Remembering Michael Mace's excellent generic positioning (in the handheld industry) diagram from last year, I wondered where the current and upcoming crop of Symbian OS-powered hardware might sit in his Entertainment/Communications/Information chart.... Read on for the results and comments welcome as always.
Read on in the full article.
well i think the chart is well laid out but... you have to agree it's hard plotting phones on such a chart i mean you have to remember the presence of third party apps which can mark many phones right in the dead zone, for example an n93/n95 with gfx acceleration and nokia's next gen of games + a third party application like profimail and nokia's mail for exchange + a couple of software for database, quickoffice and maybe a pc control app like soonR over a distance then i believe that is the perfect combination that would eliminate the dead zone, my opinion
I can see how this positioning works from a marketing perspective, but not from a usage perspective. Smartphones are ultimately so flexible that endusers may prefer to use a model for purposes that the marketers never intended.
The E61 is great for multimedia, it has a really big screen and is far better than the 5500 for stuff like video, viewing photos or surfing the web, and is equally good at MP3 playback. But the E61 is marketed as an email device, music isn't even mentioned, and the 5500 is marketed as a feature phone with music playback, the smartphone features aren't even mentioned.
It's a funny old game, marketing.
There's something wrong with the positions of the N95 and the P990i on that circle diagram. The N95 is in the center of all the three circles, but the N95 is a multimedia-centric device, so it should be a little bit higher up the multimedia circle. Also, notice that the P990i doesnt even touch the multimedia circle, but in my personal experience, i use the P990i as my walkman with its excellent music software powered by Sony, and its high quality 2 megapixel camera is sure to make the P990i a great multimedia phone. The P990i should be near where the N95 is currently in the circle, where it touches all three aspects of the circle.
Zone of death? The E61i will probably be the best selling E-series device.
Sadly though I think he is right about the E70 and the E90 although you would have to pry my E70 out of my dead hands and I will definitely purchase and E90 come upgrade time!
What I find really suspicious is that the devices in or near the "zone of death" tend to be the really expensive models, while those further away are generally cheaper.
A simpler and perhaps more accurate way of predicting sales is that cheap phones sell better than expensive ones, but we knew that already, we didn't need an overly-complicated diagram to predict it.
If the E90 cost 250 euros but had exactly the same features and was marketed in exactly the same way, would the creator of the diagram have really put it in "the zone of death"? I'm guessing they wouldn't.
If the price is the real deciding factor here, then the success or failure has little to do with "positioning" more to do with how much people are prepared to pay for the latest models.
Almost nobody buys software for a smartphone, so even if a device can be made more capable by adding software, it doesn't mean people are going to do that. They buy the device that fits their wants and needs, and they are not going to extend the device by making it more capable.
Reasoning like this, a device that can do more is more expensive. Too expensive because it has things in it you don't want to have, and therefore don't want to pay for.
A device that can do everything is therefore too expensive for almost everybody == zone of death.