By Natasha Lomas, 24 June 2009 12:43
NEWS
Mobile operators have been blamed for holding back handset evolution by failing to understand the desires of consumers.
Asked why it took Mac maker Apple to come in to the industry and launch a phone designed with usability and data consumption as its watch words, Håkan Eriksson, senior VP and CTO of Ericsson, said the iPhone was born because Apple ignored the operators.
He said: "[Apple] did not listen to the operators because all handset manufacturers have always talked to the operators and the operators have basically said don't try a phone that's more than $200; it won't sell. And then you have a constraint between where you can work."
Years of sub-$200 phones put constraints on processing power, limiting what the devices were capable of, according to Eriksson. Yet moving the bar up to $500 enabled phone manufacturers to put in "two powerful processors" - and opened the door to first the iPhone and now its imitators.
"[The iPhone] probably proves that everybody who thought they knew what the end users wanted in terms of interactive interfaces were wrong," said Eriksson, adding that people are now prepared to pay for more processing power in a device.
"I think more [powerful devices] will follow now - when we go into the mobile internet it will come up with devices that are in between a phone and a laptop," said Eriksson.
"You have seen already netbooks and will come back with more devices like that... the maximum size of a mobile will no longer apply, you will have very attractive devices coming not only [from Apple] - they were the first ones that broke that sort of operator pre-defined $200 ceiling. They broke that one and found that there was a market there also for $500 phones."
Comments
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1. VaughnSC
The Motorola RAZR was intro'd selling at $600 (before a $100 cingular rebate) in 2004.
2. Simon
While the article is mostly correct, it misses out an important point - or rather gives the network operators too much credit. For the network operator, it's all about "how much for how little" !
How much can they extract from users, for how little return. Central to this has been their insistence on removing features that they know customers want - tethering to allow a laptop to use the phone as mobile internet connection for example.
So it's not so much that they didn't ask, or that they didn't listen, but that they simply turned round and said "you can't have that". And users voted with their wallets and didn't buy.
3. Paul
I think its much more than that, and what the executives at the handset makers are not willing to say, but that is that the networks limited handset makers in offering many solutions customers wanted that the network operator did not want offerred.
The handset maker executives did not have the courage or they saw the network operator as their customer and not the user of their handsets and it wasn't until Apple said screw you, the customer is the user and if you don't accept our model we will find another operator that does. That ultimately changed the industry and its what the handset maker executives are not saying.
4. Fred Stein
Agree, Apple gets credit once again for changing the industry with a vision - the 'use experience'.
A bigger part of the vision is that iPhone breaks down the Walls of the Garden. Smart Phone apps and SaaS back-ends.