Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Cell Phone Market Research Tip

I was watching a commercial sometime over the weekend for the new mobile phone from Verizon they're calling Chocolate. Now Shannon doesn't understand why the phone is called Chocolate, she says just because it's dark and such just doesn't justify calling the phone Chocolate, but that's another story.

So anyway, I'm watching this commercial and it's all about getting updates and news alerts and all that junk on your cell phone, because that's what the major cell phone companies think their users want. I have news for you, YOU'RE WRONG.

Yes, I'm talking to you Cingular, Verizon, Sprint.

In today's market it's not about getting information from cold corporate 3rd parties (other than ring tones) to your phone, it's about capturing your own content. Phones that allow users to capture parts of their lives (taking pictures, texting, instant messaging, mobile blogging [moblogging], etc...) are where it's at.

Why do you think MySpace is so popular? It's because they've made it easy for the youth of today to capture their lives online. Second to that is the ability to connect with their friends, the key is that anyone with any level of technical ability can put whatever they want out there into the ether. The best cell phone / mobile phone networks realize that and will move in that direction. Personally, that's why I want a new phone that takes good pics (easy to upload to my blog & flickr) and a decent qwerty keyboard (easy to blog, IM, and email). The ability of it to play music doesn't really matter to me. Other than my ringer (mp3 version of Weezer's Hashpipe), I don't care that my phone has iTunes on it. When I was using the Sprint Ambassador phone, I only tried out the cable tv stuff to see what it was like, I'd never use that in a real world scenario.

The other key item is high speed internet access on the mobile network. I remember when the people working in our yard cut the cable running into the house, I was able to use the Sprint phone for internet access and was getting 400kbps upload and download speeds - much faster than my average roadrunner connection at the house. Now that's pretty powerful, when you can use your cell phone to not only capture your life, but to also backup your high speed internet connection at home... I hope the cell phone manufacturers and networks are listening cause I'm spittin the troof.

By Jason Dowdell at 07:17 AM | Comments (2)

(2) Thoughts on Cell Phone Market Research Tip

I agree completely. Make the phone that sounds good first and foremost. I don't need all the bells and whistles and I sure don't want to be stuck to your propriotary technology *cough* Verizon *cough* in order to get ringtones, pictures or use different accesories with it.

its getting a little out of hand IMO.

Comments by Evan : Tuesday, September 05, 2006 at 08:54 AM

I completely agree. The other day I discovered a very nice website called https://zyb.com/. It’s a free online phone backup service that offers not only backup but some other features as well. Unfortunately, I never succeeded to sync my phone. On contacting zyb I came to know that there are few operators who do not allow using 3rd party applications. It’s so pathetic.

Comments by molli : Monday, September 18, 2006 at 04:59 AM

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