Last week was the first post summer mobility conference of EBG. As usual, a good roaster of speaker with representatives of key players (Microsoft, Nokia, Orange) and some start-ups (Goojet). Market data provided by Comscore / Mmetrics.
The mood was pretty upbeat which feels good in the current economy. The elephant in the room was Apple - no representative in panel ... - with speakers trying to either capitalize, explain or compete against the Iphone tectonic shift.
Some interesting figures provided by Comscore :
- 77% of Iphone users have apps on their phone (vs 36% for other smartphone users)
- 85% of them browse the web (vs 52%)
There is clearly some self fulfilling prophecy as operators have pushed unlimited data plan with iphone first. Only recently have they started promoting these plans for other smartphones. Getting hit by a 100€ data cost over a month for browsing makes you rethink your usage pattern! (I can testify on that one)
Nicolas Petit from Microsoft was very upbeat about the soon to come launch of Windows Phone (aka Windows Mobile 6.5). Based on everything I have read and heard from Microsoft people, it is difficult to get as excited as he is. The 6.5 is not expected to get even close to iphone ease of use. That could be with Windows Mobile 7 in a year or so. More than 3 years behind Apple... On the positive side for Nicolas, France is where WM has the highest market share with 26% of smartphone.
From the Nokia side, Bertrand Dupuis was covering the different strategies and initiatives. Much expectations on the N900 on Maemo. That could overcome the slight disappointment on the N97 that has not been the expected Iphone killer. OVI has been somewhat slow to take up. Let's wait and see how it goes.
Back to Apple and the appstore. The 2bn downloads has just been passed recently. That means the current trend is close to 11 million downloads a day! However the top 20 downloaded applications are all free. The major paying category are mobile games far ahead of anything else. That makes me wonder even more why Nokia was never able to pull it off with Ngage which started earlier with the right games.
To conclude, I fully agree with Guillaume Decugis (Goojet) analysis on the importance of the iphone. Why is the iphone so important and so good? yes, the handset is good, the data plans offered are the right ones but more importantly it is a great distribution channel. It improves all steps of the buying process on mobile (discovery, payment, delivery, recurrent usage). In the mobile space, we were missing a great mobile only distribution channel, reasonably cheap and not fully dependent on the operators. Apple has shown the way. Let's see what Microsoft and Nokia will do.
Frederic Halley
It is quite rare to see two of their major customers to merge!
Posted by: used computers | Saturday, 06 February 2010 at 08:03