ORLANDO, Fla.-If smartphones aren’t the proverbial “overnight success” that results from years of toil, they’ve acquired added cachet in the industry because the players are focused on growth.
Operators seek to sell more data, handset vendors seek healthier margins, operating-system providers seek market share. With the industry maturing-replacement handsets now account for two-thirds of global, annual sales-the seekers are serious.
A good deal of this seeking is focused on smartphones. And now, usage meters on devices in the hands of end users provide behavioral data on real-world use, bolstering the notion that the devices can deliver on sought-after promises of growth.
Just a year ago, attendees of CTIA’s annual Smartphone Summit heard evangelism tinged with a degree of earnestness.
This year, the tone of the summit’s panelists sounded more like a confident mantra. The segment has the industry’s attention.
Today, smartphones represent nearly one-third of handsets sold in the Asia-Pacific region, about 13 percent in Western Europe and 6 percent in the United States, according to Gartner Research. Panelists cited price point, form factor and ease-of-use as major drivers in smartphones’ rapid ascendancy.
“This is the year of the thin, cheap smartphone,” Cliff Raskind, a wireless enterprise analyst with Strategy Analytics, told the summit audience.
Despite the practical reasons for paying attention to smartphone news, it also helps when presenters exhibit some kinetic energy; most analysts tend to run through their slides in washing-the-truck mode.
In that sense, Mark Donovan, senior analyst at M:Metrics, drew the most audience reaction as the summit got underway by expounding with a bit of verve.
Donovan announced his firm’s new Meter Direct product, which cracks open a window onto end-users’ behavior in a typical day. The mobile Web audience peaks between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., while multimedia messaging goes wild from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m., for instance.
“That’s where data usage is ‘off the hook,'” Donovan said, gesturing animatedly at data on the room’s screen.
Donovan said advanced features correlate with data usage. In other words, as browsers improve, browsing increases. With greater computing power and memory, more applications get downloaded. Smartphones’ advanced features lift usage by 800 percent, he said.
Donovan made sure to mention Apple Inc.’s iPhone, which has garnered plenty of industry discussion.
“Apple’s good at figuring out what consumers want,” Donovan said. “It’ll be very disruptive, and that’s good.”
Blurred lines
The devices are morphing, imperiling easy definitions. Just as the term “smartphone” often defies consensus, “handheld” is becoming a looser term. Enter HTC, which announced two devices-the “Advantage” and the “Shift”-at the enterprise segment that fall between smartphones and laptops. The latter runs Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Vista OS (and offers a 30-gigabyte hard drive), in an effort to mimic the desktop experience-an area HTC is pursuing, said Todd Achilles, head of the vendor’s U.S. operations.
With a grim profit outlook for manufacturers as handset prices continue their decline, Raskind said smartphones offer healthier margins. In the enterprise, in-building use of wireless is a major trend that may affect how feature sets are offered. Individually purchased handsets remain a major part of the enterprise market-a “conundrum” for IT managers, Raskind said. The “next 100 million” users of e-mail represent an avidly pursued market, Research In Motion Ltd. having largely secured the first 100 million.
The mantra that smartphones are a happening market segment is beginning to sound less like evangelism and more like a value proposition.
