Sales of Mobile Phones Sizzling

The Joongang Ilbo today notes that sales of mobile phones have been sizzling lately, largely due to a rise in consumer spending and increased sales of so-called smart phones.  According to the London-based research firm, Strategic Analytics, world mobile phone shipments stood at 324 million units in the fourth quarter of 2009, a ten percent increase over the same period in 2008.  As shown in the accompanying graphic, (click on graphic to see larger version) Nokia remains the market leader with a 38.1 percent share of the global market.  Samsung and LG together have a 30.6 percent share of the market, followed by Motorola with 4.9 percent and "other" manufacturers, including Apple with 20.1 percent.

A couple of things should be noted about these 2009 market share figures.  First, they represent the end of an old era in which feature phones dominated the mobile market.  Feature phones are those with certain features, such as the phones camera or music capability, are accented to appeal to different market segments.  The feature-phone era is ending and giving way to the new era of hand-held broadband internet computers, as discussed extensively in earlier posts on this blog.

Second, the figures and this graphic do not break out sales of either the Apple iPhone or Android devices.  These two categories promise to take up most of the global market share over the next five years or so.  It appears that the major challenge for LG, Samsung, Motorola and Symbian is to see how much of the Android market share they can occupy.

Third, mobile handsets are well on their way to becoming a commodity, just as happened with personal computers.  The key value in the global mobile market is in the software and applications.  What a person anywhere in the world can do with his or her mobile device will simply depend on the speed of the internet connection and the power of the Apple apps, Android apps, and ....we'll see what others might become competitive in the global market.

The Mobile Revolution: More on the iPhone Effect in Korea

As time passes, it becomes more and more apparent that the introduction of Apple's iPhone has sent shock waves through the mobile communications sector in South Korea, revealing some of its salient characteristics.  This phenomenon, the so-called "iPhone Effect" deserves a more thorough treatment than in my earlier post.  The following are some of my thoughts about the iPhone effect.

• The iPhone effect is occurring now only because leading industry and government players chose to ignore the implications of the transformation in mobile communications taking place around the world starting more than two and a half years ago with the introduction of the iPhone.  Neither the handset manufacturers, nor the mobile service providers, nor the government seemed very concerned about this until mid 2009.  The effect was that Korea continued to pursue an old model of mobile communication, based on feature-phones, while mobile broadband and "apps" were taking hold elsewhere in the world.


• It underscores Korea's relative weakness in the development of software and internet content, versus the manufacturing of hardware.  LG and Samsung Electronics together command a large share of the world market for mobile handsets, but are relatively weak in the so-called "smartphone" segment (I don't like this term, because the new phones, iPhone and Android, are really hand-computers or hand-broadband devices) show signs of being caught flat footed by the success of Apple's iPhone in the Korean marketplace.


• The iPhone effect also highlights the continuing high dependence on (or preference for) Korean language web content, as illustrated by high levels of usage of Naver, a Korean-language service, and relatively low levels of usage of Google.  The vast majority of the iPhone and Android apps being downloaded and used around the world are written in English or other languages.  The iPhone in Korea is exposing consumers to many of these applications, disclosing a clear "App-gap" with many of the most useful applications not yet available in Korean.


• The iPhone effect occurs partly because the Apple iPhone has introduced a multi-touch, capacitive touchscreen that is more than just screen technology.  It is a user-interface (UI) that everyone else is copying as we enter this new era of the handheld, internet-connected PC.  The iPhone is faster, easier to use and just a bit more intuitive than any of the competing phones on the market today, including Google's Nexus One and, most pointedly, Samsung's local T-Omnia II.  In this revolutionary era, the iPhone is setting the standard, much the way that the IBM PC did way back in 1980.

The revolutionary transition in mobile handsets from phones to internet-connected computers is well underway, both in Korea and globally.  Given the nature of semiconductors and other components that go into the handsets, it is clear that handsets will soon become a commodity, much like PCs are today, with more or less  modular, interchangeable parts.  The big money and the major impact of this transformation will be found in software and content.  Therein lies the future challenge for Korea.

English-Teaching Robots for Korea by 2018?

An article in today's issue of The Korea Times proclaims "Robots to Replace Native English Teachers."   Participants in a recent robotics forum speculated that, by about 2015 robots should be able to help English teachers in the classroom and that by 2018 they should be able to teach on their own, while communicating with students."  Robots are already available in English classes through a pilot project in Masan, aimed at testing the viability of robotic teachers.   Some participants in the robotics forum also saw English -teaching robots as a remedy for the lack of English teachers in small rural farming and fishing villages.

After reading this article, I remain very skeptical.  Nothing is mentioned about the current state of the art in machine translation and the considerable challenges of teaching English to native speakers of Korean.  The linguistic and pedagogical challenges of teaching English would seem to be too large to be overcome by developments in software and artificial intelligence in less than a decade.  In any event, we'll all see.