News

Colour phones -not GPRS - may sell new "mobile terminals"

Mobile data growth in the last year flopped "because GPRS network operators were almost universally unprepared to persuade new or existing end users to upgrade to GPRS terminals," - but colour phones may make users dig into their pockets again, according to a Dataquest report.

The mobile phone market for last year was expected to decline, because prices rose, says the report; and they rose because the operators stopped subsidising the phones heavily. As a result, users bought GSM subscriber identity modules, and plugged them into old phones. This fact was widely anticipated - something which Gartner's Dataquest subsidiary doesn't emphasise in its summary - but which was expected to be offset by a huge growth in mobile data.

Dataquest's Bryan Prohm, senior analyst with the Mobile Communications Worldwide research group, correctly points out that the launch of GPRS phones didn't coincide with a successful launch of group packet radio services.

The main problem was that the network operators weren't entirely honest about GPRS, claiming to have launched them when they didn't have more than very preliminary, experimental networks with very low capacity in small areas; and when they were still wrangling about the details of the standard to be adopted - a factor not emphasised in the Dataquest summary, either.

And a major factor in that has to be complete confusion over pricing policies for packet data, where charges range from a pound per megabyte from some suppliers right up to £20 per megabyte (two pence per kilobyte) from Cellnet in the UK.

The data market also suffered because mobile data terminals (phones or other devices) are still new to purchasers, and devices like the RIM Blackberry and Handspring Treo didn't ship until this year.

Also, they take a lot of groundwork preparation; the Blackberry needs to have a corporate server set up, and linked to the GPRS network, with special software written to extract corporate data from the company's WAN databases and push it out to mobile users.

Dataquest's Prohm suggests that the early high orders for Ericsson's T68 phone may point the way to the next consumer trend - colour displays and larger screens. This week's several announcements from people like Virgin/Playboy and i-mode suppliers in Germany about "soft porn" transmissions of colour images to subscribers certainly point the same way.