The US smartphone landscape in the US has, for the most part, been dominated by two kinds of devices — Treos and BlackBerrys — sold to a narrow group of enterprise users and prosumers. Certainly other devices have been sold to other types of users, but not in very high numbers. But I spoke to Symbian’s VP of US operations, Jerry Panagrossi, at CTIA last week, and he told me why the company thinks that’s about to change.

Much of what’s held Symbian-powered and other smartphones back in the US has been price sensitivity: consumers here are conditioned to phones being sold a particular way, which means for them, free or very cheap phones sold through operators. It’s been rare for phones in the consumer market to be able to attract buyers in droves when they’ve carried a premium price, and these successes have been driven more by fashion (ie the RAZR) than features. This is driven by carrier marketing, which to this point has focused on grabbing new subscribers. But Panagrossi says that Symbian’s market models indicate a correlation between market saturation and smartphone uptake, since carriers are forced to try to maintain sales growth by marketing higher-value services, rather than just going all out to win new subscribers. 75% penetration — which the US should hit very soon — represents the tipping point, he says.

The company’s experience with NTT DoCoMo in Japan bears this out — Symbian (along with Linux) is one of DoCoMo’s preferred handset development platforms, and sales of Symbian devices there have grown significantly over the last several years. Western operators, like Vodafone, are increasingly settling on smartphone platforms to standardize their handset portfolio and push the devices more squarely into the mass market. US operators aren’t any different, Panagrossi says, and as they turn their attention to more data services, they’ll start pushing more smartphones — which can also allow them to shift the subsidy models away from being solely based on voice spending.

The big Symbian news from CTIA was that Cingular will soon sell the Nokia E62 for $150, the lowest price point of any Symbian device at launch in the US. While some would say that the E62’s lack of 3G and WiFi connectivity when compared to its sibling, the E61, cripple the device, it’s not likely to matter here — especially not at $150. That’s a huge price point, cheaper than the Motorola Q on Verizon, and significantly cheaper than Treos or BlackBerrys. This is really the first time a US operator has set up a Symbian device to do well in the US, and with such aggressive pricing, it’s likely Cingular will put a decent marketing push behind the E62 as well. But the low price emphasizes its value (and that of other smartphones) to operators — it’s going to deliver data users, with a good chunk paying a decent monthly fee for email access. That’s an important step for Symbian, and S60 too: to prove to US operators that their devices drive higher ARPU. Granted, this is still an enterprise-/professional-focused device, but the data usage, standardization and customization benefits it offers can translate to the consumer market as well.

[tags]mobile, symbian, smartphones, e62, nokia, s60, treo, blackberry, cingular[/tags]

Being so involved involved in the new new world of wap these days, it’s useful to be jerked back to reality and be reminded that sms is actually far bigger and far more mainstream for the majority of people.

So I liked this idea from the Netherlands, that allows you to send your buddies a present by sms.

Cadeau Code is a nicely presented website that featured a range of groovy gifts (including the famous Philips Bodygroom, for all over shaving). You select your gift and put in the recipient’s mobile number and your message, pay by credit card and an sms goes winging its way to the lucky person in your life. They then redeem it online. Nice.

But are they missing a trick by not allowing a total mobile experience and including wap for both ordering and collecting the pressie? Of course, they are. Who wants to get something on their mobile only to wait for hours to get home or to the office to check it out?

If we’re doing mobile, let’s make it joined up mobile.

Story source: Springwise

When you’re trying to look like a serious company, and not a patent troll, it’s probably not the best idea to kick off your press release announcing a lawsuit with “Cingular: You Got Served!”

I mean, how are we supposed to take seriously a company that thinks advertising-based ringback tones will be worth $12 billion a year in 2011, when it says things like that?

Here in Austin this past weekend was the Austin City Limits Music Festival, a 3-day concert featuring 130 bands, and 65,000 or so people sweating their butts off in a field near downtown. Cingular and AT&T are big sponsors of the event, and Cingular had an interesting little promotion, where they let people record their own ringtones.

They didn’t let people convert something into a ringtone — they had a small music studio with a guitar, microphone and piano and a pro working the mixing board, and people could go in a record themselves. Cingular customers got the recording sent the their phones right away, while users on other carriers got an MP3 emailed to them. Nothing huge or earth-shattering, I just thought it was a cool promotion that fit in well with the event.

Unless you’re completely musically untalented, like me, in which case the novelty probably wears off pretty quickly

(Photo from News 8 Austin)

[tags]mobile, cingular, ringtones, mobile marketing[/tags]

Oliver Starr’s got a thorough writeup of the latest edition of the Carnival of the Mobilists over at MobileCrunch. Check it out for the week’s best blogging about mobile.

As I wrote last week, Russell and I were in LA for the fall CTIA show, which they pitch as “Wireless IT and Entertainment”, as opposed to the bigger, more general spring event. I don’t know if it’s this supposedly narrower focus, a lack of interest in traveling to LA, bad timing or what — but quite honestly, there wasn’t a whole lot of news coming out of the show. A couple of big deals (News Corp. buying 51 percent of Jamba from Verisign and RealNetworks buying WiderThan), and that was about it. No one new product or service had everybody talking, and there weren’t many announcements that made a big splash.

That’s not to say it wasn’t worth it — as always, meeting old and new friends and plenty of MobHappy readers made the trip worthwhile. We both had some interesting meetings and interviews we’ll get out this week, but in the meantime, MocoNews did its usual comprehensive job, while PhoneScoop kept up with the new phones.

Overall, the biggest takeaway from the show was that mobile advertising is the hot topic in the business right now. Anybody and everybody that’s got the slightest angle was playing up their ad chops, but it doesn’t take much to separate the wheat from the chaff and it’s a safe bet that many of these companies — that were all about mobile multimedia last year — will have moved on to the next topic du jour by the time next year’s show rolls around. In the meantime, get ready to receive ads on your phone, in one way or another, if the last week’s been any indication.

[tags]mobile, ctia[/tags]

One of the missing services that aren’t provided by operators and handset manufacturers is good back up of data sitting on the device itself. Anyone who has ever lost a phone or dropped one into some kind of pool of water that seem so irresistible to mobiles will know the pain involved.

But even if you aren’t hit by this type of catastrophe, it’s still hard for most people to transfer contacts and other stored data from one phone to another. So it seems a little silly to give customers a very good reason NOT to trade up their phones.

Zyb, have a nice solution for stored contacts that allows you to back them up quickly, securely and painlessly over the air - and free. Simple as that really.

It also has some nice tools for synching and sharing calendars and Outlook entries that are worth checking out. It’s free to use, with the plan being to introduce some premium services to generate revenue.

I’d like to see the facility to back up other data too - treasured SMS, for instance and photos. These may be some of the planned premium services they’re going to introduce.

Nice service. Check them out.

[tags] zyb, back up, OTA [/tags]

A few months ago, I did a little consulting for Loopt to help them get a toe-hold in Europe, so it’s great to see the product finally come out of stealth mode and get into the market. They launched last night on the youth focused, Boost Mobile network and I’m sure it’ll be a great success.

The friend finder isn’t a new concept - I can remember people talking about it for at least 8 years and maybe even longer. It’s also been a consistent part of any mobile future-gazing done by pundits. However, it’s one thing to talk and another to overcome the significant technical and commercial challenges and actually launch something that not only works, but is cool and usable, so that’s what makes Loopt exciting.

Loopt is a Java application that users download to their phone. Once you’ve started to add your friends, you can see them on an on-screen map in real time. Plus you can can send them messages and get alerts when they’re nearby. In other words, Loopt simply gives you all the tools to run your social life.

While it might be vaguely useful for us older folks (everyone over 30 in this context) it’s going to be particularly valuable for the mobile natives who are growing up today. Already kids live their social lives in way that would be unrecognizable to a teen even 10 years ago. No longer do they make plans in the same way as we did in the old days. They make vague commitments to meet “in town” at pretty unspecified times. Then when they get there, they speak to each other via their mobile to hone in on a specific destination and time.

Now Loopt enables them to do all this without the voice element, plus it allows users to update presence information like “in a cafe” or “at the cinema”. This later feature is going to be pretty addictive, as kids everywhere fiendishly keep their latest information up to date.

The biggest issue facing Loopt is that currently they need to launch their product in conjunction with an operator, to get the location feeds. While Boost are to be congratulated for their vision in being the first to market, Loopt can’t really fulfill its fantastic potential until all a user can see all their friends, not just those on the Boost network. Or until the user has persuaded their network of friends to switch operator to get the Loopt tools. I don’t want to be unrealistic, but I really think that for certain users, Loopt is compelling enough to generate a switch, but let’s see what happens.

But if you’re an operator and you want to appeal to a younger audience, get people to use more data and generate income from services other than voice (err…thatll be all the operators in the world then), you should check out Loopt. It’s a location based service that is seriously in danger of being a compelling user application and making some real money.

Declaration of interest: Loopt are also funded by Sequoia Capital, who also funded AdMob (my day job in case you missed it). This is a complete coincidence actually and has nothing to do with my opinions here. I guess you probably know that, but just wanted things to be 100% transparent, as usual.

Posting might be light this week as Russell and I are both at the annual fall CTIA confab in Los Angeles this week. But we’ll have plenty to report, whether we get to it this week or next, so be sure to check back.

David Beers has done a great job of putting together the latest installment of the Carnival of the Mobilists at his Software Everywhere blog, so check it out for the best writing from blogs about mobile technology.