Simple phones still dominate the market
By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 05 January 2010, 14:39 IST   |    4 Comments
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Simple phones still dominate the market
Bangalore: The craze for the smartphones may be on all time high, but majority of the phones used around the world are still normal cheaper phones. According to data from the Nielsen Company, roughly 82 percent of cellphones in use are limited-function phones, the kind that typically sell for less than $50 or are given away with a two-year service contract. These simple phones, also called as feature phones are improving in quality and standard. "Feature phones are migrating away from the tiny screens that characterized their dominance in the era of the Motorola Razr," said Ross Rubin, an industry analyst with the NPD Group, a market research company. "They have more sophisticated operating systems, touch screens and bigger screens." Sleek offerings from Samsung, LG and Motorola have attracted the attention of entrepreneurs and software companies hoping to market functions similar to those found on the iPhone. One phone, the LG Vu, for example, has a three-inch touch screen with "haptic feedback" so the user feels a response when tapping on the screen, a 2-megapixel camera and up to four gigabytes of external memory - enough to fit hundreds of additional applications. Another, the Motorola Clutch, has a Web browser, support for GPS functions and is Bluetooth enabled. These phones typically come loaded with a simple suite of applications selected by the carrier, like puzzle games, a mobile e-mail application, a navigation application and an instant-messaging client. "These companies are trying to raise the bar from the lowest common denominator," Rubin said. One may think that majority of the developers are now focused on making applications for the app store of Nokia, Apple and others. But this fact may not be entirely tru considering the reach of smart phones as opposed to feature phones. So many companies have continued to make applications for feature phones. One such company, GetJar, offers about 60,000 applications for nearly 2,000 different mobile phones, including the Motorola Rokr. Feature phone users can find YouTube, Tetris, the restaurant locator Urbanspoon and a range of expense-tracking and calorie-counting apps. But just because consumers have simple cellphones doesn't mean they don't want Facebook, Wikipedia or a popular instant-messaging application like Nimbuzz on their phones, says Ilja Laurs, Chief Executive of GetJar, which is based in San Mateo, California, and Lithuania. "Everyone wants apps, but not everyone can afford an iPhone," Laurs said. At the end of December 2009, the company said nearly 55 million applications were being downloaded each month, an increase of 260 percent from the period a year earlier. "We're on track to hit a billion total downloads in about two months," Laurs said. "For every top 100 apps you hear about, there are literally tens of thousands of additional apps that never make it to any top lists because of the noisy environment of an app store," he said. These niche applications, he said, have the potential for success on a site like GetJar, which caters to a broad set of phone users outside the iPhone or Android-powered system. About a third of GetJar's traffic comes from smartphones, the company said, and the rest is from feature phones.

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