App Planet - 'tis app'ning at Barcelona !

Image by blogpocket via Flickr

Mobile World Congress is here this year with more participants than ever. Now what is the b..( ah can't use buzz like before anymore let Google make it gbuzz ) big themes this time ? You guessed it right. It is the "apps" - the small applets that gained fame as finger food for iPhone users. Every platform now has it and service providers are starting to have their own app aggregation too. Mobile World Congress acknowledges the trend by having an App Planet program as a focused developer event. Spread over four days, App Planet has two platforms covered on each day, starting from Vodafone and Motorola and then on to RIM, Sony Ericsson and Google Android. For the first time Nokia does not have a presence at the Mobile World Congress in a business decision that apparently reflects Apple's approach which too does not make use of the Mobile World Congress to launch products. Apple does its own events which are designed to suit its interests perfectly and Nokia is also expected to do the same.

Google is building the second momentum after the Android push with plans for a super-fast fiber network to half a million homes across America. This should send alarm bells ringing for the traditional telcos. Google has also slowly but inevitably started to focus on hardware with its Nexus One phone. There is a lot of talk as to which entity would be able to pose a counter to Google's hurtling advances. Its not difficult to imagine Google taking a big chunk of the market by showing a will to controlling customers data. Now's the time for a player to like Nokia to consolidate non-American market by making (pretty) big investments on OS, platform and an ecosystem to take advantage of the latent period when the strong American players ( Google, Apple) fight it out among themselves.

What about RIM, the makers of the well accepted Blackberry smartphones? RIM had wriggled out of very tricky situations in the past and has gained strength in the enterprise segment significantly and is still the leader in the smartphone segment in the US market, which is a big thing seen along with the growth of iphone. During the course of last year some businesses had indeed switched over to iphones for their workforce. However this trend has not appreciably picked up and I think the Android moment had a side effect of delaying large scale enterprise shift from Blackberry centric policies. RIM is certainly a strong player with notable innovation strengths and is bound to play a dominant role in the near future.

The other news that has made a splash is that of Motorola splitting itself into two companies. Now the mobile phone business would be an attractive proposition for potential suitors. It has been a theme with Motorola to spin off the mobile phone business at an appropriate time and Motorola had driven cost measures aggressively and has got a measure of success. My hunch is that the mobile phone business would be lapped up by some PE group or the other option - being taken over by a big player - Google comes to mind... let us wait and see.

Scaled-down PCs and scaled up smartphones

Netbooks have started to appear in almost all of the PC makers' lines. Removing optical drives and shrinking the form factor has and using new UMPC chipsets have developed a market which was just waiting to mature. These mini-notebooks, priced on par with mid-range smartphones make a good product for selling first PCs to those who don't require a "big" notebook. The PC vendors realize this only too well as one can see from the Linux option available on most netbook lines. The idea is to make it as affordable as it can get for a lot of buyers who don't want to buy a new PC. I was searching a few months ago to see what options there are for getting a Linux laptop from the major PC vendors and the options were too few. The situation has changed a little now with the netbooks. The recent trend in netbooks is to have as closer a spec to normal laptops in terms of computing power and storage.

Now, why are netbooks important? A lot of people are going to have high speed connectivity soon and these are people who did not have it before. There is a need for simple reliable machines which enable people to be connected at work, at play and on the move. Since connectivity on the move makes the machine most phone-like we are beginning to hear stories of netbooks which are more smartphones than PCs. Google which is keen on getting the mobile broadband going to expand its advertising base may well try to leverage the Android platform for netbooks. Microsoft will be bolstered by its own offerings, may well launch a netbook flavor of Windows to make it attractive for the affordable PC set.

I think it makes a good case for telcos to give away netbooks as part of their mobile broadband contract. Since netbooks are costing in the range of smartphones broadband packages can be marketed in two flavors - one with the usual phone connection and the other with the netbook option.

I want to make a post on the features I would like to see evolve on a netbook at a later time.

Image from: eptiger.blogspot.com

RIM bullish on India market

RIM has announced plans for selling *unlocked* BlackBerrys in India [ET ]. Redington has been drafted to play the local distribution support to work in tandem with telcos to push the niche smartphones to the *consumer* market. In the last post I highlighted the trend of smartphone sales picking up in India. BlackBerry has drafted a strategy specifically targeting the Indian market involving development of localized consumer-centric mobile applications and even considers launching an India-specific smartphone targeted at the consumer market. BlackBerry has had a good market in India in the enterprise segment with virtually every company rolling rolling out their push-email services on BlackBerry.

Around the same time comes the news of Motorola closing down its sales office in India [ET ]. Notwithstanding Motorola's recent troubles, this tells a tale of the changing market. The lower end of the market entices with volume, but the burgeoning vendors in this segment make it very unattractive in terms of margins. After a lull, the grey market is flourishing with lot of cheap handsets from China and elsewhere and they are taking the game out of the major vendors. Now the space in the higher end smartphone market is getting expanded and vendors should take cues from the policy makers and market to reap the dividends from momentous things such as 3G rollout.

New trends [ET ] in mobile phone usage points to a marked increase in the sales of smartphones in India as compared to other mobile phones. This is a significant statistic because of two reasons. One, there are vendors who focus on non-smartphones for the Indian market and they can take some pointers from this trend. Two, the smartphones are priced at a very high premium by some vendors who can now think of volumes and make their offerings more affordable.

The mobile phone has become the most integrated gadget to people after the watch and its going to stay that way. And like watches people would start to want their smartphones to be the smartest of the lot. Simple swiss army knife-kind of smartphones with a list of features and having elegant form like those of Swiss watches would soon dominate the market. This has been exemplified the success of smartphones like BlackBerry which has really taken of well in India.

Smartphones' rise into the public imagination is great exemplified by Barack Obama's images of using his gadget. Obama's choice of smartphone also tells a lot about the trend. Have a look...

    Image Courtesy : SlipperyBrick.com