The theme starts becoming lame, I know (and I herewith promise to look for new semi-funny references to Steve Jobs). However: if the world’s largest operator by subscribers changes its dress culture, that is to say swaps from a tightly controlled walled garden to a free store concept, that surely merits this. So, without further ado: China Mobile plans to launch its very own AppStore. Its Chairman & CEO Wang Jianzhou (who was, I think, not sighted in Mr Job’s favourite garment) announced this at the GSMA Mobile Asia Congress in Macau. Now, with a whopping 436.1m subscribers, this opens fairly interesting vistas for mobile content – if, yes if, one can hit Chinese taste, that is. They specifically cite Apple’s success with its iPhone as a trigger for them to do it. Truly impressive that a company so big would move so quickly.
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According to research firm Nielsen (whose mobile arm incorporates what was previously known as Telephia), more than 20m household in the US (0r 17%) have ditched landlines in favour of mobile (or as they would call it cell) phones. It signifies a rather steep increase.
– U.S. cord cutters tend to have lower income-levels—59 percent have household incomes of $40,000 or less.
Smaller households, with just one or two residents, are more likely to cut the cord than larger households.
– Moving or changing jobs are the biggest life events associated with cord cutting: 31 percent of cord cutters moved prior to cord cutting and 22 percent changed jobs.
– Wireless substitutors tend to use their mobile phones more than their landline peers, 45 percent more per phone, but still save an average $33 per month in a household of one subscriber, less $6.69 for each additional wireless resident, when they cut the cord.
Now, what I do find surprising is not the fact but rather the apparent reasons given for “wireless substitution”. It is cost…On data, Nielsen also speculates:Now this I understand, and the study shows indeed that wireless-only consumers use the mobile Internet more than twice as often as their primary access to the web than the good old-fashioned rest (11% vs 5%). It will be interesting to see how quick this substitution works though for the masses: people with money tend to retain their landlines, which suggests that a wireless-only solution is still less convenient. With hardware (computers, phones, etc) becoming increasingly able to access multiple wireless standards (i.e. via the mobile networks as well as WiFi, etc), this factor might however be evaporating relatively quickly.“Landline wireless substitution may just be the start. […] As wireless data networks improve and speeds become more and more competitive with broadband, some consumers may cut the Internet cord, as well, favoring wireless data cards and other access through carrier networks.”
Application vendor Handango published its 2008 Yardstick report, which one might slag off as some (rather shameless) PR on content consumption on “smartphones”. According to this,
[t]he Games category leaped from fourth place at year-end 2007 into the second spot behind the Entertainment category.
It also reports that
‘Ringtones’ was the most searched term in the first half of 2008, and ‘games’ was a near second, up from number three in the second half of 2007. ‘Themes,’ ‘GPS,’ ‘weather,’ and ‘music’ also make the list of the top 10 searches.”
Surprisingly then, in none of the measured platforms (RIM, Palm, WinME, Symbian) does a single game make it into the top 10… Now, does that mean that places 11-98 were all games? Hmm…
I then asked myself what the heck is a smartphone? Mobile advertising guys Admob note that
[t]here is no standard industry definition of a smartphone. We [Admob] automatically classify a device as a smartphone when it has an identifiable operating systen and continually update our list as new phones with advanced functionality enter the market.
Globally, Nokia rules the pack: the top 4 smartphones are all from the Finnish giant (Admob numbers), and all N-Series devices, namely the N70, N95, N73 and N80. In the US however, there is not a single Nokia phone (or rather, as they would put it, “multimedia device”) amongst the top 20 smartphones. According to Handango, 2 Blackberry devices (8830 and Curve) were the top 2 devices, according to Admob (not representative), it was the Blackberry 8100, the Palm Centro and the Blackberry 8300). Globally, these don’t really feature: Nokia has a market share of a whopping 62.4%!
The more interesting facts are unfortunately from confidential information from the likes of M:Metrics. Without giving too much away, the top devices for games consumption (downloaded) are the iPhone and Nokia’s N95, both with quite some margin ahead of everyone else (and the iPhone with quite some margin ahead of Nokia’s performance monster). This does indeed show that a powerful handset (or at least one with powerful UI) promotes content consumption, which is, I’m afraid to say, old news indeed.
So, no news then?
Funny. Sometimes a theme somewhat haunts you… After I have posted about the demise of Tira Wireless (and added some alternative views on the labyrinth that is platforms and handset fragmentation; also go and revisit my posts on the same topic here and here), today we can read that it will all get worse (or maybe not). I bet they read my recent post on the issue… 😉
“Hey, we noticed you tried downloading content to your T-610. You may not have realized that this phone is utterly outdated and will give you no joy when playing games. We would like to offer you a discounted upgrade to the brand-spanking new N76/ W880i/ Pearl/ iPhone/ Viewty/… and your life would be so much cooler. We are confident that you would then also have more luck with the girls/boys… Best. Your carrier”
Follo
wing the iTunes success story, we could see it coming, I guess, and indeed after a mere 3 months of going live the mother of all black turtlenecks informs us that the Apple App Store rocketed past 100m downloads for iPhone and iPod. Impressive numbers! And another example how simplicity and a good eye for ease of use wins the day: put applications (games are apparently leading the pack, too, with no less than 700 of them [that’s nearly 25% of the total available]!) into one place where a) people can find them and b) it is easy to download, install and run them, and you are on to a winner (operators, listen to this!).
- There are 3,000 apps on the App Store, 600 of which are for free. Now, for what percentage of downloads these 20% are responsible for, we are not being told though…
- 90% of the apps are priced at less than $10 (this will include the 20% free ones, I guess). However nothing is said if it is $9.99 that is the prevalent price point or perhaps $0.99 a pop.
The App Store certainly is a success for Apple (in particular considering the relatively low number of devices that access the store, and this deserves our unreserved applause! The only thing is: it might just be that 90% of the downloads were of the unpaid kind and another 8% of the less-than-$3.00 kind, and that would mean that it is actually not such a great success for the developers hoping to make a buck from it (rather than only showing off the funky logo on investor presentations).
Mobile games blogger extraordinaire, Arjan Olsder, provided for a great guest post by Qualcomm games guru Mike Yuen, and it’s well worth a read! Mike addresses this most horrible of issues to mobile game developers that is called fragmentation or, in his words, “[t]he lack of platform and hardware standards continues to be a major inhibitor to mobile game growth in the United States [and elsewhere; ed.]. This diversity in development platforms (Android, BREW, Flash Lite, iPhone, Java, Linux, Symbian, WAP, Windows Mobile) and hardware configurations (display resolutions, RAM/heap memory size, processing and graphics power, audio formats, keypad and other input modes.”
Mike rightly points out that, “[i]n many cases, the costs associated with individualizing software builds to the particularities of each handset, operator and language account for more than half of the overall development budget for new game titles. It’s a simple, but important concept. If fewer resources were diverted to porting a title from handset to handset, operator to operator, more resources could be dedicated to advancing the development of new and innovative gaming concepts.”
He goes on to draw an interesting comparison to the Korean and Japanese markets where there are not as many handsets (and platforms) around and where consumers are more than twice as likely to download mobile games. He then goes on to look at market disruptors like Apple (iPhone anyone?) and others only to conclude, sadly, that “[m]obile gaming is in a state of flux – platform and hardware fragmentation has clouded the once blue sky of gaming’s future and positive disruptive products such as Apple’s iPhone have changed industry perception and consumer expectations about the future of the mobile gaming device. I’m not expecting us to reach consensus anytime soon. Fragmentation is an inherent element of the mobile industry and perhaps always will be.”
Now, is that really so? He is of course right in his analysis of the current environment. But does this really have to be like this? The mobile space suffers from too many very large companies with very large markets. And if this wasn’t enough, there’s two different groups of them, with diverging interests, namely operators (carriers) and handset manufacturers: the former want everyone to be on their network, the latter to be on their handsets. Both are more often than not big old molochs of companies with a lot of market power in their segments. However… the markets seem to gravitate (under consumer demand) towards a more open set-up: operators seem to be accepting the fact that they cannot reign their users into walled gardens forever (more and more resign to flat-rate data and open the mobile web to users) and OEMs seem to realize that they need awesome numbers of users to have a real impact and so most of them gravitate to more open platforms (or, in the case of Nokia, create them).
As most of the newer platforms appear to be based on C++ or siblings thereof (Symbian, UIQ, Linux, Android [yes, I know that they us a JVM], BREW, Win ME, etc), it would appear that a reduced complexity might be nigh. Not as easy as online, mind you, but light at the end of the tunnel nonetheless. And it makes sense as the current fragmentation isn’t really helping anyone: consumers grow frustrated with ever-changing platforms. They want cool content, not a proprietary operator-variant of cool content. Hope, my friends, there is hope!
Not really mobile but at least digital and interesting in any event: a news release has it that Apple‘s iTunes had overtaken mighty Wal-Mart as the US’ largest retailer of music. Best Buy was ranked third and Amazon.com and Target tied for the fourth spot in January and February, it is reported.
iTunes apparently sold more than 4 billion tracks since its launch in 2003. The survey counted every 12 digital downloads as one CD but excluded mobile music sales. Apple claims more than 50 million customers. This is a rather impressive development: They sold around 25m tracks in 2003, surpassed the 1bn mark only 3 years later and hit 3bn in July2007.