Pocket PC Thoughts: Mobius Redmond 2003: Day 0 and Day 1 (Half of it)

Jonas noted that even though Smartphones have large colour screens, more memory, and more processing power than traditional phones, the incremental cost of building a Smartphone over building a feature phone is quite small. This means that the Smartphone will be able to follow the pattern of traditional mobile phones: upon release, they’ll be more expensive than the giveaway phones carriers use to get signed contracts, but over time the cost will come down to the point there the phone is low-cost or even free with activation. The Orange SPV was (I believe) 199₤ in the UK at launch, within two weeks it was 99₤ from the Car Phone Warehouse. I believe by 2004 we’ll see free Smartphones with activation.


Figure 3: The SPV-E200 from the front. Looks like the SPV and SPVx, doesn't it?


Figure 4: The SPV-E200 from the back, now featuring a camera.

Jonas also revealed some SPV E200 details – it’s the first English-language Windows Mobile 2003 Smartphone to come out on the market. The SPV E200 offers integrated Bluetooth, a camera, MMS client, and is based on the same body design as the SPV and SPVx. Orange will be releasing the Orange SPV E200 in Q4 2003 in the UK, France, Holland, Switzerland, and Denmark markets. The continued evolution of the Smartphone platform is important to Orange, because like all carriers, one of the most important measurements of success is the ARPU – Average Revenue Per Unit (customer). Carriers are glad to have you as a customer, but what they really want is for you to spend a few extra dollars every billing cycle – a ring tone here, a few dozen SMS messages there – this is how they make serious money, because there’s little to no network impact for delivery of these items. Based on a survey, on average, Orange customers would browse Web pages only once a month on traditional phones, but five times a day on the SPV Smartphone – which means GRPS usage and higher ARPU.

The mobile phone space continues to grow as a nice clip, and the predicted growth curve of data-rich devices remains strong. IDC is predicting that by 2007, 81 million converged phones and phone-enabled PDAs will be sold per year. I personally feel that in order for this to happen, data package costs need to come down. In many markets, flat-rate GPRS plans are upwards of $50 USD per month – that might not be a big cost for large companies to swallow, but to the average SOHO end user, that’s a lot. I think the sweet spot is $10 per month above the basic mobile packages. We’ll see what the market will bear out as we slowly crawl towards 3G – network carriers have a huge investment to pay back with 3G, so it may take longer than we hope to see those prices come down.

Smartphone 2003
This was the first official discussion of Smartphone 2003 that I’d heard from Microsoft, so it was quite interesting to the Smartphone Thoughts part of my brain. There were four key goals for Smartphone 2003: deliver a great phone experience, enable rich messaging, deliver the best platform for innovation, and meet operator requirements.

Jonas talked about the huge number of people who are accustomed to the traditional Nokia interface, and how Microsoft didn’t realize how much of a hurdle it would be to give those users a new UI – even if it’s a familiar Windows-type UI. Jonas speculated that Symbian Series 60 devices will have some of the same challenges – I know that when I picked up the N-Gage, I had no clue how to use it, even though I’ve used Nokia phones for years. Any platform with a rich UI will start from the same place in this regard.