...except this time it is GPS/Navigation being touted as the saviour of the mobile industry. The always entertaining and accurate Michael Mace points out the fallacy of the magic technology bullet for mobile devices in his most recent blog post, along with the note that "a briefing [from] Nokia said that mobile billings are 84% due to voice, 10% SMS, and everything else accounts for just 6%."
Read on in the full article.
Perhaps I'm rather atypical - my main mobile bill last month was for 15 mins of voice, 8 sms messages (probably all to Twitter), and 23MB of data...
I actually think its just a question of time. Paying for extra services will come in time, though a lot of it will be ad supported as it is on the web.
Navigation does have a lot of potential, but it wont change things quickly. There's even more to location based services (when / if they take off).
The percentages on a phone bill can be very deceptive about how people actually use their phones:
-Third party offline software, music and video sales (purchase onto PC, transfer to phone) are completely ignored by phone bills
-Offline usage (including games, photos, videos, music playback, video playback, FM radio and GPS using offline maps) is completely ignored by phone bills
-People frequently pay for calls and texts up front in packages, rather than paying as they use a particular service. If the package includes unlimited data too, then no matter how people actually use their phones, the percentage breakdown on the bill will remain unchanged. Any radical changes in usage would go completely unnoticed as far as billing is concerned.
...but in total, yes, the vast majority of people use their phones for calls, texts and little else. You only have to look at the average sale price of a handset to know that, which is something like 90 euros.
You cannot buy a smartphone or 3G or bluetooth or camera phone for that amount, so most people simply don't have the hardware required to use any advanced services even if they want to.
It will only get genuinely interesting when smartphones with 3G, bluetooth, decent cameras etc do go below the 100 euro barrier, then you'll have the real mass market colliding with advanced hardware. That's what I've been saying all along:
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/features/item/The_Last_Smartphone.php
It's hard to know when it would happen, but if you look at phones from 10 years ago the most expensive models had the same features as the cheapest phones today. If that rate of progress keeps up, then we can expect to see the first sub-50 euro smartphones in about 2017 and the first sub-100 smartphones some time before then, maybe in 2012.
Smartphones won't be called that by then of course, they'll just be everyday phones, and the technology fans will have moved on to some other new and expensive feature which no one uses. People used to enthuse over GSM and SMS, no one does that any more because they've succeeded in becoming mass market.
Like fashion, food and music critics, technology fans only seem to enjoy features or devices that are used by a tiny percentage of people.
Even the supposedly wildly popular iPod has only managed to sell 100 million over the past five years, which is a pathetic 1.6 percent of the Earth's population. By contrast, mobile phones (most of them bog standard ones) sell 1000 million units every year, so if these sales keep up there'll soon be a phone for virtually every person on the planet. It's the bog standard technologies that make the real difference.
Obviously he's right and yes its always a bad idea to get overexcited about new functions by claiming they'll cause a revolution. However, that doesn't prove that navigation won't be big in the near mobile future. I remember when virtually all my friends shunned colour phones then camera phones saying all they wanted was voice and sms. Now they all have cameraphones just like everyone else in the world. I personally get lost a lot and would obviously use gps navigation if my phone had it. I don't think i'm alone either.
There are two seperate issues here, which seem to have been conflated:
1) How much chargable air-time does a solution use (this issue is rightly the concern of operators, but mostly only concerns ISVs and handset manufacturers because it concerns operators).
2) How much time does the user spend on a particular application (this is an issue that is rightly the concern of ISVs and handset manufacturers, and only concerns operators because they actually sell the devices to those end-users).
We've got ourselves into a weird situation in the mobile industry, with these two concerns so bizarrely split up. Ah well...
In any case, there's a great slide, also from Nokia (from the S60 Summit), towards the bottom of this page, which was referenced from AAS a few days ago.
This slide shows that Messaging is the major (36%) time waster -- er, I mean user -- with Voice (22%) following, then multimedia and PIM on 16% or so each, followed by the dribs and drabs. VERY interesting slide. (And does messaging consume so much time because the UI is so hopeless, or because people really send that many messages? That would be an interesting study. If we measure by time used vs. data generated, though, that yields a very low efficiency for messaging compared to voice, but that's a pretty silly measure, right?)
In any case, these proportions are totally different from these other figures also from Nokia, since the ones on the slide are about handset use, while the ones from the story above are about network use.
-Malcolm.