The USA, the rest of the world, and the cell phone culture
Posted on 16 June 2009, at 10:28 am, by Carly Z
Simple rivals or symbols of a culture clash?
There was an interesting blog post circulating the interwebs over the weekend. The author, Tomi Ahonen, posits that the differences between the United States and the international cell markets have influenced what phones find success domestically vs the rest of the world. It’s a very long piece, so take your time…maybe start slow cooking a pot roast. Dinner will be done around the same time as when you finish reading the piece…but it is worth reading.
What I found really struck me was that among the ideas in the author’s main thesis was the idea that “American” phones are not as SMS-centric as euro ones, hence the lack of Symbian love in the United States. He also argues that what worked successfully in the USA (the RAZR, the iPhone), needed to be tweaked for the rest of the world, and that the rest of the world needed to tweak their phones for success in the USA.
I had a few issues with the central arguments: one, that Nokia was virtually untouchable in the cell phone market because they understood texting and entertainment, and that only RIM sees how to mimic that effectively, much to the detriment of Nokia’s marketshare (see here). It just seems awfully presumptive to assume that RIM realized they could make more consumer friendly phones because Nokia got there first, especially since Windows Mobile and Palm had smartphones with multimedia capabilities for years as well. Two, the article doesn’t satisfactorily address the continued success of windows mobile, android, or the iphone, all us-based or heavily influenced OSes. He touches upon them, but he seems to think that there needs to be a change before they can go from “USA success” to “world success”. The theme that the US has such a wildly different phone culture permeates the piece, and while that may be true, some of his examples were a bit extreme. I don’t know that Americans looked at Nokia phones without antennas and summarily rejected them based on not having the visual clue they could receive cell phone service.
And maybe I am betraying my American bias, but how do you separate “SMS phone” from any phone that does email and texts?
It’s a great read, though, if for no other reason than he does go into exhausting detail about the history of the European cell phone markets and the successes and failures they’ve faced. It’s obvious that he knows the European phone markets quite well, even if I think he did miss the mark on his thoughts on the United States.
I know we have some international readers, along with many road warriors and world travelers. Does Tomi Ahonen have a pulse on the world cellphone market or do you disagree with his assumptions? Sound off below!
via AWright from brighthand.com
Related posts:
June 16th, 2009 at 11:03 am
I am glad that he admits a Finn / Nokia history … as it shows his bias. He is very quick to point out the wrong-ness of American assumptions and market centricity, but seems somewhat blind to issues with Nokia …
Honestly, I feel that the world is coming together on this stuff rather than moving apart … my old Psion Revo has a SMS function at a time when US cell phones had no texting … now it in nearly inconceivable to consider a phone without texting.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:46 am
…and another reason why I think most phones are going to move to some kind of QWERTY keyboard eventually. I think many people got used to T9 for texting simply because they had no other choice. However, I don’t know of ANYONE teen or otherwise who prefers T9 to QWERTY for TXT/SMS. Whether that QWERTY keyboard is touch screen based or physical is not as relevant as whether or not phones as a whole change their designs to accommodate this.
Thoughts?
June 16th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
I agree, I think very quickly we’re going to see most phones have at the minimum some sort of suretype, if not full qwerty. I can’t believe how fast it went from qwerty on smartphones-only to qwerty on a freebie phone with contract.
I also think that the low end of the smartphone market and the high end of the featurephone market are colliding for the same reason (main audience being people who just want a qwerty for texts and maybe logging into gmail twice a week), but I am planning on discussing that in a separate post.
June 16th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
Exactly – and that ‘convergence’ further renders most of that article useless.
June 16th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
I just finished reading the article and I really think he lost it once he refered part o the problem to the “dominance” of CDMA in the US market. That simply isn’t the case. GSM and CDMA have been running on par here for a long time. GSM has never been the “significant minority” that the author refers to.
I really think the author also should have separated the Asian markets from the European markets. Nokia has failed to have dominance there either.
In other words – other than his comments about the European market – he doesn’t understand the other markets the way he thinks he does and he draws some odd conclusions as a result.
I think the early adoption of email as a legal communication method in the US impacted this a bit as well – Nokia is not good at browsing or email.