Why the iPhone is not the only game in town

May 21, 2009

Ray Anderson is CEO of Bango

By Ray Anderson

I love the Apple iPhone. It has encouraged people to browse the Internet on their phones. As the CEO of a business focused on helping companies capitalize on the mobile web, this is great news.

Apple's PR machine has worked with a mass media that has never been actively courted by phone makers in this way. It has managed to whip up such a flurry of interest that you might think the iPhone is the only phone that has a browser.

The iPhone is undoubtedly a cool device, favored by marketing types and executives in media, advertising and mobile. If all your friends have iPhones, it is easy to think everyone has one.

The reality is in fact quite different. Here are the global sales figures for new smartphones for last year, released by Gartner:

• Smartphones account for 11 percent to12 percent of all mobile handsets sold globally
• IPhones account for 8.2 percent of the smartphones sold globally
• Towards the end of the year, smartphone growth had slowed to 3.7 percent

So the iPhone was less than 1 percent of new phones purchased last year, and remember the figure doesn't include all the people who didn't change their phone last year.

Having a mobile optimized only for the iPhone is like refusing to admit people into your restaurant if they are not wearing a Rolex watch.

Yes, a Rolex watch might indicate that a customer has a large disposable income, but you had be ill-advised to turn away all those other diners. Why would you cast your net so needlessly narrow? It doesn't make business sense.

If you peek at the mobile Web via the Bango service, you will see that in any given month people browse the mobile Web from more than 1,800 different devices.

While our "Top 20 Handset" list is a good indicator of the devices you need to optimize your mobile service for, one must remember that the list changes month by month.

A smarter approach is for your mobile Web site to be written in xHTML. Then use a content management system and device detection to deliver a version of your service with image sizes optimized for the user's specific handset.

Most important of all, though, is to give people on the move what they are likely to need from a mobile site. Strip out any content and navigation that is superfluous for the mobile user. Adjust the layout to make it simpler on a small screen.

Compare http://ft.com on a PC and http://m.ft.com from your mobile device and see what I mean.

The PC version is the all-singing, all-dancing version for those with lots of screen real estate, enabling them to deep dive into whatever their chosen area of interest and get viewpoints from the markets.

The mobile site by contrast is a much simpler version with the ability to store a user's preferences against their FT.com profile. The benefit is that when users return they can quickly get to what interests them most. I expect we will see more mobile sites take the same approach to offer people what they want without the need to login.

Whatever you do, don't lose sight of the rewards that the mass market can deliver. The iPhone is a great thing, but it is not the only game in town.

Ray Anderson is Cambridge, England-based CEO of Bango, a provider of mobile billing and mobile analytics services. Reach him at .

Comments on "Why the iPhone is not the only game in town"

1. Devesh Khare says:

   May 28, 2009 at 12:24pm

   I agree with the points in your article. It frustrates me when I see companies solely focusing on the iPhone without creating a marketing plan and understanding the market demographics. BlackBerry owns 50% of the smartphone marketing (http://www.aumnia.com/blog/mobile-trends/iphone-will-not-dominate-the-smartphone-market-blackberry-is-king/) and when a company focuses only on the iPhone, they are immediately choosing to ignore 50% of smartphone users. Not smart.

2. David J. MacKay says:

   May 21, 2009 at 12:22pm

   Ignoring a market segment is never an easy choice. With so many mobile web platforms, ROI has to be the determining factor when deciding which platform to target.
   
   At this point, I wouldn't consider the number of phones sold when deciding what platforms to target. Consider Mobile Browsing by Platform Market Share:
   http://marketshare.hitslink.com/mobile-phones.aspx?qprid=55&sample=31
   
   With far fewer devices in the wild the iPhone dominates with almost 65% market share. Android, which also uses the WebKit rendering engine is a distant second with 8.5%. Blackberry, with so many devices in play is at only 3%.
   
   Until users of other platforms start to actually use their browsers, over 70% of the market can be reached by optimizing for WebKit.
   
   However, if your niche are heavy Blackberry users it'd be wise to make their experience as painless as possible.

3. Kim Dushinski says:

   May 21, 2009 at 8:42am

   Ray:
   
   You are so right on target with this. I cringe when I see businesses only optimizing for iPhones. I'm going to recommend that anyone in mobile marketing read this article before beginning their strategic decisions for their mobile campaign.
   
   Thanks for the eye opening stats.
   
   Kim