Mobile World Congress offered the usual flurry of product announcements and commentary. In part one of this roundup, I looked at the smartphone trends and the big players at MWC. In this instalment, I move the spotlight to the state of the tablet market at MWC, and the app marketplaces, since the software side is now playing a much bigger role at each Mobile World Congress.
Tablets: growing fast but still Apple's game
Tablets are a fixture at MWC now, and the segments are starting to overlap somewhat, with several phone/tablet crossover devices entering the market at MWC, like Samsung's Galaxy Note and Asus's Padfone.
The tablet market has been Apple's playing field for a couple of years, with the iPad completely dominating, but a couple of challengers are starting to make Android's presence felt. Amazon's Kindle Fire, with its low price and dedicated Amazon store, immediately won 14% of the market, while the iPad dropped from 64% to 57% (but expect it to jump back up when the iPad 3 is on the shelves).
Other tablet players, like RIM's PlayBook and HP's late TouchPad, haven't managed to make progress at all. That may change: RIM surprised observers with PlayBook 2.0, a software upgrade fixing many of the problems with the first cut. The new version has been receiving positive reviews and may establish a solid niche for RIM in the tablet space, with the PlayBook's attractive pricing on par with the successful Kindle Fire.
Google, meanwhile, has been open in acknowledging that its tablet suite has not been able to stand toe-to-toe with Apple, and promised to do better.
Mobile World Congress offered apps aplenty for enterprise users and consumers both. A large part of what drives tablet and smartphone adoption is the extent of the app marketplace available for each platform. There are two key factors here: availability for users and profitability for developers.
Chris Ross, managing executive commercial development at Vodacom, loves apps. “Network operators love app stores because they drive bandwidth. We can find more reasons for you to use your phone and use data; all I have to do is introduce you to an app store. We even launched our own app store to make it easier. You can just use your phone account to buy Android apps or Java apps for feature phones. We've done over a million downloads already. And we'll have BlackBerry apps shortly too.”
Users, meanwhile, are winning from greater bandwidth availability, driving down their bandwidth costs despite growing usage, he says.
Manufacturers have also stepped up to encourage app adoption, such as Samsung's own store enabling app purchases by SMS.
Google's app store has grown massively in the number of available apps, about half a million at the time of writing this, catching up with Apple's, which broke that barrier some time ago.
But the sheer number of apps is becoming less relevant: a small subset of truly widespread killer apps outpace the rest, and app developers are increasingly targeting both iOS and Android - it doesn't make sense to exclude so many millions of potential users on either side.
What matters is that Apple's app store is far more profitable for developers. As the universe of Android users grows, revenue from paid apps and ad services could climb, but for now the prevailing developer sentiment is that in general, iOS is profitable and Android is an investment.
Malware is also a worry. Apple's iron grip on its walled garden frustrates users and developers alike, but does weed out potentially dangerous apps early. Android has been plagued by scares of malicious apps, most of which seek to capture personal data or direct the unwitting user to premium-rate services.
Even though Apple doesn't officially take part at MWC, so strong is the company's influence that any product announced is almost immediately compared to its iEquivalent. Although numerous Android tablets hit the shelves at MWC, it was Apple's iPad 2 which took home the Best Tablet award.
The mobile landscape is rapidly coming to resemble the PC-versus-Apple marketplace. The similarities are striking: PCs covered a broad base from budget machine to high-end powerhouse, sported a broader range of software and peripherals, and tended to be criticised for inferior user experience. Sound familiar? It's Android vs iPhone. In the PC vs Apple world, there wasn't much room for a third player: Amiga, anyone? Similarly, Microsoft and RIM have to fight for their place at the mobile table. Microsoft has a great new mobile OS and partners with solid technology, and is likely to be a contender. RIM needs something, possibly a miracle, to pull itself back into contention.
Apple is not blind to the market share possibilities of low-cost devices, and made deep price cuts for the first time with the launch of the iPhone 4S, by reducing the price of earlier models. With the target price for budget Android models below $100, that's probably not a market Apple will want to play in for long.
The PC-vs-Mac, broadbase-vs-premium relationship looks well set for the phone market. Android is winning the device market share numbers game, but Apple's profit margin on its sizeable niche is so healthy that it faces no threat, as long as it still has the support of both its loyal fans, and the developer community.
On the network side, Mobile World Congress was all about high-speed mobile networks. LTE wireless networks are being aggressively rolled out across the world to support fast data transfers and applications such as video streaming. Spain's Telef'onica, although it is not yet operating a commercial LTE network, used MWC to demonstrate LTE offering 100mbps downloads to mobile devices.
Network operators love app stores because they drive bandwidth. We can find more reasons for you to use your phone and use data; all I have to do is introduce you to an app store
Chris Ross, managing executive commercial development at Vodacom
LTE announcements at MWC included carrier equipment from WiFi hotspot bridges to micro-cells, and several handsets, among them ZTE's PF200 and N910, and a range of NEC devices including a dual-screen folding model. Expect LTE adoption, by networks and users, to follow in the footsteps of 3G and HSPA - the market's demand for more mobile bandwidth is insatiable.
All the South African network operators have active LTE trials in place, but deployment is hindered by the question of spectrum reallocation currently before ICASA, a process now spanning several years, and which is proving frustratingly slow and complex to resolve.
Next up in part 3 - the roll call of products at MWC: 41 megapixel cameras in cellphones? Built in projectors? Three-way transformers? Check, check, and check.
Share