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Marketers should be leveraging smartphone capabilities: Study

In the last quarter, more than 75 percent of smartphones are GPS equipped, yet application developers still aren't taking advantage of this implementation, according to Ovum Research.

Ovum identified 77 smartphone models that were released during the sample period, 59 of which were GPS-equipped and 49 of which that had WiFi ability. Ovum reported that many carriers are hesitant to admit WiFi-enabled handsets onto their networks even though most consumers say they expect WiFi to be present in smartphones.

"The importance of location-based services using GPS has been built up for some time now, and it looks like handset capabilities are finally catching up to the industry buzz," said Tim Renowden, analyst at Ovum, London.

"Now application developers need to step up to the plate and deliver applications that take advantage of the high penetration of GPS, and picking the correct platform to develop for is crucial," he said.

"Location can potentially improve ad targeting and relevance, but the killer app for mobile marketing has not yet been found and having the capability in devices is only the first step."

Ovum's Smartphone Capability Tracker didn't see much penetration for mobile television capability as most platforms have not had the multimedia abilities required up until recently.

Of all the platforms tracked, only the iPhone, Symbian and Windows Mobile platforms released devices with mobile TV capability, Samsung being particularly enthusiastic about including and supporting the feature.

Ovum predicts that mobile TV will grow in popularity as processing power and screen resolutions improve over time.

While widgets seem to be a point of excitement within the mobile industry, Ovum reported that only 10 percent of smartphones support Internet widget frameworks.

Along with mobile TV capabilities, Ovum also expects a steady growth in the arena of widgets.

"Given the huge buzz around Web widgets on handsets -- several manufacturers and operators have announced big plans for widgets -- it was surprising to see how few handsets supported this feature," Mr. Renowden said.

"We would expect this situation to change significantly in the next versions of the tracker."

Ovum was disappointed to see that despite their potential, rich Internet application frameworks have made little impact on smartphones, according to the Smartphone Capability Tracker.

Adobe's Flash and Flash Lite currently have the greatest penetration as 41 of the 77 smartphones identified support Flash.

Ovum reported that Windows Mobile has less than inconsistent support for Flash while iPhone OS and Android do not currently support Flash at all.

During the sample period for Ovum's report, only the iPhone, Android and several Nokia handsets had pre-installed app store clients.

Since then, BlackBerry, Palm, Nokia and Windows Mobile 6.5 each have their own app store, a development that was spot-on predicted by Ovum in the report.

"Mobile marketers wishing to deploy advertising and marketing tools to smartphones need to pay close attention to which technologies are able to reach the biggest audience -- which at this stage means using browser-based Web standards," Mr. Renowden said.

"Adobe Flash and Flash Lite has the highest penetration for richer media experiences, but high-profile smartphone vendors such as Apple and RIM don't support it, which is significant especially in North America where these two vendors have very high smartphone market share," he said.