What the future of smartphones looks like (and of tablets, too)

Tomi T Ahonen is an ex-executive of Nokia

 

Tomi Ahonen likes writing long, run-on pieces on his blog communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands. Long-winded pieces that are fun to read on a Sunday afternoon, because he writes streams of conscience, complete with 'ha ha ha' inserted, as he mocks those who yelped against his earlier predictions, now come true. Also, he hates those involved in the destruction of Nokia.

This is what he says about the future mobile market in "Seems Like My Work Is Done: As we shift from Hunters in mobile industry to Farmers, most of the cool stuff is done and dusted":

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Android has won. Its ecosystem is now larger than that of Windows. The only outpost left to conquor is Apple's App Store, which Android is on track for overtaking in early 2015.

iPhones will continue to lose market share until it reaches about 10%, because iPhones are as niche as iMacs.

Windows Phone will remain below 3%, because cell phone carriers hate Microsoft, because it owns Skype, because it took away 40% of the world's telecom traffic and drove down prices. Nadella will sell off the Nokia acquisition.

Blackberry will remain popular only in the corporate and government markets.

Everyone else has no chance.

By 2017, all phones will be smartphones (phones that run apps that can be installed by users); no more feature phones (phones with fixed feature sets). 

Premium SMS (paid short message service) last year made more money than the movie and music industries combined. But SMS (run by cell phone carriers) will be eclipsed by OTT (over-the-top services, like or Facebook Messenger or BBM for Android), because they are independent of the carrier. But this will take a long time, because six billion people use SMS, apparently.

Tablet sales will continue to fall, because they are immobilizers, not much better than transportable PCs: you have to stop to use a tablet, and so it is inconvenient compared to the large-screen smartphone. 

Smartwatches are a failed market, with half being resold on eBay. (Considering how young the renewed smartwatch market is, I disagree. I recall the same returns problem with early digital cameras, until the breakthrough of usable resolution, 1600x1200. Smartwatches need the breakthrough of long-battery life, such as Citizen's solar powered watches.) 

Social media is the new tobacco industry, whose addictive endorphin hits are the new nicotine drags.

In Conclusion

The mobile industry has moved from hunter stage to farmer stage. Companies are consolidating, exiting, focusing on the bottom line. The era of cool is over.

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There. I saved you from reading 5,300 words. But if you want to:

http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2014/07/as-we-shift-from-hunters-in-mobile-industry-to-farmers-most-of-the-cool-stuff-is-done-and-dusted.html

 

Comments

[Cedric Desbordes - www.graebert.com]

Hi Ralph,
I read the same article from Tomi but do not read the same about tablets. The author explains how tablets are for a different use case than smartphones because a smartphone fits into your pocket and have constant access to the networks. He also explains that there will be by far more smartphones than tablets which means the global revenue for apps will be higher for smartphones.

Let me quote exactly his words about tablets: "Yes they are very VERY good replacements of laptops and in many cases can do what smartphones do - but they will not replace the smartphone. They are only ultraportable PCs and their market is a tiny slice in magnitude of what will be the global smartphone market."

I can agree with Tomi on that but see also a different situation for our industry. I think we can agree that CAD is not something you can expect to do on the small screen of a smartphone but you might use it to be notified of a modification and to have a quick look at a drawing. On the other hand a tablet is something that has a larger screen and that you can hold in hand and move around, especially when you don't have to type too much text (which would typically require a keyboard).

Interestingly you can see that the leading manufacturers are all announcing now tablets aiming more specifically at professionals (iPad Pro, Microsoft Surface, Samsung Note Pro but also hybrids like the Asus Transformer Book Trio). See also the discussions between Apple and IBM on the one side and Google with HP on the other side. At the Graebert Annual Meeting we will show with the launching of ARES Touch for Android some interesting numbers: tablets are now breaking into the professional world.

The way I see it is that professionals used to work only on one PC and we are now reaching a post-PC era with professionals using one or more PCs (and potentially under different OS) + a smartphone (or maybe 2) + more and more frequently tablets (potentially as a side device or as a replacement for a laptop).

What do you think?

[Ralph Grabowski]

I agree with you that there are two use cases for tablets:

- Casual consumption by consumers: this market is mature (current tablet technology is good enough) and is saturated (sales are slowing).

- Production use by professionals: this market needs faster-stronger-better technology to handle the extreme uses cases presented by 2D/3D CAD and digital content creation (movies, animation, games)

An Android tablet with a keyboard is an amazing product (as I keep harping about my Asus TF-101 Transformer with dual batteries and lots of ports). When I urge manufacturers like Dell and Lenovo to produce such products, their eyes glaze over -- and they keep outputing stunted $180models instead.