPod, the watch, the point-and-shoot camera, the Flip video camera, the GPS unit, the compass, the pocket LED flashlight, the universal remote, an entire drawer full of city maps, the deluxe HP scientific calculator that I've had since grad school, the wireless communications unit for my laptop, the pedometer, the metronome, the tuner, and the pitchpipe. To say nothing of the pocket paper notebook.
Now, thanks to the Kindle app, my library is shrinking.
My portable audio recorder's days are numbered. (The stumbling block: when you're recording audio you really want to be able to do it for an hour or two at a time, without stopping for anything, so you don't really want to do it with your smartphone. What if you have to take a call, or tune an instrument, or do a calcuation on your H-P calculator simulator in the middle of recording? But these things are getting so cheap that soon I'll just be able to buy a dedicated one for audio recording. Or maybe it'll just multitask well enough to record audio in the background, with the mics attached by a cord.)
The cost of the smartphone is still too high, and the durability too low, for it to quite replace every single one of my paper field guides for birds and animals -- you want to be able to use the thing in the rain, while standing in the mud, with one hand, without flinching -- but that's almost there too.
Probably does already, have you tried?
I'd suspect this is why you're being downvoted. Smartphones have many more uses than 'looking up directions.'
If a smart phone was even more reliable and had greater battery life etc, would it make much difference to you?
That's disruption. I guess there's a real question as to whether smart phones will keep becoming more powerful, thus keeping battery life short (like Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away). But certainly, there could be smart phones with today's performance, but with the same reliability and battery life as current dumb phones, it's just a matter of when (prolly not in 3 months!)
That said, I wouldn't recommend a touchscreen smartphone if you need durability and robustness. There are a couple of good non-touchscreen models on the market, but they are being squeezed out.
I'm using a Sony Ericsson J132; it comes with Alarm, SMS, Reminders, Birthday, Calendar, Timer, Stopwatch, Calculator, Torch, Radio and a GREAT BATTERY life.
Radio comes FOC without a need for data plan or online streaming. :P Batter is able to last me 2-3 days, I dun think my iPhone or HTC can do that yet now.
Suggestions? (I'm on tmobile)
I would love to buy an iPod Touch that works as dumb cellphone since it will save me the hassle of carrying two devices. Puzzling why there is no such device from the biggies.
And the touch is only $200 because it doesn't include all of that hardware. They're much thinner. I bet they'd be a bit more if you put that stuff in there...
I would love to be proven wrong that there is some objective reason why the cellphone chip and a GPS chip would add $400 to a device (standalone cellphone and GPS together will cost less than $100, so the bare chips should be much less).
We probably have the smallest operator margins (and/or most network overcapacity) in the EU. The US mobile communication prices seem unbelievable, esp. when everything related to tech is usually considerably more expensive here.
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Main_Page http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo_FreeRunner
What -ever happened with that? or the dream of ULTRA CHEAP laptops?