Mobile Phone Wars - A New Generation

Melbourne Herald Sun, Thursday March 4, 2013

Three years ago the iPhone was blasting every competitor off the field and shoving aside long-term market leaders like Nokia and BlackBerry. Apple looked unstoppable as every hand seemed to reach for the pristine white style leader.

After lengthy analysis and praise of Steve Jobs' marketing brilliance that had brought this about - and resurrected a mobile market that had been hammered by the GFC - I pointed out that his competitors were not about to leave the billions of dollars lying on the ground, they would come back with a headlong charge.

So it has been, with every mobile phone maker putting out its newer, brighter, more powerful smartphone than the last. At February's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, all the leading manufacturers showed off their dazzling wares.

They are now all lining up on the shelves of our mobile phone shops, making your fingers itchy to play with the inventive applications.

Nokia has inevitably lost its leadership crown, coming in with too little too late, in the wake of the iPhone powerboat. Now the battle for smartphones is being fought between Apple and Samsung.

But let me warn the confused follower here: there is a difference between smartphones and common or garden mobile phones. Smartphones are the clever computers like the iPhone or Galaxy or Nokia 920, with their huge power and memories and scores of internal programs. A mobile phone is the cheaper, more basic device that handles telephony but not necessarily many things more.

So while Nokia may have lost in the smartphone race, they still sold 100,000 phones last quarter, to take the lead in the overall market. And in fact they have declared that they see the huge market in the developing world as having a far greater potential that ever-fancier phones.

So many parts of the world - Africa, Asia, South America, the Middle East - missed out on centuries of infrastructure: roads, copper wires, power generation, telephones. Now with a mobile phone in hand and a base station on a mountain top, they can communicate with the world - or check the next valley to see if they require any milk today.

Taking so much for granted, we find it hard to envisage what a miracle mobile communication can be to the remote world. We smile at photos of an old bedouin on his donkey with a phone pressed to his ear. But that man's life and livelihood have been transformed.

However back in our shopping malls we can anticipate more goodies from the MWC. For the other phone companies have also been cooking stuff up in the labs. The new LG Optimus has a 13 magapixel camera. That's hard to imagine in a mobile phone, for that amount of data you would have needed a grunty SLR on a tripod, not so long ago.

Think the design of the iPhone is neat? Take a look at the new HTC One, with a machined aluminium shell and polycarbonate components, protected by a tough Gorilla Glass display.

After finally getting their act together BlackBerry have come back to life, posting a modest profit for Q4 and proving the obituaries premature. Their new Z10 phone is aggressively aimed at the iPhone - as they would say, with more of a business stance. And next month the new Q10 will even resurrect the keyboard.

There must be something in it - Samsung has already released a commercial needling BlackBerry, in addition to poking fun at the iPhone "fanboys", the commercial that supposedly played a role in putting down Big Apple and raising up the Galaxy. When your enemies attack, you're on the right track.

ray@ebeatty.com