The world of the mobile phone has come on a lot in the last few years. You don’t just use it to talk to someone. Now you can send and receive text messages, take pictures and little videos. The latest addition is music, as evidenced in the launch of the Motorola ROKR and the Sony Walkman W800.
Swiss pen knife
In other words, the mobile phone is fast becoming an all-in-one gadget that gives you messaging, pictures, video, Internet access and music. It really is fast becoming all-singing and all-dancing. Faced with the growing sophistication and wide choice of mobile phones available, it can be hard to decide what model is right for you, but it’s a safe bet the people doing the selling will have one that suits your needs.
Price dictates
Ask any operator and they’ll tell you the same thing. People make their decision based on three main issues: the price of calls, of texts and the handset. Even those providing 3G services agree. “People look at the style of the phone, the cost and the tariffs,” says Graeme Slattery, head of communications at 3Ireland.
Aesthetics
Chris Stewart, business account manager at Motorola Ireland, agrees that price “is hugely important. Look and design is the second most important factor”. He points out that in the pre-pay market it is important to have a phone priced at EUR*99 or below. “In pre-pay, 30 per cent of the market is taken up by phones at EUR*99 or less.”
Prices of phones range from as little as EUR*9 to over EUR*300 and your choice of phone can be affected by the decision over what service and tariff you want. Some phones are only available if you sign up to a contract. Prices can also vary depending on which deal you opt for. As an example, 3Ireland offers six different 3G phones to customers – the price of the cheapest phone varies from EUR*9 if you opt for the EUR*60 a month tariff to EUR*89 with the EUR*25 tariff.
There are phones for all tastes. Motorola has a pink phone, the Pink V220, which is sold through O2 stores. In October, the phone was sold out. “There’s obviously a pink market,” says Stewart. Another very successful model is the ultra-thin V3 RAZR. “It has sold more than some models which are cheaper because the design is unique. There’s nothing like it on the market.” The RAZR is an example of where look and design has made an impact.
Shop around
Beyond the phone itself, there are the obvious issues of cost of calls and text that apply equally to those considering pre-pay and those opting for a contract. It’s really a case of shopping around and deciding which charge scheme best suits your needs – with some placing the emphasis on text messages, for example, and others offering talk time – and there’s plenty to choose from.
Third generation
Vodafone and 3Ireland also make much of the fact that they offer 3G networks and services to prospective customers. For those of you unfamiliar with 3G, it effectively gives mobile phone users broadband-like download speeds, enabling them to download video and music on to their handsets. Vodaone and 3Ireland are already offering sports highlights packages, full music track downloads, games and other content to 3G users.
According to Cara Twohig, corporate affairs at Vodafone, a “very healthy proportion” of handsets it sells are 3G. Although she can’t give figures, citing confidentiality, an idea of the strength of the market is provided by Motorola which reveals it has sold over 20,000 3G V1050 clamshell handsets since the launch of the product in June.
Content critical
Music and sports are driving the take up for people in Ireland, she adds. In Vodafone’s case, this means highlights of Barclay’s premiership football, UEFA Champions League, GAA and Heineken European Cup Rugby.
It has also launched a 15 minute music magazine programme, fronted by Dave Fanning, called Access Music TV, which will feature interviews with artists, live footage from gigs and reviews. There are plans for 26 episodes, one every fortnight, and Vodafone claims it is “the only Irish mobile music TV proposition in Ireland”.
Welcome to 3
Rival 3Ireland offers many sports highlights packages and other content, including news and comedy clips, for free, but charges EUR*2 for full length music video downloads and EUR*2 for full track audio downloads.
Music is being viewed as an important future market for the mobile phone, but it’s still in the early stages right now. For example, the two most high-profile music phones, the Sony Walkman W800 and Motorola ROKR, don’t have the capacity to download music tracks over the air. Instead, they rely on people putting tracks onto their PC and then transferring it to the phone.
The Sony Walkman W900, announced in October, will let you download tracks over the air, but it’s not available here until the early part of next year (too late for Santa!).
Track limit
You can download music onto other phones, but most of them don’t have the storage capacities offered by the Sony and Motorola models. This inevitably means a limit of eight or 10 tracks for the majority of phones. There’s also the issue, in Vodafone’s case at least, that once the tracks are on the phone, they can’t be moved anywhere else. So either you keep them forever or you’ll have to erase them to make way for another track. 3Ireland got around this problem recently by introducing a dual download service, allowing people who download a track over the air onto their phone to also download it from a Web site onto their PC.
Who needs 3G?
There are some who suggest the availability of 3G isn’t a big issue. That’s the argument presented by Meteor, which doesn’t have a 3G network at the moment. David McLaughlan, product development specialist, argues its customers aren’t asking for 3G services. “It won’t be a selection criterion in terms of choosing a network,” he claims. You could argue that he would say that. Meteor launched Meteor Stuff in October, a range of content including ringtones, video clips, games, graphics, news, weather and sport. Customers are also able to browse downloadable content for free. They only pay when they decide to purchase.
Meteor argues that’s what most customers want. “2.5G is sufficient for most people,” says a spokeswoman, “for our customers, it’s what they’re looking for and what they’re asking for.”
Introducing I-mode
O2 has taken a different approach, with the introduction of an Internet service known as I-mode. In this model, you can access and browse a wide range of web-like information and services from over 80 content providers. For example, you can book flights on Aer Arann, send flowers with Interflora and make a mortgage application to AIB.
I-mode, which is primarily targeted at 25 to 45 year olds, claims to offer “the broadest range of content available over a mobile phone.” Every handset also offers the ability to send and receive e-mails with attachments.
O2 points to the large number of homes in Ireland without Internet access (over 60 per cent), many of whom don’t have a PC and won’t buy one because they think it is too expensive, as potential customers for the service.
Download charge
Users are charged only on what they download, not for the time they spend online. Most sites are free but some require a subscription. All e-mail is free until the end of March 2006. The main I-mode handset is the NEC 343i, also known as the ‘nano phone’. O2 has just added the Samsung s500i as well. The NEC phone costs EUR*29 for contract customers and EUR*89 for pay as you go. Samsung’s version costs EUR*29 and EUR*239 for pay as you go.
Talk and text only
As we’ve seen, the functionality in mobile phones and the services provided through them are increasing all the time. But for those of you who want to return to simpler times when mobile phones weren’t all singing and dancing but purely for making phone calls and sending texts, Vodafone has introduced the Simply range. The two handsets have large, easy-to-read screens; bigger buttons for commonly used features such as key-pad lock and ringer volume; a phone book manager and a flashing blue light to indicate missed calls and new text messages.
They are free to customers signing up to an 18 month contract (post-paid), from EUR*49 with a 12 month contract and EUR*129 for pay as you go customers.
The diversity of the mobile phone market and the wide range of models and services available means that Santa should be able to find something to suit most people this Christmas.
Memory matters
The next step in music for mobile phones is higher capacity handsets that can also download tracks over the air. The Sony Walkman W900 from Sony Ericsson, for example, has 470 MB capacity, enough for up to 240 songs, but it can be increased to as much as 2 GB with a Memory Stick Pro Duo. Music can be downloaded over the air or from a PC.
Given Sony’s music industry background, it’s interesting to see the way in which the phone is being positioned as a music device in its own right. To this end, Sony Ericsson has also introduced a music cable, which enables people to connect the phone to their stereo. It has also launched the Home Audio System MDS-70, a phone cradle which connects to a set of speakers, allowing the user to “nest the phone in the cradle, press Play and enjoy the full, rich sound that is synonymous with Sony home Hi-Fi products”. Unfortunately, the speakers won’t be available in Ireland until early next year.
At this point, people might be struck by functional similarities with a certain little white device from Apple. Richard Dorman, marketing director at Sony Ericsson, says there’s “still a way to go for mobile manufacturers to catch up with what Apple’s done” but points out that in terms of convenience “a mobile phone is something you’ll always have with you”.
A side effect of the increasing requirement for mobile phones to store music and video is that the memory requirements are going up. Chris Stewart, business account manager at Motorola, says all phones shipping for Christmas should have 64 MB or have a 64 MB card in the box. Next year, the memory capacity of some phones could increase to 1 GB. The ROKR, for example, has 512 MB.
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