Apple’s magic marketing touch has not only convinced the world that it invented the concepts of touchscreens and on-device applications stores, but has made it de rigeur for just about any smartphone maker to embrace these ideas. Without iPhone, there would have been touchscreen devices (LG Prada was the first of the new wave, and perhaps Palm deserves the original credit), but they would not have tumbled on to the market in quite such as rush as this pre-holiday buying season is witnessing. The latest contenders are the much anticipated Nokia Tube musicphone, the impressive LG Renoir cameraphone, and RIM’s first touchscreen, the BlackBerry Storm. All boast slightly different combinations of Apple-busting hardware features, but know that their success will also, increasingly, depend on the web experience ‘ the user interface, the integrated applications and the stores.
Most of these products will debut first in Europe, so we’ll start with Tube, by virtue of Nokia’s influence on this territory, although the handset has been so often previewed that it seems to have been with us for months. It was unveiled in London last week, together with its closely entwined service Comes With Music, an unlimited download offering that has already been emulated by the leading musicphone player, Sony Ericsson, in a blow against iTunes.
The Tube – or 5800 XpressMusic as it is officially known – has been hotly anticipated as Nokia’s first foray into the touchscreen format pioneered by LG and Apple, though the Finnish vendor has played down the significance of the interface, especially outside the US ‘ but accepted it needs the format du jour to improve its chances of a US carrier deal or significant direct sales. The vendor was somewhat hazy on pricing and shipping dates, but the retail price should be €279 ($387) unsubsidized ‘ reasonably competitive with similar phones and the iPhone, though not aggressively so, until you remember that it includes a year’s worth of music via Comes With Music. A recent study by market researchers at TNS Technology revealed that people aged 16 to 64 want to download 64 music tracks a month, which in conventional stores would cost about £600, making the £130-a-year fee for Comes With Music very reasonable, especially if it comes bundled with a phone (and Nokia’s scale means it will have room to move on pricing).
The game changer here is that Nokia is marketing a web service as the primary offering, with a device to drive it, rather than the content being purely a support act for the phone. It is also following its usual approach of keeping a decent margin and positioning its handset by desirability of the associated services and features ‘ in this case music and video capabilities and the downloads offering, not price alone. On the other hand, it has to keep a clear price differential with the more highly specified N96 ‘superphone’.
Comes With Music gives users a year of unlimited, free music that they can keep even once the 12-month subscription period ends. The move will be Nokia’s biggest push into the internet services market to date and will challenge Apple’s dominance of the digital music market, as well as Sony Ericsson’s PlayNow, which is tied into its powerfully branded Walkman phones.
Although the Tube has a strong feature set for a midrange smartphone, a sleek design and the added lure of the unlimited music service, it probably doesn’t have the ‘wow factor’ to be a breakthrough device in the US, where Nokia is struggling to push its share into double digits.
Nokia says it will do a US launch next year, but has not confirmed whether Comes With Music will be an integral part as it is in Europe, and is reportedly considering using a different handset as the vehicle for its unlimited music launch there.
The first markets to see the cellphone will be the UK, Finland, India, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Russia and Spain, but others will have to wait until the new year.
This shows how important emerging markets are to Nokia ‘ it has over 75% market share in India ‘ and how, rather than relying on ultra-low cost handsets, its seeks out the rising middle classes with well priced mediaphones and appealing content.
The handset is the first to feature version 5 of Nokia’s Series 60 user interface, which runs on Symbian OS. This is the first release to support tactile feedback and advanced sensor technology, widening the range of interactive options, such as the ability to silence the phone’s ringer by turning the device upside down.
Over at RIM, the Canadian vendor has announced two key developments this week, both fundamental to its strategy of becoming a mainstream mobile internet/smartphone player and emerging from its email niche. While the markets continue to be nervous about the financial investment required to make this move, RIM is turning out the products to support its goals. Following hard on the heels of its well regarded first 3G phone, BlackBerry Bold, it has now unveiled its first touchscreen, BlackBerry Storm, with its first flip-phone, Pearl Flip, and other consumer driven models to follow. As well as the Storm, which will launch as an exclusive with Vodafone and Verizon Wireless, RIM has outlined plans for its own applications store (see separate item), increasingly trendy for any web devices maker, and aiming to score some points over the current benchmark, Apple’s App Store.
Ironically enough, while RIM stuck to being a one-trick pony, its share value consistently defied all the odds and remained high despite a rising tide of competition in its core mobile email market. No sooner did the Canadian company come out of its comfort zone and start being truly creative, unleashing a string of attractive and innovative devices into the mainstream enterprise and power consumer sectors, than the jitters set in, and the vendor has been struggling against a series of batterings of its stock.
The main negativity about RIM centers on the strategy of moving into the smartphone mainstream, where it will have to spend large sums to develop well differentiated devices and to market them to carriers and consumers ‘ and where it is going up against the handset giants head-on rather than lurking in a niche that it still dominates. Combined with economic uncertainty in the developed markets where RIM thrives, the nervousness is justified ‘ but if quality and inventiveness of product strategy could alone win the day, RIM deserves to bounce back (and that is something we never said in all the push email years, when its demise often seemed long overdue).
The two new developments this week highlight how sophisticated is RIM’s new-look strategy, going well beyond pretty devices or the single ‘killer app’ of its heritage. The company has announced a general objective of making its smartphone the hub of a user’s whole digital media and communications experience, integrating the ‘four screens’ of the converged web (cellphone, landphone, PC and TV). This is nothing new ‘ Nokia has been preaching the same mantra for years ‘ but RIM is turning out the devices to support its difficult task of punching above its weight in the over-competitive mobile webphone sector. It is also showing promising signs of understanding the even more important driver of competitive edge in this nascent market ‘ the software experience, in terms of the user interface and the available applications. This is a far more difficult challenge for a device maker, though RIM does have the benefit of a deep understanding of pushing tailored content to users.
The Storm device is now out in public, trying to make itself visible amid the hailstorm of excitement surrounding Android G1, iPhone 3G, Tube, LG Renoir and Dare, and so on. Like all smaller players, RIM has had to go the extra mile to push its product up into the ranks of the big hitters, and has not just simultaneously launched versions for CDMA and GSM/HSPA carriers, but developed a dual-mode GSM/CDMA system that, like the BlackBerry World Edition enterprise handset, switches automatically between the two networks for international roaming.
The product will be in stores in November, in time for the key holiday purchasing period, though once again US consumers on GSM networks will be denied this choice for a while at least ‘ while AT&T struggles to get the Bold onto its HSPA system, Verizon Wireless has the exclusive on Storm, running on CDMA, and the first 3G BlackBerry for this network. Its co-parent Vodafone will have first call on the Storm in Europe, running on its W-CDMA/HSPA networks.
Verizon Wireless has been pre-marketing Storm heavily, highlighting RIM’s role as the main alternative to the iPhone for CDMA carriers. RIM has not announced pricing yet but the new device is likely to be in the $150-$200 range in the US, with 18-month or 24-month contract, putting it up against G1 and Instinct, and rather below the ‘superphones’ like Bold. In Europe, there should be more opportunities to get a Storm for free, given the intense competition for customers’ mobile data contracts. Vodafone UK says it will offer the device free for customers who sign for a two-year contract with a £35 ($62) per month data tariff.
Storm has a 3.25-inch screen, just smaller than the iPhone’s 3.5 inches, and is designed to be more rugged, which adds about 16% to its weight compared to the Apple rival. Other potential negatives are lack of Wi-Fi ‘ which RIM says is an unnecessary drain on battery life, and less in demand now that 3G offers wide coverage and flat rates.
ClickThrough is an alternative to haptic feedback, which in turn improved on the original touchscreens, which had no feedback to the finger touch. ClickThrough makes the experience on the Storm clearly different from that on iPhone, G1, Samsung Omnia and others. It consists of a suspension system that lies beneath the display, and most early reviewers have liked the accuracy ‘ but said it takes some getting used to, especially for existing touchscreen users. True to its heritage, RIM does seem to have conquered the major challenge for touchscreens, their inadequacy for heavy email or texting users ‘ even without a physical keyboard like Omnia has. The Storm has a built-in accelerometer to automatically rotate the screen depending on whether it is being held vertically or horizontally.
On the multimedia side, the Storm is adequate rather than in the league of the N96, supporting a 3.2megapixel camera with video, flash and autofocus; Media Sync software for synchronizing iTunes files; and the media player can handle various formats like MP3, AAC, WMA, WMV, MPEG4 and H.264.
Finally, among the big three touchscreens of the week, there is the LG Renoir. Like many of the Korean supplier’s high end products, it blows away most of the competition in its features and innovations, but will still have to struggle to make as much noise as Apple, Google or Nokia. And in the US, this is likely to be one more HSPA superphone that consumers will not be able to choose, as the two W-CDMA carriers increasingly highlight just a few homegrown models (see separate item).
The Renoir, more officially known as the KC910, is a slim (under 14mm) touchscreen handset that matches the much vaunted eight megapixel camera in Samsung’s recently launched i850. The camera, and therefore imaging and video applications, are the key focus on the Renoir (the name chosen because of the famous painter’s skill with light ‘ and another of LG’s attempts to use European referenced brand names to emphasize that it is now a global, not a Korean, phonemaker). Like Nokia with the N95/96, LG is surrounding its megapixels with fine photo features, putting clear water between its handset and the iPhone, which has only managed a mediocre camera.
The Renoir will sport Schneider-Kreuznach certified optics, a Xenon flash, auto and manual focus, sensitivity up to ISO 1600 and geotagging. It also boasts a first in phones, the Touch Shot feature, which allows the user to focus on any object simply by touching it on the screen, with the shutter firing automatically once the finger is removed, reducing shake.
Other features include HSDPA and Wi-Fi connectivity plus Assisted-GPS. It is the successor to the Viewty, a image/mobile TV optimized model. The handset will ship in main European territories this month and in east Asia, Latin America and Russia in November, with China and the Middle East to follow in January. North American launches do not seem to be on the agenda.
What has not yet been previewed is the user interface for the Renoir, and this element is increasingly vital in differentiating a smartphone, regardless of its hardware gizmos, from its rivals. LG should benefit from the increasing importance of the UI, since it has invested large amounts of R&D in this area, and drawn on the experience of the highly advanced Korean mobile internet market. LG famously put a touchscreen into a mainstream smartphone before Apple did (and had some legal actions against the US company over alleged pilfering of technologies from the LG Prada touchscreen handset).
LG has had an uphill battle establishing its brand outside its traditional strongholds of CDMA and Korea, but has made major breakthroughs in Europe in the past few years, as operators like Vodafone look for the next big web optimized gadget. Worldwide, it regularly swaps places with Sony Ericsson for the fourth/fifth positions in the handset rankings, and like its larger rival Samsung, has Motorola in its sights. Although a big hitter in terms of hardware and multimedia innovation, and with strong experience of the demanding Korean mobile web consumer and carrier, it has yet to score a branding coup on a par with Apple’s or Nokia’s, and it is behind the curve in terms of delivering web services, application stores or developer programs.