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The americans are coming!
Now, Robert Scobble is not my favorite blogger either, but you got to admit that he has an uncanny ability to put the finger where it hurts on interesting stuff.
He has just put up a post on the Travelling Geeks site about the sad state of affairs in European mobile. Just a few years ago the americans were way behind in mobile in most every aspect. Their phones were sad little things - they only turned them on when they had to make a call outside the house. Their operators were terrible and there was no coverage anyway. And they lacked interoperability - they couldn't even send an SMS message to a someone on a different carrier. Not that they would know how to anyway.
But what is the situation now? The iPhone, Android and the Palm Pre is setting the standard. Granted that the tech press is predominantly US based and more or less blind to anything going on outside the home turf. But the press over here in Europe is touting the same. And they are rignt. Not to mention the europeans that are buying iPhone and Android phones by the boatload.
I usually am polite and say I’ve seen some stunningly cool companies, like Spotify (who won four TechCrunch Europa awards last night) but in the back of my head I remember how cocky the same entrepreneurs used to be when showing me their cell phones and noting how far ahead of the world they were. That cockiness is done and that has deep implications for entrepreneurs across Europe. They must now visit Cupertino and Mountain View to get access to customer bases.
Read the post here: Europe no longer matters to lead position in mobile.
Nokia's half-assed attempt to piggy back a touch layer to the 8 year old UI fossil S60 will bite them in the ass. They should have designed a new finger optimized UI from the scratch. Cheap Android devices in the next year will bite into their low end market share as well.
Posted by: Mobile Observer | July 26, 2009 at 12:08
i'm really not convinced that iphone and android are selling by the boatload in europe. android certainly isn't.
apple isn't announcing geographic distribution of iphone sales, but from other sources it appears the iphone is selling ok in the uk.
in the rest of the europe it isn't really selling that well at all, apparently having gained market share of 1-2% in most countries, while failing completely in some countries.
not to mention the utter failures in the developing countries such as russia and india.
Posted by: sam | July 22, 2009 at 00:30
hmmm! Nokia will never be a competitor for iPhone. iPhone is a trendy gadget transformed into a device, a poor one actual (performance). Nokia rulez and Symbian it's the best OS on mobile market. Nokia makes cheep phones but also smart phones, that are more business orientated then fun orientated. :D
Posted by: Mo | July 13, 2009 at 09:45
Well, true, but there is also Sony Ericsson who has been a driving force in the whole feature phone segment. Also, there has been a lot of business model innovaiton coming out of Europe, while the US kept their gardens walled.
Ah, well :-)
I'd love to check out the Palm, hopefully they'll launch over here before too long.
Posted by: Morten Hjerde | July 13, 2009 at 07:37
Well, Europe is primarily Nokia-centric, and Nokia is behind the competition - I expected an iPhone competitor from Nokia, not Palm.
Just got a Palm Pre today - initially impressions are good.
Posted by: AnkurJ | July 13, 2009 at 03:37