Posted on 02/03/2004 8:07:46 AM PST by El Conservador
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - As a fashion color, gray is the new black, thin batteries are in and you're not in vogue if you don't have the latest ringtone.
As the U.S. wireless market grows, the cell phone is evolving into a phone in name only as calling becomes almost secondary to a host of other functions.
After years of trailing Japan and Western Europe, where cell phones have long had color screens, e-mail, music, video games, cameras and other accessories that make American cell phones look backward in comparison, handset makers are finally pushing a new generation of units on the domestic market that offer the full range of functions available elsewhere.
"From the consumer perspective ... it makes no sense to go for a low-end handset," ABI Research analyst Kenil Vora said. "The definition of low-end shifts from monochrome handsets to phones with a little bit of something on it."
Qualcomm Inc., whose CDMA (news - web sites) network technologies serve as the basis for two of the four largest wireless carriers in the United States, said recently its rapid growth was being driven by demand for phones supporting features like color screens, cameras and multimedia capabilities.
Such features -- once considered "advanced" -- are now increasingly mainstream, especially as prices fall. CDMA-compatible phones with color screens can be had for as little as $30 and with cameras for $100.
Texas Instruments Inc. said last week the greatest part of its sales growth was coming from a heated demand for wireless technology, including processors that let phones run multimedia applications.
As prices fall and demand rises, Qualcomm Chief Operating Officer Tony Thornley told Reuters recently, the market for plain old phones -- no color, no camera, no music or downloadable games -- is drying up in the United States.
"I think that that part of the market is going to decline quite rapidly," he said. "I think black-and-white screens are going to go the way of the black-and-white television very rapidly."
The cameras in the new generation of phones in particular are improving -- Thornley said Qualcomm's roadmap for its chips supports resolutions of 4 megapixels by 2005, and predicted that flash and zoom would become increasingly common. Most cameraphones now use 0.3 megapixel cameras.
In the coming years, Thornley said, the most simple of phones were only likely to have any kind of market share in places like India and Latin America, where low-cost cellular is crucial.
CELL PHONE NO LONGER
Qualcomm is not the only company seeing such a shift. Motorola Inc., the world's second-largest cell phone maker, has said that the landscape is changing.
"Certainly, the whole concept of cell phones is no longer," Chief Executive Ed Zander said on a recent conference call. "It's becoming an information appliance and you're adding the kind of capabilities -- Web access and the kind of camera capability and some of the future products -- (so that) consumers are looking at this thing as more than just making a phone call."
Brokerage Smith Barney recently estimated that, entering 2004, half of all cell phones shipped would have color displays, and citing IDC, said as many as 100 million camera phones would be shipped in the year.
The changes can be seen already in the inventory of the four largest U.S. carriers.
Verizon Wireless, a joint venture of Verizon Communications and Vodafone Group Plc, has only two non-color, under-$100 phones on its Web site. Cingular Wireless, a joint venture of SBC Communications Inc and BellSouth Corp., offers three. AT&T Wireless Services Inc. has two and Sprint PCS Group has none.
ABI's Vora said that with major handset makers like Samsung Electronics and Nokia (news - web sites) already shipping anywhere from 50 percent to 90 percent of their phones in color, monochrome looked to die out worldwide by 2008.
Every time I go to school, both at UMSL and WU, and I see people with shiny, color-screen, camera-included, Web-capable phones make me want to switch.
I'm on a budget, but I think I'll eventually get one of the new phones.
I firmly believe that murdering someone whose phone rings in the movies should be considered justifiable homicide.
1100 minutes a month, plus 3000 nights and weekends, with long distance included after 7:00 PM. All that for 55 bucks a month.
That's two phones. It's a deal SBC can't come close to.
L
The only phone that appealed to me had a camera. I walked out, to wait for another phone without a camera to be introduced.
Most of my clients have strict policies against cameras on the premises. Cell phones with cameras are also prohibited.
A cell-phone left in my car isn't very useful to me.
Exactly what I've got. Now, I see them in bubble pack at 7-11, sold as 'pre-paid phones'.
I am perfectly happy with the thing. I may be a geek by trade, but it does what I want it to do, so I have no plans to switch anytime soon.
Its always a 'reverse culture shock' and kinda' like walking into a darned time machine and going backwards, everytime I travel from Asia (Japan specifically) back to the US. US cell phones are so ugly, bulky looking with no frills, so uninteresting and years behind what is available in Asia. Of course, people drive much more in the States and have less time to talk on the phone, where as a highly mobile population in Asia which walks alot and meets outside in large groups much more socially, would have the need for such technology.
So do I. It was free with the account. I need a phone not a camera.
I have a V60. It's the best phone I have.
But where I live, it's already "gone". The cellular carrier has converted to GSM, and I need to upgrade to a GSM phone in order to get the better service plans.
But, the GSM version of the V60 isn't compatible with their system. So, I can't get it here.
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