I love the statistics behind an industry, watching trends, and so on. And yesterday saw AppleInsider publish a table from Gartner’s new stats on worldwide smartphone sales in Q1, 2008. It’s only a summary of the top 5 manufacturers, but it makes interesting reading. Nokia are top, of course, with their Symbian-based S60 smartphones selling 14.6 million units in Q1, with a fast-moving RIM in second place on 4.3 million units. And, the point of Apple Insider’s article, Apple are a relatively new entry at number 3, having overtaken all other established smartphone makers to achieve worldwide sales of 1.7 million in the quarter. So that’s HTC, Sharp, Sony Ericsson and Motorola all beaten comfortably by the new contender from Cupertino.
What’s especially notable from the statistics is that Nokia and Apple don’t market their ‘smartphones’ as such.
Instead, the terminology of ‘phone’ is used almost universally by Nokia – at least when they’re not calling their devices ‘multimedia computers’, a term which provokes sympathy from the techies and incomprehension from the general public – while Apple try and use the noun iPhone as much as possible, as if they’ve invented a whole new genre of mobile device. But, when pushed, Apple revert to ‘phone’ as well.
RIM use ‘smartphone’ universally, but my hunch is that they’re riding a wave that’s more or less past and that in time even the Blackberry will ‘just’ be a ‘phone’. Incidentally, if anyone’s wondering about numbers 4 and 5 in the table, they were Sharp and Fujitsu, largely on the back of their Symbian-based MOAP devices in Japan.
While it’s interesting to look just at ‘smartphones’, the definition of what constitutes one seems to vary from week to week. Even Gartner here include the two MOAP devices even though they can’t be expanded with native third party software, one mainstream definition of ‘smart’. The other definition sometimes used is the presence of a qwerty keyboard, but then most of the S60 devices, all of the MOAP ones and the iPhone all get excluded, which is also clearly a bit screwy.
What about spec level? Surely something with 5 megapixel camera, GPS and Wi-Fi deserves to be called smart? Undoubtedly. But that spec now encompasses numerous mainstream phones – it’s not just all about the Nokia N95 anymore.
Up until today, the Apple iPhone didn’t qualify as a smartphone by any of these definitions. That changes with the announcement of next iPhone generation, with third party applications and higher specifications – but in a sense it’s irrelevant, since the very term ‘smartphone’ is now due, I content, for retirement, in the face of an onslaught of features and functions in phones from all manufacturers and from all corners of the globe.
Even native third party application support is no longer critical, with the advent of super-spec, 3D-enabled, GPS-aware and fully web-compatible Java apps that can run more or less fully cross platform.
So, the iPhone isn’t a smartphone any longer. And neither is the Nokia N95. And neither is the Blackberry Bold. And the HTC Touch Diamond. They’re all just phones and may the best device win. This time next year, there will only be one worldwide stats table – for ‘phones’. The good news is that the wider phone market is ten times larger than that for ‘smartphones’, so there’s plenty of room for all. Apple will be happy selling 15 million iPhones by this time next year, Nokia will still be content to sell another 70 million or so S60 phones and I expect RIM to achieve around another 15 million Blackberrys. Microsoft say they want to quadruple sales of Windows Mobile devices, and I’ve no doubt that they’ll hit another 10 million units.
In all, over 100 million very smart ‘phones’, but still only around 10% of the overall market. What about the other 90%? Another 15 to 25% will be made up of high-spec phones that don’t run OS X, S60, Windows Mobile, etc. – functionally equivalent to the iPhone, N95, etc. but perhaps without the depth of platform.
When was the last time you heard a man in the street, a family member or a colleague use the word ‘smartphone’? Thought so. They all, without exception, use the word ‘phone’. Sure, they lust after your iPhone or N95 or Touch Diamond, and they recognise it ‘can do more’. But your hardware is still, in their eyes, part of the same family of devices.
Way to go Apple, today’s announcements will see iPhone sales rise and rise. However…
The smartphone (as we knew it) is dead. Long live the phone!