The Island of California

Today on Jaiku, Stefan posted two interesting articles, one about people accessing Engadget from their (i)phones, and the other about the perils of refusing to change in the marketplace. Together, I think these articles make an interesting point about the perception of the mobile market from both the manufacturer and the customer points of view.

Although it only gets a brief mention in the first article, and it still has a tiny percentage of the market, there is no doubt that the Apple iPhone is the darling of the U.S. mobile market. Market dominance shifts at the drop of a hat nowadays, where development can be done on computers instead of costly labs, and just-in-time manufacturing is a reality.

Nokia overtook Motorola with a technology choice. Sure, there was branding and what-not, but Motorola's (and indeed the greater US market) decision to wilfully blind itself to the emerging GSM standard, giving Nokia a huge opening. This technology shift is behind-the-scenes as far as the users are concerned and what it amounts to in the US is the belief that to change networks, one must change their phone. Half the time this is true, as the networks are not compatible, but as long as you switch with compatible technologies (from AT&T to Tmobile) you can continue using the same (unlocked) phone.
Samsung added cameras to the phone. Sure, they sucked, but people loved them and used them for all sorts of goofy things. This opening, left by the other phone manufacturers was a customer-facing one, but it was obvious. The phone user could see the camera lens on the phone and know what it was for.

Now look at the other article, where a (technophile-centric, to be sure) website is reporting that over 95% of its mobile visitors arrive via some sort of iPhone. That is amazing, especially considering most phones can browse the web just fine. What this tells me is that mobile phone manufacturers and networks (other than AT&T, who has paired itself with the iPhone) need to do a much better job at informing their users on how to use their mobile devices effectively.

The "Island of California" (neat history lesson in the "perils" article) here is the belief that a phone is just a device to talk to people and take crappy pictures. If you want e-mail, you have to get a blackberry, and if you want to browse the web with your phone, you need an iPhone. Of course, this is all crap. Most phones can do both these things with varying degrees of success, but the experience is better than you might think. Go ahead, give it a try, and for e-mail, Google's gmail app will install and makes e-mail on your phone easier than a blackberry. Or, Exchange users, try Nokia's Mail for Exchange. There are a number of solutions out there, but the problem is the users are not made aware of them. The users think the phone is a device used for talking, rather than the mobile computer it is, and the networks have either bought into this, or at the very least, perpetuate it with little effort to change perceptions.

I suppose releasing a new device is the simple answer, but the simple fact is that -other than the nice touch screen- Apple's iPhone is not that good. A phone and your wallet are the two things that go pretty much everywhere with you, and the phone -a computer in its own right- has the ability to tell a story, and to share that story with those you love. The newest iPhone can start to do this, but the Nokia N95 has been able to do this for two years. And now, they have a number of other handsets that can do all this, for a lot less money than one would end up paying to AT&T and Apple.

Leave the island and take a good look a the Nseries and Eseries models, plus some interesting Samsung models, and you can get a good idea what you are missing. Without the high price tag and lock-in that you will get from jumping in with the iPhone crowd.