{"id":214,"date":"2009-03-03T22:50:00","date_gmt":"2009-03-03T22:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vhirsch.wordpress.com\/2009\/03\/03\/recession-where-asks-the-smartphone\/"},"modified":"2012-04-25T14:53:16","modified_gmt":"2012-04-25T13:53:16","slug":"recession-where-asks-the-smartphone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/2009\/03\/03\/recession-where-asks-the-smartphone\/","title":{"rendered":""Recession? Where?" Asks the Smartphone…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I previously looked at recession-busting sectors<\/a> and products<\/a>, and here’s more proof that not all is bad: two reports point out that smartphones<\/a> continue to outperform the market rather significantly, recording growth<\/a> figures of 25.9% year-on-year in Europe; the growth for all of 2007 vs 2008 was even more impressive: they grew by 36.1%. In the US, smartphones increased their share<\/a> of the overall mobile phone market from 12% in Q4\/2007 to 25% a year later. Good numbers!<\/p>\n

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Half of the (US) smartphones now come with touchscreens, with 70% “instead” (?) having a QWERTY keyboard (my best guess is that this includes phones with a slide-out keyboard, such as the T-Mobile G1<\/a> or the Sony Ericsson Xperia<\/a>).<\/div>\n
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So how come? The iPhone but also other devices like Blackberries<\/a>, Nokia’s higher-end phones (e.g. the N95<\/a>) have powerfully demonstrated that the use of a mobile for things other than using voice and SMS (and take the occasional snap with a so-so camera) is not the end of all things. The overall feature sets of smartphones but – possibly more importantly still – the overall user experience is generally significantly better on a fairly comprehensive scale, and this – in particular in times of recession – would suggest a much higher value for money (“if I pay \u00a350, then I get 4x in value of what I would otherwise have.”): they now all contain decent cameras, enough storage to work as a decent MP3 player (or in Apple’s case even as an iPod…), they do e-mail, connect more effortlessly to the Internet, play more fulfilling games and generally provide a much richer content experience (did I just hear “widgets”?).<\/div>\n
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For the content industry, this is good news: more powerful devices are generally easier to address and provide a better route to transport brands and production values across to the small screen. The iPhone has shown (see e.g. here<\/a> and here<\/a>) that users DO use their phones for all sorts of things if one makes it easy for them. Therefore, the smarter the phone, the higher the consumption. Good, good!<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I previously looked at recession-busting sectors and products, and here’s more proof that not all is bad: two reports point out that smartphones continue to outperform the market rather significantly, recording growth figures of 25.9% year-on-year in Europe; the growth for all of 2007 vs 2008 was even more impressive: they grew by 36.1%. In […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[484],"tags":[1350,79,228,310,471,561,595,605,626,657,734],"class_list":["post-214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oem","tag-apple","tag-blackberry","tag-g1","tag-iphone","tag-nokia","tag-rim","tag-smartphones","tag-sony-ericsson","tag-t-mobile","tag-touchscreen","tag-xperia"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paSwZv-3s","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=214"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1718,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214\/revisions\/1718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}