The race to the middle

The race for the high-end smartphone is over.

Quite simply, between Blackberry, Android and iPhone the market is essentially tied up. If you speak to the owner of any of those platforms they’ll basically defend their choices to the death. However, those devices certainly aren’t cheap enough for everyone to afford and you could argue that the market of people that would buy a high-end smartphone is saturated and everyone already has made their choice.

The new battle it seems is for the middle end of the market or if you’d have to be specific (at least in South Africa), the R150 a month or for those with dubious credit records about R3500 to outright buy the phone.

This week saw the release (or at least the announcement) of both the Microsoft Kin devices and the Nokia C3,C6 and E5. These devices feature smaller screens than high-end smartphones, a resistive rather than capacitive touch screen (if there is a touchscreen) and at best an 8 gig memory that usually comes in the form of an SD card not an internal memory. Wifi and GPS seem fairly standard. The Nokia devices run Symbian, an operating system I’d define as smart but not in Android territory quite yet and the Microsoft phones come with their own unique subset of Windows Mobile 7 that seems smart enough if not stripped down. While I’m fascinated that phone companies are trying to get to the middle of the market I think they’re going about it totally wrong.

You see, these phones are generally around two years behind in terms of current high-end specs of a phone, roughly the length of a modern day cellphone contract. My theory is that manufacturers shouldn’t even bother wasting their money developing devices for the middle and low end of the market but rather devote all their time and resources to creating the most amazing, high end phones (in various form factors such as QWERTY and touch) and then every year these new models. Basically you’d have a range of phones released once a year that would serve everyones needs. In order to to service everyone else what was high-end one year becomes middle of the range the year afterwards and then becomes slightly lower end the year after. Apple is doing this to a small extent by still offering the iPhone 3G but the price difference between that and the iPhone 3GS is actually fairly negligible that the 3GS is a no brainier.

I’ll give you a perfect example: I’m due for an upgrade on my Nokia E71, a phone I’ve loved and still love due to its great range of features. Now instead of pushing this phone down into the mid range buyer the phone will be phased out in favour of their new range of mid level phones. It’s both environmentally and financially wasteful considering how great a phone the E71 is in terms of hardware and in terms of software, Symbian has hardly changed or could be updated with a firmware update.

This system is not only great for the consumer in that they’ll have better technology diffused down to them faster but for developers of apps they’ve got an easier job in that they know they’ve got a steady stream of devices to create apps for.  Of course we don’t live in a world where people like the same devices and everyone has different tastes. I’d recommend catering for the most popular subsets of people.

Will this happen? Unlikely as this would take years to get diffused down from high-end to low-end. If I were a high-end cellphone manufacturer I’d stop production of middle and low end phones in order to sell my “old” designs to the middle of the market.

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