The mobile phone industry is used to pushing features onto consumers — the “they don’t know how much they want it” attitude has received a fair bit of criticism, but proponents of the business method point to camera phones as an example of it working…despite lackluster demand at the start half of all UK mobile phone users now take pictures with their mobiles, and a quarter send them on. The BBC has an article on feature phones (more than voice, not quite a smartphone) and what they mean to the industry. It has gathered some interesting figures: “The smarter the phone, the bigger the usage of data. Smartphone users are five times more likely to watch television and three times more likely to listen to music on their phone than normal users, which boosts the revenue of network operators.” The smarter the phone, the higher the ARPU, which makes them important to the whole mobile industry.
There’s not a 100 percent conversion rate. “A year ago, 40 percent of 3G users browsed the web; now only 30 percent do.” That’s not less people surfing the web, that’s an indication that more people are getting 3G handsets for reasons other than the data speed. “We are packing more and more functionality into these phones, but there just aren’t enough 10-year-olds around to explain how to use all that,” quipped a speaker at the recent Symbian smartphone show in London.” Which leads naturally onto the cost of data, widely seen as the biggest inhibitor of people using the mobile internet. The burst of activity when people get a new phone only to be followed by a severe drop-off is normally put down to lack of interest in what is offered, but M:Metrics analyst Paul Goode links the phenomenon to people receiving their first phone bill. When 3 launched an all-you-can-eat plan in Sweden it had to buy new base station to cope with demand, which is probably what scares a lot of operators.
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