The mobile phone recession?

A Gizmodo author wrote a sobering analysis in Popular Mechanics of the CTIA conference on the wireless industry this week:

It's been nearly a year since the Apple fanboys first camped out to scoop up eBay-bound iPhones, and the biggest mobile players are still trying—and failing—to mount a serious challenge to its dominance of consumers' hearts and minds. While Apple was a trade show no-show for the annual wireless and telecom industry showcase here, I've been feeling their pulse pretty much everywhere while reporting live from the trenches at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

It's the trend that just won't die: Cellphone powerhouses are still forcing themselves to play catch-up to the new guy. In fact, it's become almost impossible to look at any of the major new handsets unveiled at CTIA or through our revolving gadget doors at Gizmodo without being reminded of the iPhone. While in some cases this is merely because Apple has cast such a long shadow, it's more often because other companies are intentionally mimicking the look and feel of Apple's year-old device.

My take of the slow CTIA show is actually much simpler: nine months is not long enough for competing vendors to reverse engineer and certify a true iPhone competitor. The result: we're still seeing phones that were designed based on the original descriptions of the iPhone from January 2007, not on actual iPhone experiences. And while I think the iPhone will actually be very challenging to imitate successfully, it's too early to claim competitors will completely fail.

The result: I don't expect a mobile phone recession. But Research In Motion's earnings results announced last night do reflect a trend we can expect: profit compression due to lower prices. With consumers struggling to pay mortgage and credit card bills, I think we will see many vendors cut their prices and margins on mobile phone handsets to entice those cash-strapped consumers. The only problem: price cutting almost never works as a long-term strategy.

At the end of the day, handset vendors will win and lose on innovation and brand value. Those that choose to compete on low prices will engage in a race to bankruptcy, not success. And if you need proof of that fact, just go ask Motorola how competing on mobile phone prices without innovation worked out for them.

Check the calendar to understand RIM/Microsoft and other deals

No, hell isn't freezing over, and Research In Motion isn't going Windows. Despite a posting at briefing.com claiming RIM is introducing a Windows Mobile-based Blackberry, CNBC did some fact checking and discovered it is an April Fool's joke. Joining this story are similar rumors on Microsoft adopting the iPhone OS (hah! No.), Apple adopting Windows Mobile (hah hah! No.), and Google and Richard Branson sponsoring a manned mission to Mars (hah hah hah..... maybe? No.)

Today is not a good day to be reading the news a skepticism deficit. You have been warned.

How many outages can a Blackberry user stand?

Boy, how many more Blackberry outages will it take before businesses start providing negative feedback to Research In Motion (RIM) in the form of cancellations? Your guess is as good as mine. But given that this weekend's outage makes three in the last year, RIM has some explaining to do to its customer base.

Fun drives iPhone inevitability?

I found that this article by Matt Asay on CNET.com that claims The inevitability of the iPhone struck a chord with me. Specifically:

The iPhone "just works," and then some. I thought I wouldn't be able to type on the iPhone without tactile feedback. I was wrong. I'm actually faster on the iPhone than I ever was on the Blackberry, and that's with only an hour of "training." I thought I would miss a host of things with my Blackberry, but I haven't. Instead, I've been blown away by the innovative use of gestures and the user interface. I resisted the iPhone for a year or so, but looking back it was inevitable that I'd end here. It is the best-designed phone that I've ever seen or used.

As someone who is carrying both a Blackberry and an iPhone with him nowadays, I'm struck by how different the two experiences are. Not surprisingly, when I use the Blackberry, it feels like work; when I use the iPhone, it's fun. We'll see if that persists when the iPhone grows enterprise email access, but I suspect it will. After all, what good is an Anywhere device if you avoid using it because it feels too much like work?

How the iPhone SDK is reshaping mobile application development

Eugene Signorini, Andrew Jaquith, and I wrote a Yankee Group Decision Note analyzing the Apple iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) announcement last week; clients will probably see it in our published research sometime next week. But despite that note being more than 2,000 words, I'm still finding new insights from other writers on the topic. Today's harvest includes some commentary from Michael Mace, who declares that Apple gets it right. Michael's been on my mobile Web Sites interview list because he's an authority on many aspects of the mobile market and business strategy, and I think his comments on the intersection of mobile apps and the iPhone are particularly interesting:

I think it's likely that web apps will eventually displace most native mobile apps, because the addressable market will be so much larger. But eventually can take a long time, and if anyone can buck the trend it'll be Apple. They have created by far the best overall proposition for mobile developers on any platform in the US or Europe, and I hope they'll do very well for a long time.

Apple is challenging the rest of the mobile industry to compete on its terms. It will be very interesting to see how the other mobile vendors react, Nokia and Microsoft in particular. Nokia seems to be focused on a strategic positioning activity around seeing who can collect the most runtimes, while Apple is solving real developer and user problems. It's a striking contrast.