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2009 Mobile Trends - (Part One) - 21 May 2009
by Fjord
Read this article in Chinese (translator: Sean Liu, Yan Ding; proofreader: Christina Li)
(c) Fjordnet Limited 2009. Reprinted with permission.
App Stores are digital Innovation Bazaars
Nowhere in the industry can the future of mobility be seen as clearly as in Apple’s App Store. 2009 will be a year of wonderful digital bazaars full of innovative apps and services from developers around the world. Homebrew computing will be reborn.
For many years, mobile apps have been lost in the dark alleys of operator portals with poor selection, poor discoverability, and bad revenue splits.
Apple’s App Store has changed everything. The predictable process of getting into the store, the application search and discovery experience for customers, and the collection of revenue has become easy. Homebrew computing will be reborn and thrive.
Pangea, the creators of the Bugdom and Nanosaur games, has made $5M on iPhone applications, more than from 21 previous years of software sales. Pricing below €2 seems to unlock volumes through impulse buying. “Trial” apps with limited feature sets, free apps with ad-based business models and rental charging will also succeed.
Marketers have innovated new app concepts like iPint and iZippothat make advertising a socially sharable act. The long tail of the App Store will allow the iPhone to attract great content and emerge as a true mobile gaming platform that puts pressure on the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP. These real revenue and brand exposure opportunities will start a tornado of innovation, investment, and competition that will delight users and finally unlock the potential of smart phones as open platforms. Operators, Nokia and even the major Internet portals such as Amazon, eBay, Google, MSN, and Yahoo will fight for control of these new marketplaces.
The Cloud puts digital life at your fingertips
The Cloud puts digital life at your fingertipsMobile phones become true life recorders as Moore’s Law drives processing power and memory density up and costs down. Everything you record is sent to the Cloud.
These Cloud-based services safely store and effortlessly share your life. The PC is displaced as the hub and takes its place as a powerful but non-mobile client.
Continuing and dramatic reduction in the cost of memory, increase in mobile processing power and advances in operating systems enable phones to become truly powerful life recording computers. Everything from location, photos, video, speech, audio and nearby friends becomes indexed and sent to the Cloud. The “Cloud" as embodied by Facebook, Google, Apple’s Mobile Me, MSN, Yahoo, MySpace and others is where the most relevant information about your friends lives. It’s also the place where you publish your life story, hear from far-away friends and make new ones.
In the developed world, Outlook is no longer the sole repository of all personal information. The PC continues its displacement from being the primary digital hub into a powerful client that is best used sitting down at home or work.
In the emerging economies and for mobile-centric teens there are even fewer reasons to centre your digital life around a PC as Cloud-based services are cheaper and more accessible, interconnected and reliable. Google’s profitable web business model and unparalleled distributed computing network gives them a massive head start. Facebook is growing at a massive rate. AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo are chasing. Nokia is struggling to get in the game.
Netbooks for connected kids
The Netbook is less than 1kg and an A4 or smaller sized machine powerful enough for all the normal consumer computing tasks. It will be sold by mobile operators using 24 month subscriptions costing €30 a month.
Netbooks will be favoured by teenagers wanting to hangout in Facebook and MySpace, chat over IM, video call over Skype, and watch videos at YouTube. This is the personal communication and entertainment centre; however their argument for getting one will be homework. It will be used continuously at school, on the bus, and in the bedroom. The screen of 9”to 10”seems suitable for browsing and typical non-work related tasks and is at the same time highly portable. The incumbents will dismiss it as a toy, falling into an innovators dilemma trap. The opportunistic Taiwanese will find new business from the growth-hungry and cash-strong mobile operators.
Netbooks will be free in exchange for a €30 a month, 18-24 month subscription which will be appealing to cash-constrained consumers. As with the iPhone, Netbooks offer a business model that unlocks mobile data revenues. We expect several new consumer-friendly Linux based experiences to emerge during 2009 funded by operators. Gaining an experience control point which can act as a base for future service revenues is too attractive to pass up for the operators. Windows XP will also do well in the developed markets. Key players to watch in 2009 are Acer, Asus and HP who have some of the most innovative devices in space. Watch Carphone Warehouse to see how the business model is shaped. We predict that Apple will also enter the space, but not until 2010.
TV finally goes mobile
Time shifting, place shifting and episodification of visually rich audio/visual content is creating a TV revolution in which content is decoupled from the constraints of the broadcast model and mobile-enabled in both the time and place. “Transmedia” content is now available on multiple devices and consumed when needed.
This transformation will be lead by the BBC, Apple and YouTube.
2.4” QVGA screens are becoming standard. Memory cost is rapidly falling. New phones play high-quality video and offer fast downloads and streaming. This is an attractive platform for the content industry and a boredom killer for commuters.
Even better video playback from new mobile chips in 2009 and less inexpensive memory cards will make it easy to stream, sync, and download video content. The BBC’s iPlayer is spearheading the new TV which provides for time-shifting and place-shifting. Apple’s focus on video in the iPhone and iPod as well as the iTunes Store is a great “side loading” experience. Going from a controller-based linear broadcasting model to an on-demand social consumer-pulled model is a revolution that will efficiently cater to the social trend of boredom. 2009 will be the year the mobile couch potato is born. We will see consumers staring at their mobiles with headphones on as they tune in to mobile TV and tune out of reality.
We expect the most progressive broadcasters will start to create new forms of content which is centred around content brands, but where the content is available in smaller time chunks. Sport, news and weather will be among the first to evolve. Handset vendors and operators will want to promote these services. New business models will be created. iTunes is an early success with both renting and purchasing options. The mobile + fixed line operators offering TV over broadband will invest in mobile and strike broader content licensing deals to drive revenue and to differentiate from smaller competitors. As with YouTube before it, in 2009 we will see TV becoming more community driven and users helping to surface great content by promoting and driving traffic to it.
Companions at the mobile feast
More users will carry companion products in 2009.
For years Blackberry users have carried a smaller phone for voice. Early adopters carry the iPod in addition to a mobile as their optimised music device. In 2009 we will see more iPhones and iPod touches in users” second pocket as an entertainment computer. The losing battle with battery life, the need to disconnect from work, high cross-operator tariffs, and the advantages of a dedicated device are the main drivers.
Consumer research would typically confirm that users want fewer devices rather than more. Behaviour is increasingly indicating the opposite.
Heavy Blackberry e-mail users have for years carried a second phone for voice. Many consumers prefer to combine a mobile phone for calls and an iPod for music. The leading practical reasons include limited battery life constraining usage, a need to control the ever-presence of work, and high costs to communicate with friends on different operators. However, in addition increasingly the capabilities of a specialist device outweigh the inconvenience of carrying two devices. Their superior interaction, functionality and display means that the mobile phone is good enough for voice, text and camera, but does not compete in the delivery of media content.
We do think that consumers have no problem managing two mobile devices. They increasingly realise that two companions are better than one at the mobile feast. We would expect during 2009 to start to see additional successful fusions of music + voice beyond the iPhone where users select a casual computer as their second device. This combination allows for good ergonomics and good service evolution. We also expect to see rich camera + voice + GPS combinations where the high-end mobile again grows in thickness to cater for powerful optics and great battery life for voice, mapping and life recording.
(Read the second part of this article)
Fjord was founded in London in 2001. The office today employs some of the most experienced and talented digital design specialists in the market, and is working on leading projects for UK and international clients.
Contact Chris Liu (chris@fjord.co.uk) for more information about Fjord.
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