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The rise of the smart phone

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Posted By Neoco

I popped over to Nielsen’s colourful offices for an update on the mobile market developments and a cuppa last week. The hot topic of the seminar was the rise of the smart phone and how the latest figures show that the smart phones will indeed have a majority share of the market (at least in the US) by 2011. Thanks to the throngs of creative thinkers and developers around the globe there now seems to be few limits to what we can get our mobile phones to do for us. Long-gone are the days when you would have to sit tight and wait for next year’s model to come out before you could have any additional functionality on your device…

The key user group of the smart phone is the 25-34 year olds, with Nokia being the current market leader in the UK. However, Nokia fails when it comes to engagement much due to its limited online usage. They also continiously achieve fewer downloads than for instance the iPhone. Thanks to the highly integrated and often affordable Android phones (and again the US is leading this development) we can now see how the smart phones are reaching out further into the mass market. Huawei is one example of a brand no one had heard of (at least none of my friends!) until recently – they are launching a smart phone in the UK next month, which will be available on pay-as-you-go for £100. I’m sure this mass market approach will very much influence the market for apps.

Ed Kershaw rounded of his presentation with giving a summary of what he sees as the mobile market areas to watch in 2010 and going forwards:

1.     SMS advertising being re-born

2.     Location location location (based)

3.     The smart phones goes mass market (pushed by the world cup and 2012)

I would be interested to hear whether you agree with Ed on the above? Is ‘location based’ and ‘real time’ the future of all marketing? And what is your personal take on the Nokia (reach) versus iPhone (cool) situation?

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  • http://www.neoco.com/alex Alex Kilgour

    I agree that it is all going to be about location based apps, you have foursquare, gowalla, brightkite etc… all getting lots of funding. At the moment these apps are all about the iPhone so it will be interesting to see if Nokia can makes inroads into this area. It will be interesting to see what happens to the iphone when the new version of the OS is released and how that affects consumers.

  • http://www.neoco.com/igor Igor

    the iphone v. android v. nokia debate seems to be an everlasting one. a lot of people are convinced that android will overtake the iphone in popularity in a year or two (which seems like a reasonable suggestion simply because there is a larger variety of handsets and the prices are lower), and that nokia will catch up in the smartphone market (they’re developing changes to their operating system and market strategy to be more similar to apple as i understand it). so far there’s not been much to prove or disprove this that i’ve seen. i really think it’s a case of “wait and see”

    as for advertising/marketing – i agree that location based services are going to become more valuable. surely a user is more likely to be engaged with an ad if it is more relevant to where they are and what they are doing..? whereas sms… i really don’t see where this could go. smartphones can already read your emails and emails are far more captivating than sms; and with the uptake of push email, they’re almost as timely as sms nowadays. personally, i hate sms advertising. i do NOT want advertisers to know my phone number – i consider it to be much much more private than my email address

  • http://www.facebook.com/benn.achilleas Benn Achilleas

    Location based services are awesome. Look at two of the World Cup apps we are releasing which find the nearest venues showing World Cup footy for you to enjoy – or to avoid. Being able to detect user location enhances the user experience as it instantly makes the content more relevant to them without the need of additional button pressed filters.

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