Business 2.0 has a piece on what we can expect from 3G phones of the near future. This part of the article covers the specific areas of functionality that are in the works.

This is going to be a very interesting sector of industry to watch. The phone business has become enormous. Over the last few years as phones have increased their functionality they have quietly changed the face of a number of business and sectors. e.g. Minolta, one of the most enduring camera brands, no longer makes cameras. They shuttered that part of the company earlier this year. Why? Because of phones that are cameras. The music industry that only a year or so ago was reeling because of Napster and P2P picked up all the losses from piracy from new media income. And it wasn't from iTunes. That represents a drop in the bucket. The real pick up in revs was from ring tones, ring back tones.

Last year Motorola alone, which is about 13% of the global phone business, sold about 200 Million phones.

At the same time the phone carriers are reeling from the advent of VOIP and in particular Skype. It has made the old fixed line network revenue pretty much worthless. If not now, then very soon this will be the case. But the mobile phone services that they supply are extremely profitable.

So think about this. You put together the clout of the telcos and the momentum that they can  create together with the clout of the phone device companies and their need to keep on getting people to upgrade and what do you get…. Oh and I forgot to mention the sunken capital for the purchase of the bandwidth  spectrum from the various governments….

So it is a recipe for creating a global marketing push that will be a juggernaut.

This will tend to drive a huge amount of R&D spend over the next three years. Battery technology to enable longer life, chip technologies for greater speed, lower power etc, screen resolution for brighter picture…. as well as all the technologies that have driven the Internet over the last 10 years needing to be ported over to a new platform.

This is going to be the driver for the next major goldrush of our times.

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Posted in Main Page by Chris Gilbey No Comments Yet