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Cell phone craze
Mobile extras drive up shipments by 24 percent By Sean Abbott J201 Reporter Indiana University junior Jessica Fix has had her Motorola 50019 cellular telephone for less than a month. And she will be the first to tell you she is addicted to using its special features. During class, she text messages friends she does not get to see every day. In her dorm room, she activates its speaker phone so she can do homework or clean her room while conversing with family. At night she takes it with her to parties to photograph her wild nights or sneaks it into concerts to get candid celebrity photos. It accompanies her everywhere and has dozens of uses she has yet to even discover.
“If I didn't have my cell phone, I'd probably cry,” Fix said while scrolling through the heap of stored pictures on her phone. “It never leaves my side.”
This addiction is something that afflicts millions of Americans like Fix every day.
Consumers are being pulled in by the convenience of cell phones and their extended supply of gadgetry, and this is driving up the demand for mobile phones that function as technological Swiss Army knives. According to an International Data Corporation study, shipments of cell phones in fourth-quarter 2004 rose 24 percent compared to fourth-quarter 2003. Last year also marked a record high for cell phone shipments in a single year. Shipments rose to 664.5 million units, a 29 percent increase compared with the 513.8 million in 2003. That's a lot of cell phones.
Rather, that's a lot of smartphones. Cellular providers are pumping out more built-in gadgets now than ever before, and consumers are eating them up because of their convenience. According to a March study by Massachusetts-based Forrester Research, two-thirds of all households in the United States had a mobile phone at the beginning of the year, and the average number of mobile phones in those households was 1.8 phones. Phones with extra features are contributing to this trend. “I like compact, very all-in-one type of things,” Fix said. “I don't want to have to carry around my phone, my planner, my MP3 player, my camera, yadda yadda yadda.”
And what about her television? She now has the opportunity to add that function to her cell phone, as wireless providers are offering better network connections and more material for downloading, including television shows.
Verizon Wireless debuted a new service called V CAST in February that gives users access to broadband wireless Internet and the chance to purchase premium downloads of video games, music videos, sports clips, and even shortened versions of popular television shows like “Sesame Street” and Fox's “24.” “Just the idea of being able to take out my phone and say, ‘Look, (“24” star) Kiefer Sutherland is shooting people on my phone,' how cool is that?” said Bloomington, Ind., Verizon customer Joseph Loy, who said he is more interested in the idea of watching television on his cell phone than in the series of shorts based on the Fox television drama. “I would definitely do that.”
The weekly, one-minute “24” shorts started becoming available for download to V CAST customers in early February. Verizon says the show has a parallel plotline and a different cast from the weekly television show's storyline, and Sutherland will not be making an appearance on phones. Verizon is taking a slightly different approach to television on cell phones than other wireless providers. Instead of offering access to live television broadcasts on cell phones like Sprint has been offering since autumn 2002, V CAST will let users download “mobisodes” (short for “mobile episodes”) made specifically for release on cell phone Web browsers. V CAST is already releasing material provided by Fox Sports, ESPN, CNN, VH1, and Comedy Central to areas with broadband coverage. “I honestly think this is going to be a craze once people see other people using it,” said Bloomington Verizon Wireless retail sales representative Scott Denninger, who contends cell phones will take the place of laptops in a few years. “We haven't experienced anything like this yet.” Instead of cellular-exclusive material, wireless providers Sprint, Cingular, and Midwest Wireless currently carry plans with MobiTV. With MobiTV, customers can watch live television from over 20 channels, including the Discovery Channel, CNBC, ABC News, TLC, and C-SPAN. On the other hand, text messaging is much bigger than mobile television in East Asian countries such as Japan and Singapore, where Forrester Research says broadband mobile commerce has been rapidly increasing since 2001. According to Indiana University international student Tim Lum, talking is no longer the main feature of “mobiles” or “hand phones,” the terms for cell phones in his homeland of Singapore. “Text messaging is huge in Singapore and Japan,” Lum said. “Here, I don't even text anyone, I just call them. But sometimes in Singapore, I don't even call them, I just text them. We use them for calling, too, but that's just not the primary function of the phone anymore.”
In America, much like in Lum's Singapore, cell phones are settling in behind televisions and computers as “the third screen in our lives, that's no longer just a phone,” said independent telecom analyst Jeff Kagan. The new features available today are helping cell phones get there. “The extra features come as a way for the wireless providers to get users to spend more time and more money online,” said Kagan, who is based in Georgia. “And users love the stuff, so it works well together.” At the same time, this all might be unfamiliar ground for service providers. “It's all very new and exciting,” Kagan said. “We are not sure how to charge or how to market yet. Some will be successful and some will not.”
Both Kagan and TechWeb.com Editor-in-Chief Frederic Paul say it will be a long time - if ever - before cell phones make laptops go the way of the dinosaurs. This is because as a “third screen,” cell phone screens are pretty small. “Cell phones and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) will never replace laptops,” Paul said. “But they will be used in many applications instead of laptops. When you just need to access the Net or check a piece of info, they're fine. But for real work you need a full size keyboard and screen. When cell phones/PDAs, and they will become one fairly shortly, are able to provide that functionality through virtual keyboards and projected screens, then the distinction will evaporate.” Paul says that most work on a laptop requires a keyboard and full-size screen, something not yet available from cell phones or PDAs. But he does say that eventually, with the advent of “virtual keyboards and projected screens,” their functionality will make them more like laptops than before.
Yet in the midst of more sophisticated mobile devices and more costly monthly bills, some consumers are moving toward prepaid or pay-as-you-go phones, rather than being without a cell phone or paying too much for one. According to Forrester Research, twice as many households use prepaid wireless communications than did in 2002. “Pay-as-you-go or prepaid phones are a relatively new entry,” said Kagan. “Think about the millions of dollars the carriers spend on advertising to bring customers in to buy. Now think about all the customers who cannot qualify for the phone service and walk out. Now instead of saying goodbye, the vendors can offer the prepaid phone. They can turn lost sales into prepaid customers.” Twenty-one-year-old IU junior Ashley Rhodebeck recently became one of those customers. Just a few weeks ago she graduated from Wal-Mart prepaid phone cards to her family's three-year-old Nokia cell phone that they have nicknamed “The Brick.”
“My friends ask me for my cell phone number, and I tell them that I actually just got one,” she said. “Kind of.”
Behind its one-dollar IU faceplate, the hand-me-down phone sports a monochromatic display that Rhodebeck says she can pretty much only use to store phone numbers in its electronic address book. That's only if it decides to stay on long enough for her to do so (she says it likes to randomly turn itself off). But she is fine with this because she's just not a “phone person,” she says. Most of the time, she leaves it turned off in her purse. And she usually doesn't even give people her number. She uses it mostly just to call her family or make long-distance calls from her dorm room.
“I'm not going to be one of those people who walks to class everyday with a cell phone glued to their ear,” Rhodebeck said. “Nobody's that important for me to talk to.” Her father helped her set up a Verizon pay-as-you-go plan for “The Brick,” which can make calls, receive calls, access voicemail, and that's all. It does not have a camera, a text messenger, or a Web browser, and Rhodebeck said she would never pay for such extra features because she doesn't need them. She likes having a phone that is, well, just a phone. Someday, though, those might not be available any longer. “Eventually every phone will be a ‘smartphone,'” said analyst Kagan. “Users will choose the device with the features they need. It's a part of the growth and the progression of the industry.”
What features do you use the most? Let us know. What new features do you want added? Let us know.
Page designed and edited by: Alicia Broach Last updated: April 29, 2005
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