Communities Dominate Brands

Final Numbers for Q1 in Smartphones Bloodbath year 2: Electric Boogaloo

It took a while, but we finally have the numbers for all 4 major analyst houses (Gartner, IDC, Canalys and Strategy Analytics). I did as I always do, I calculated the average of their totals, to find the quarterly total smartphone sales - which came to 101.2 million, and we saw a growth of 2% in smartphone sales in the first quarter of 2011 from the fourth quarter (Christmas-quarter) of 2010.

BY MANUFACTURER

This is how I report (or when numbers not officially given, am doing my official estimate) of the top 10 biggest smartphone brands by manufacturer in Q1 of 2011:

Rank . . Brand . . . . . . . Millions sold . . . . . . Market Share Q1 . . . . (market share Q4)

1 . . . . . Nokia . . . . . . . 24.2 million . . . . . . . 24% . . . . . . . . . . . . . (29%)
2 . . . . . Apple . . . . . . . 18.4 million . . . . . . . 18% . . . . . . . . . . . . . (16%)
3 . . . . . RIM . . . . . . . . 14.5 million . . . . . . .  14% . . . . . . . . . . . . . (14%)
4 . . . . . Samsung . . . .  12.6 million . . . . . . . 13% . . . . . . . . . . . . . (11%)
5 . . . . . HTC . . . . . . . . . 9.7 million . . . . . . . 10% . . . . . . . . . . . . . (  9%)
6 . . . . . SonyEricsson . . 4.9 million . . . . . . . . 5% . . . . . . . . . . . . . (  5%)
7 . . . . . LG . . . . . . . . . . 4.7 million . . . . . . . . 5% . . . . . . . . . . . . . (  4%)
8 . . . . . Motorola . . . . . . 4.1 million . . . . . . . . 4% . . . . . . . . . . . . . (  5%)
9 . . . . . ZTE . . . . . . . . .  2.2 million . . . . . . . . 2% . . . . . . . . . . . . . (  2%)
10 . . . . Sharp . . . . . . . . 1.8 million . . . . . . . . 2% . . . . . . . . . . . . . (  2%)

The big movers are Nokia in crash-dive, lost 5 market share points in just one quarter, and Samsung and Apple who both picked up two market share points in the quarter. HTC, LG and ZTE are also growing, Motorola is slipping back further into the pack. RIM, SonyEricsson and Sharp are roughly holding station.

BY OPERATING SYSTEM

I also did some forced math to try to squeeze as close as possible the operating system numbers that are reported, to the above total number and as usual, this is the more difficult bit, but this should be close. (Please remember, I only count smartphones, not tablet PCs or other devices that might run on say iOS or Android etc) The market shares by operating system as I see it for Q1 are:

Rank . . . Operating System . . Market Share Q1 . . . . . (was market share Q4)

1 . . . . . . Android . . . . . . . . . . 35%. . . . . . . . . . . . . . (30%)
2 . . . . . . Symbian . . . . . . . . . 25% . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (32%)
3 . . . . . . iOS . . . . . . . . . . . .  18% . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (16%)
4 . . . . . . Blackberry . . . . . . .  14% . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (14%)
5 . . . . . . bada . . . . . . . . . . . .  3% . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (  3%)
6 . . . . . . Windows Mobile . . . . 2% . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (  2%)
7 . . . . . . Phone 7 . . . . . . . . . . 2% . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (  2%)
Others . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1% . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (  1%)

First, remember that Symbian also still has Japanese makers who support it in addition to Nokia (that is why the percentage here bigger than in the above). Also very interesting race among the small operating systems is hidden in the percentages. Several sources say bada sold 3.5 million (thus almost 4% when rounding off), compared to about 2 milllion for old Windows Mobile and 1.6 million for new Phone 7. So even in Q1, Microsoft's newest operating system is being beaten even by its older sibling, and Samsung's new OS outsells all Microsoft Phone 7 partners combined, by more than 2 to 1.

A number we should look out for. Samsung has not given a split of bada vs Android vs Microsoft handsets, but if those analyst numbers and quoted numbers are roughly right, we should have been at about 8.8 million cumulative bada shipments by end of Q1, so sometime now during Q2, we should pass 10 million cumulative bada devices. Expect that kind of noise soon from your Samsung team..

And in the Nokia-watch.. How is my model compared to Nokia reality. When I did my 'Nokia premium smartphone customer give-away sweepstakes' blog, I projected the following (which we can now compare to actuals for Q1)

TOMI PROJECTION IN FEBRUARY FOR NOKIA MARKET SHARE CRASH IN 2011

Quarter . . . Market Share . . . Unit Sales . . . .  ASP . . . . . Total Revenues of Smartphones
Q1 2011 . . 28% . . . . . . . . . .  29 M . . . . . . . . 146 Euro . . 4.3B Euro
Q2 2011 . . 21% . . . . . . . . . .  25 M . . . . . . . . 136 Euro . . 3.3B Euro
Q3 2011 . . 16% . . . . . . . . . .  21 M . . . . . . . . 126 Euro . . 2.6B Euro
Q4 2011. .  12% . . . . . . . . . .  17 M . . . . . . . . 116 Euro . . 2.0B Euro

I said clearly in my blog that it was my 'best case' scenario, as there was plenty of Nokia doom and gloom at the time, following the Stephen Elop stunning Microsoft announcement of February 11 (including my previous analysis of the decision and how it was made). But there were several competent analysts who came to the blog who said they felt I was being too harsh on Nokia, that while it would be bad, it wouldn't be quite that bad. Well, now we have the very first evaluation of those numbers. And yes, it is worse. I had expected Q1 best case to be and what it actually was:

COMPARISON NOKIA Q1 AHONEN PROJECTION VS REALITY

My projection Q1 . . 28% . . . . . . . . . .  29 M . . . . . . . . 146 Euro . . 4.3B Euro
Nokia actuals Q1 . . 24% . . . . . . . . . .  24 M . . . . . . . . 147 Euro . . 3.6B Euro

So Nokia is already 4 market share points below what I projected, 5 million unit sales below what I projected. It is almost spot-on on the average sales price drop as I predicted, thus total smartphone revenues are 700 million dollars below what I projected for the quarter. If you thought Nokia's year 2011 was going to be an annus horribilis based on Ahonen's doom-and-gloom blog, it is clearly going to be far worse...

Make your own guesses how much worse Q2 will be than my original projection in the above, haha..

ANDROID SPLIT

Also as many are intersted in how the Android world is doing, I am continuing with my best guess of how the Android manufacturer internal market shares are going. I find for Q1 that the Android family splits its 36 million handsets sold like this:

HTC . . . . . . . . . . 26%
Samsung . . . . . . 24%
SonyEricsson . . . 13%
LG . . . . . . . . . . . 13%
Motorola . . . . . . . 11%
Others . . . . . . . .  12%

I will come back later with some gossip and news about the various brands how they are doing now in Year 2 the Electric Boogaloo..  But I wanted to post these market share numbers as I know many of my readers have been waiting for them. Enjoy

My E7 Review: Nokia's Best Phone Ever.. To Annoy and Aggravate Loyal Nokia Users: The superphone that could have been (and should have been)

I am sorry to use a tired cliche, but to rephrase the opening line from Dickens classic A Tale of Two Cities, it really fits perfectly describing the Nokia E7 flagship phone: it was the best of phones, it was the worst of phones. (and to continue even, it really fits: it was the smartphone of wisdom, it was the smartphone of foolishness. It was the E7 of belief, it was the E7 of incredulity. It was the cameraphone of light, it was the cameraphone of darkness. It was the cellphone of hope, it was the cellphone of despair.)

I wanted to make an honest, complete review of the E7 and do it after a couple of months of using it. I do love it and I do hate it. The thing is, I hate it several times every day… And yet I carry it and can’t imagine not carrying it (for now). But if a rival made a similar handset fixing just the glaring problems, they would have a winner.

SO WHY THE BEST SMARTPHONE EVER?

The E7 is Nokia's current flagship smartphone. Its the one with the slider full QWERTY keyboard hidden inside a slim body which looks very much like the N8, but with that giant 4 inch touch screen. It is somewhat a blend of the N8 and the N97, or a successor to the magnificent E90 Communicator and shows lineage from the N900. I wanted to wait with my review, as I had a series of early rapid disappointments in the first days after I opened the box, and felt I should do an honest view of owning an E7, after some serious use over many weeks, in regular use cases.

I travel a lot and am a kind of business heavy user. I am a geeky user and power-user and have walked around with at least 2 phones in my pockets since 1999 (and two smartphones in my pockets since 2001). I tend to use most of the features on smartphones and experiment with them a lot - this is my 20th mobile phone and 16th smartphone, 12th cameraphone and 7th phone with full QWERTY input. I am not a typical Nokia user, I am a very loyal and very knowledgable power user. My needs would be somewhat different from average E7 users and probably more demanding. Please keep those things in mind when reading this review. This is primarily written to those loyal Nokia users who have owned several Communicators in the past and other premium N-Series phones etc.

IN THE STORE

The E7 is as if it was designed for the store (as opposed to the user). It makes a breathtaking first impression. It looks and feels magnificent. The 4 inch screen is big, extremely bright, and has severe blacks which makes all videos, pictures and websites seem very bright and contrasty on the screen. Compare the E7 alongside most rival smartphones in the store, and the screen - the most flashy and noticable feature of any phone - truly shines.

My preference has always been for black phones and I selected the black model, and that body color combined with the superblack of the AMOLED screen, it is an object of beauty. A tiny but satisfying feature is the idle screen clock in slim silver color elegant but giant digital display, it is alluring. Every phone maker needs to see that clock, and make sure their on-screen idle screen mobile phone clock-faces are at least as visible and sharp as that on the E7.

Then the feel of the phone in your hand is like most top-most Nokia phones you remember of your past. The ones that always seemed to be priced beyond any reason, into the phone price stratosphere, until you tried one in a store, and fell in love with it immediately. This E7 seems rock-solid, a very pleasing metal case all around with smart tapering to the edges, a slim phone seems even more slick. (And like so many of phones in this price range, I keep mine in my breast pocket, so when I bend over, it sometimes slips out and falls on the floor - and like any previous superphones by Nokia, its build quality is so solid, yes, the E7 takes many hits and continues without complaint. I have literally dropped it already several times, no problem at all).

And then you open it, and have that delightful experience of the phone snapping into its 'desktop' or palmtop confuguration, with the screen tilted facing you, and you see the full rows of QWERTY keys of the keyboard. The E7 is wooing you over, this is such a sexy piece of technology in your hand.

Then you try the QWERTY keyboard which is a masterpiece. It is the best keyboard Nokia has ever done. In fact the best keyboard anyone has ever done on a phone. It is the best keyboard there has ever been in any phone or PDA. Its keys are perfectly spaced, the keys have comfortable movement, yet the whole keyboard is an ultra-slim component neatly sliding out of view when not needed. If you have a friend with an E7, just ask to borrow it for a moment, and try out the keyboard. This is so incredibly comfortable to use, it is as good, 'as if Apple would add a full QWERTY to the iPhone'. Yes, its that good. As good as if Apple had done a QWERTY. The best keyboard of any smartphone or PDA, ever. A true masterpiece of design and user-friendliness.

 


In the store the sales rep will rattle off a long list of impressive tech specs starting with the 8 megapixel camera, the 10.2 Mbit/s HSDPA speed (vs 3.2 on most), WiFi b/g/n (vs most with b/g), and HSUPA and tons and tons of superpower specs, not just TV out, but HDMI video output! Etc etc etc. And you are sold. This is the most impressive phone in the store. And even though its the most expensive Nokia currently, you buy it. This is 'the' phone you wanted. And you take it home. And that is when the flood of disappointments start.

IS NONE OF THE NOKIA YOU EXPECTED

So a bit of clarification. This is Nokia's current flagship. It is priced above the N8, and in many markets it sells for more than the iPhone. It is the most expensive Nokia phone currently.

The typical buyer of the E7 is the loyal 'QWERTY' Nokia owner. This is not a Nokia phone to capture new customers. It is 'the' phone for the premium loyal Nokia users, especially business users. Its natural customer is the loyal Nokia owner who has had premium Nokia smartphones for the past decade, is likely a past Communicator owner and appreciates the QWERTY, arguably, feels he or she 'needs' the QWERTY. (If the QWERTY is not needed, the N8 will trump the E7 with many features such as a better camera etc)

So the typical target customer for the E7 is the person who still walked around with an E90 Communicator, or bought the rare N900, or went for the disappointment with the N97. Hard core Nokia loyalists, who have plunked big money for top end Nokia superphones for much of the past decade. Who took pride in the technology leadership that has always been Nokia's superphone category. (I have argued before that the E90 Communicator was the best phone of its age, the best phone of the past decade and quite literally was 'twice the phone' as its contemporary iPhone model (the iPhone 3G) back in 2008. Not just two screens vs 1, two cameras vs 1, two keyboards vs 1, but also twice size, twice the weight - and twice the price as the iPhone 3G haha.. The E90 Communicator was the last Nokia phone that would regularly beat the iPhone in head-to-head consumer tests by major reviewers. Obviously the one area where the E90 could not touch the iPhone was the touch screen, it was the last of Nokia's superphones in the non-touch screen era).

Talking about touch screen and Symbian. These loyalist Nokia owners will see none of the faults and will marvel at all the advances in the latest Symbian S^3 version. It is very good multi-touch tech, while purists will say its not on par with the iPhone (but who is) but its so far ahead of the early touch screen Symbian devices, it is definitely far more than good enough. It is responsive and convenient. I personally am not a fan of touching screens of any kind (I hate the fingerprints etc, and I am a fluent touch-typist and prefer keyboard entry usually) but this E7 screen is winning me over. The point is, that if an iPhone user tries the E7, they see all the ways 'it is not as good as an iPhone' but for a loyal Nokia business phone user, it is by far the best touch screen Nokia has ever had, and Symbian is showing a very sprightly rapid and convenient upgrade to its look and feel in this model. Why would Nokia kill of Symbian if it is capable of this level of convenience is on the minds of many early users of the E7 (and probably also of the N8).

So the E7 lands in the pocket of those who are not new to Symbian and who have downloaded plenty of apps from Ovi in the past, and who know plenty of the particular features that make the Nokia premium phones so user-friendly and so powerful.

And these users tend to be business users. They need their smartphone not to play Angry Birds, but to do serious work, which is why Nokia top business phones have been compatible with the Microsoft office suite apps for more than a decade. The first smartphone with removable memory, Nokia has supported multitasking, folder views, and been compatible with most of the stuff out there including of course Adobe flash etc.

Because the typical E7 customer has had a smartphone for probably the past decade, and this is likely the 6th or 7th smartphone for that buyer, they know most of the basics. Because this buyer is a loyal Nokia user, they will know the Nokia quirks and gimmicks very well. It won't be the first time they upgraded from a previous Nokia phone to the next, bringing their contact list, calendar and various notes and files with them from the previous Nokia phone to the next.  So many of the features I will talk about in this blog will be perhaps 'on the periphery' for many newer smartphone users and especially for example to iPhone users. That is not the primary target market for this phone. This is the annual expensive QWERTY model for the Nokia loyalists. They will know, they will observe, and they will be disappointed. Again. And again. And disappointed once again. And again. And still again. This E7 is the phone designed to disappoint loyal users, as if to kiss them farewell, thank you for the loyalty, now go and marry a Samsung or iPhone or Blackberry, the Nokia E7 says in a melancholy way: I don't love you anymore, my most loyal customers.

THE ULTIMATE POCKET PC

Before we go there lets show how phenomenal this E7 is, how close it came to being the ultimate phone ever made. If you are an older PC user who remembers the desktop era before laptops, you have probably had this tech fantasy as I have had. The desktop era had a set of separate units of tech, that each could be separately upgraded and changed, to improve the overall performance of your 'system'. The central 'box' was the CPU unit which housed the motherboard of the computer system itself, its onboard RAM memory, the Intel microchip processor and some necessary bits that allowed internal upgrades to the system like say a video co-processor or a multimedia board or sound board etc.

Separately, you'd connect all sorts of 'peripherals' to that central unit. For inputs you'd connect a keyboard and mouse (and joystick for game playing). For outputs you'd connect a monitor and speakers. Then you could add if you so desired, connectivity (a modem), a printer, a scanner, mass storage like a hard drive or CD ROM drive, a floppy disk drive, even early on, a tape drive, etc. And each PC system could be modular and grow as your needs grew. So if you could not afford a color monitor at first, you buy a monochrome display, and later you could upgrade the system by just replacing the monitor. Same for the mass storage as your needs grew, etc. And if you spilled coffee all over your keyboard and it became sticky and not responsive, you would not need to replace the whole PC, you’d just replace the keyboard, and you were good as new again..

Take that concept and think of the modern smartphone. We already can do a mini version of that, when Nokia introduced TV-out, so we could substitute the tiny smartphone display, via the AV video inputs of your TV set, and use the big plasma screen TV in your home (or at the hotel) as your PC screen. Similarly you could connect a bluetooth keyboard and have real size keys to type on with all 10 fingers, for serious 'work'.

But the rest of the system was still a compromise and there were many parts that didn't work well with the 'mini system'. Like the mini-USB port that most smartphones now have. You can't fit your USB thumb drive into that port, it only lets you connect your smartphone to your PC as if the smartphone was a thumb drive, but not the other way around, to connect a thumb drive to the smartphone for mass storage uses.

And the TV display via the TV-out is of very poor analog quality display in very low resolution, so its a poor substitute for any current laptop screen. I have tried that mini-system several times in the past but didn't find it quite feasible. Still, the concept is very cool. That you could have the keyboard and screen set-up at your office and home, only move the pocketable smartphone with you and plug in where you need. And differing from carrying just a hard drive, you can always use the smartphone to do the full work of the PC whenever you have that need during the day, if you are stuck at the dentist for example and your boss needs an urgent commentary on the proposal you are working on, etc. The pocketable ‘ultra-tiny’ variation of the PC, with the expansion potential to a full powerful desktop solution. A compelling vision but was not quite feasible (yet).

THE FULL POCKETABLE PC SYSTEM

The E7 finally brings the full vision to life. And how! First it upgrades the TV-out from just AV standard video out (which it still has) to HDMI out! Now you have digital video output. Very cool, very sharp (not to mention watching any videos or pictures you've sot with the E7 which shoots HD video).

 


Then you add in the bluetooth keyboard and bluetooth mouse. Now you have the basic PC system already in place. But then the mass storage. In a show of forte, Nokia has now integrated full USB support to the E7, so yes, you can connect your thumb drive to the USB port! If you add a portable media player screen (preferrably one of the new ones with HDMI port), you have both a full desktop replacement - and note - you also have a laptop replacement!

 


Into your briefcase for the air journey you pack your media player screen pre-loaded with some of your fave movies, and the bluetooth keyboard and mouse. So for the airplane and airport lounge, you have the laptop-equivalent. At the hotel you connect the E7 to the hotel's 32 inch plasma screen and use the bluetooth keyboard and mouse and the thumb drive, and you have a desktop equivalent. In your pocket you carry the minimal files on the E7 itself, and your full PC files on the thumb drive or portable USB hard drive. I have tested this system and in some uses it works very well but the low performance processor inside the E7 does limit what kinds of things you can do with this system. But for portable computing, it is the nearest thing to 'everything' as a portable multi-component dispersed system.

 


You recognize you could also construct something like this with your iPad or tablet PC, but in that case, the minimalist version is not pocketable. The E7 is a full-function pocket PC all by itself, and you then only 'expand' the capability when and where you want, if you want a big display, big keyboard, full mouse, big external storage ability, etc. But all of it also works in the pocket-sized E7. For the geeky nerd, this is a fun platform (building on the N900 obviously). And I predict, that much like many previous radical innovations in the Communicator line from Nokia, this type of modular thinking will be the norm in the future for all work-related smartphones.

THE 8MP CAMERA TO HATE

So lets start with the disappointments. You had what, a 3 megapixel camera on the E90 Communicator from 2008. And now you get 8 megapixels in this E7. As the camera is not autofocus, with a fixed focal length, it is faster to take normal 'pictures'. It takes very good quality picture and the video capture is HD quality at 1280 x 720 reslution. A great cameraphone, except for one detail. And for a business phone, this is far more important than snapshot pictures or capturing HD video...

Here we start with the first in a the disappointments, and for loyal Nokia long-term users, its a biggie right from the start. The biggest use of the camera feature for most business users who have used premium cameraphones for 5 years or more, is not to take snapshot 'pictures' of people and places, it is a memory device. It is a pocketable scanner! We use occasionally to snap ‘photographs’ ie couple of times per week, maybe; but we use our cameraphone several times per day to scan close-range images related to work! We use it to scan receipts, airline ticket stubs, reservation codes, maps, slides of presentations by our colleagues at conferences, the fine print in the car rental agreement, that kind of stuff. Especially any kind of written   - or online - documentation for which we would prefer to have a photocopy or screen shot printout made but don't have that facility right there. So we take out our 5mp cameraphone and snap a quick picture of the document or the PC screen. And we take 'memory images' rather than traditional 'pictures' - so we take a picture of where we parked the car, or the scratches on the rental car, or the picture of 'the situation' we saw, that reminds us to write the blog later, where the picture itself is perhaps blurry even and of poor quality, but is there only to remind us later.

I may take 5-10 'real' pictures per month that I intend to save or show someone or use in some way as 'photographs'. But I take 3-5 memory images per day, which are only intended 'just in case' kind of memories that I may need later, like the hotel reservation codes and airline ticket confirmation codes. I am not going to bother to write it down, not even onto my calendar entry on my phone as I used to. Now I just snap a picture of it from the PC screen from that email confirmation or the Expedia booking confirmation page, and its all I need. I dont' keep that photo, the moment the flight is over or I have checked out of the hotel, I delete the confirmation image. The camera on the smartphone is primarily a memory aide. Having a good resolution scanner in our pocket is a very powerful productivity tool - in business!. And we've had that capacity from the first phones that did about 3 megapixels.

What you need is the close-up or 'macro' mode for such memories. That means autofocus at short range. And you open up that wonderful Nokia E7 cameraphone, take it out for a spin, and then get to the first case of taking a picture of the airline ticket stub you wanted to scan for your expense records. And you try and it doesn't work. And you try again. And then you start to fiddle with the settings. It has to work. You've used Nokia phones for a decade. Nokia cameraphones have always supported this (not always, but you've had the premium Nokia phones for so long, you've thought they always did). And certainly your past N93, E90 Communicator, N95, N900, N82, N97 and N8 have taken ever sharper close-up pictures. You were looking forward to the 8mp capability, to get sharp print of the 'small print' of legal contracts for example. But what? This phone doesn't do close-up?

What? You have just bought an 800 dollar superphone, with an 8 megapixel camera. Nokia's most expensive phone in the store, their legitimate flagship phone, and it doesn't do close up? What is wrong with them?

It is supremely annoying - and this annoying happens several times every single day. The regular Nokia owner discovers very soon this disappointment and it is true regression. Nokia is going backwards with the camera, back far more than 5 years. For the typical premium Nokia owner, they go back 4 Nokia superphone models, to where they last didn't have this ability. This is not what is called progress. This is very seriously regressing.

If it was only one thing, you'd forgive Nokia. But it isn't.

NO REPLACABLE BATTERY

And as its new, you start to use the smartphone and you try it out. So you listen to music, you surf the web, you record some video, you watch some videos, you look at photographs, you do some work on Excel spreadsheets and check out some of your powerpoint files etc. You use WiFi and bluetooth, etc. And well before the day is done, your battery runs out. So yes, it was 'heavy use' but you observe in the first weeks that you are very often out of juice before the day is done. And you go to the store like you always did with Nokia premium phones, you come in to buy your spare battery. Its a business tool. While we often also use it for entertainment along the way, it is a business phone, an E-series, for serious business professionals. Even if the day runs long into the night, we have to have the phone with enough juice to take that important international call at night. And we know that there cannot be 'enough' battery life for the heavy use days. That is why so many of us Nokia loyalist heavy users will inevitably carry along a spare battery for the phone. Not for everyday use, but when that sudden emergency call comes in that killed our battery. No problem pop in the fully-charged replacement battery, and you are good to go.

Except that you can't. What? Yes, Nokia who have always (up to last year) had replacable batteries as a standard feature - and sell tons of those accessories to loyal Nokia users - in some fit of madness decided last year (I believe the N8 was the first model) where you the user cannot replace the battery anymore? This is copying Apple yes, but in the wrong way. Its like Porsche looking at the Hummer, finding that many people like the Hummer, and replacing the handling of the Porsche with that of the Hummer! A moronic move. And yes, that is what Nokia did with this, a business phone! I have had (at least one) replacement battery for every one of my premium Nokia phones back to the 9110 Communicator a dozen years ago. But for this E7, I cannot even buy one!

This is very unfriendly for Nokia consumers and its also a bad move for Nokia! They have to manufacture the battery anyway for every single E7 they sell (one battery into the phone). They also have to manufacture some supply of extra batteries to furnish the replacements when those come (you have to take the E7 to an authorized Nokia dealer to get it replaced). But how many more spare batteries would they have sold - at the far bigger profit margin of accessories! - to all those who 'just in case' wanted to buy the replacement battery. This is profit abandoned by Nokia! No wonder their profit margins are coming down, with this type of idiotic management decisions. The premium Nokia smartphone owners had already been 'conditioned' to buy the spare batteries.

But Tomi, you can use a spare micro USB based standard replacement power pack. Haha, yeah. That is the ‘Apple’ solution isn’t it. A typical ‘American’ solution, forcing us to carry .. MORE CABLES .. in our pockets! So yeah, I’ve tried that and its an ugly inelegant work-around. And how silly do you look when your phone is out of juice, you hook up the spare USB battery pack and its cable - and then you receive a phone call. Now you have to hold that whole tangled mess to your ear! This was ‘wireless’ telecoms eh? We have regressed not just years or a decade – we’ve regressed back to 1978, three full decades back, to the time before cellular mobile wireless telecoms, back to the wired time. Now the voice call doesn’t come by wire, but the mobile phone is so dumb, it needs extra electricity to come by wire! How utterly ridiculous - when Nokia had already a full distributor system of selling spare batteries to its customers. Now they hand this profitable accessory market to some independent battery makers! No wonder Nokia’s profitability is in a crash-dive, with this kind of moronic decisions. The profit margins on accessories are always higher than the profit margins on the primary items..

And yeah. That means another charger needed now (or at least a charging cable if you carry around a laptop or something with a standard USB port for charging your battery pack). Again, extra equipment to carry is what every business traveler hates. We live by the rule of pack light, everything in the carry-on bag. And suddenly the Nokia E7 causes me to need another charger! So Nokia’s E7 is quietly whispering into my ear, Dear Loyal Nokia Smartphone Customer, I don’t love you anymore. I am deliberately making your life miserable. Yes, I don’t love you anymore. Go find someone else to love.

So the painful papercuts continue. Next, the phone book.

CAN'T SEARCH PHONE BOOK?

And this is not a casual entertainment device, it is a proper business tool. And loyal Nokia owners have amassed hundreds and hundreds of addresses and names and job titles, employers, wives names, fax numbers, car license plate numbers, whatever we collect into the phone book. And Nokia in the E-Series (coming from the Communicator) had a very vast powerful phone book. So we could enter the name of the company for example. And then search by company, to see all the colleagues we had in our phone book by the company for example, if we couldn't remember that given person's name, etc.

So now we do the normal phone book transfer from our previous Nokia superphone to the E7, and would you know it? It won't search most of the fields.

I had this bizarre incident which happened a month after I had received my E7. A friend of mine sent me an SMS (as he knows, I prefer to communicate via SMS). The message arrived just fine. He is in another country. My phone of course recognized his phone number and instead of showing the phone number who is calling me, because that exists in the phone book, the E7 kindly displayed his name on my screen and as the sender of the SMS. Now, normally, you can respond to the message directly from the message. And on all previous SMS's that I received on this E7, that worked fine. But for this person, I could not respond. I was bewildered. So I tried to call him (which usually works, just go to the message and use the calling button) but couldn't do that either. And then I decided, no problem, I'll just go through the phone book. And I went to search for him by name.

Note, my phone has already displayed his name as the person who sent the SMS, as the originator of the SMS. So my phone knows who he is, and obviously has somewhere saved his name with that international phone number. And now the annoying part. The phone book cannot find him! Not on the phone memory, not on the SIM card memory. Not by re-arranging phone book by first name or by last name etc. It cannot be found. The reason is also clear, I remember that when I originally entered his name I did not remember the exact spelling of his name so I entered him only into another field, like the address field or business field, using the nickname I had for him - deliberately leaving the first name and last name blank, thinking I will later fix that when I have the business card or get the name from an email or Linked In or whatever.

The previous Nokia phones worked just fine sending and receiving calls and messages to that name even where the 'first name' and 'last name' happened to be blanks, because the phone ‘knows’ that this field belongs to some specific phone number and we could respond to it.

But now as they are transferred to this new E7, the info has kind of become invisible. It is there, definitely, but there is no way to display it, and I cannot now respond to it! And I went to Nokia help boards to try to find a solution. There isn't any. They acknowledge the problem. This version of the newest Nokia phone book does not support any kind of search in any of the ancilliary fields, except first name or last name! This is severe caveman regression. This is a BUSINESS phone. We have been entering business info into those fields for years. Nokia has supplied us with the virtual business card facility to send personal data from one phone to another via SMS and bluetooth (and earlier via infra-red even) so we don't need to enter the data, and we can have MORE data entered. Now all of that is useless. This phone does not recognize any of that data!

Understand how impossible my situation is. I can read the incoming SMS from my friend. He knows I prefer to communicate via SMS because I travel extensively and don’t want the calls in strange time zones or when am sleeping etc. Now I can read his urgent SMS but I cannot send a reply. I cannot call him either. While his name is in it, I cannot find the name in the phone book. It is literally impossible to get to his number while it resides in my phone. I cannot see the phone number (even the 'information' field of the message only displays his nickname, not the real phone number) so I cannot even manually call him or send a message. I have to resort to going to email, and sending him an email, apologizing for not replying, and asking what is his phone number again...

How unprofessional is that? And worse, I have no way of knowing how many of my long-standing phone book entries fall in this category. His is not the only one that didn't have a proper first or last name. And Nokia cannot even tell us when this will be fixed (if ever). They only acknowledge, the new phone book does not offer search through all fields. Arghhh! Madness. This is severe regression. A business tool is crippled, to becoming akin to a toy.

SCREEN IS NOT HIGH RES

And then we get to play with the screen a bit more. In the store it looked glorious. But when we do some web surfing, we notice the screen is annoyingly formated. We compare to say the E90 Communicator (which also had a 4 inch screen, but back in 2008 had a resolution of 800 pixels across) and find the E7 is only 640 pixels across. That is 'VGA' resolution (VGA resolution was 640x480 which is akin to personal computers of about 1988). As the E7 is 16:9 screen resolution its not as tall, but the width is what counts on websites. Any screen doing modern websites and re-sizing them to 640 VGA width screen will squeeze them very badly to often ridiculously thin columns. Even in the E90 Communicator, which was the first smartphone in the world to offer a 4 inch screen, we had the the equivalent resolution of SVGA at 800 pixels across. So the screen of the E7 is regressing!

And its not just on websites. If we take the video we viewed on the E90, and display it on the E7, it is clearly less sharp. Visibly less sharp. So while Apple is going from regular resolution to 'retina display' with finer pixels and more sharp images, Nokia is going in the opposite direction, it is regressing and giving us lesser resolution today than they gave us in 2008! To effectively torpedo any benefits of the otherwise magnificent 4 inch super-bright, super-contrast, super-black display. This is yet another 'design feature' that Nokia has done, which for most random non-Nokia buyers is not noticable, but for loyal Nokia owners is aggravating. It is as if Nokia decided to deliberately annoy every exising loyal premium Nokia owner. Little but very distinct Nokia features that are lost. Its not that Nokia never had them its that we had it in the previous phone(s) and now don't get them anymore. Killing my loyalty with a hundred little paper cuts, every day, more disappointment. This is a superphone you cannot recommend. It will find a new way to displease you every single day.

NO QR CODE READER

And then one of those embarrassing moments. You are a loyal Nokia user. You remember the first QR code readers from the magnificent N93 back in 2006. You love QR codes and truly appreciate the convenience of no-typing URL access that they provide. You have started to use QR codes in your own marketing literature. And so the day comes when you meet up with a new colleague who hands over a business card - which more frequently today has a QR code - and you take out your new E7 to scan the info from the QR code. And you start to search the phone for the QR code reader. And you spend minutes digging for it. You've used Nokia phones for a decade. You know Symbian. You know 'Nokia logic' in the directory structures and how the apps are organized. You dig everywhere in settings in the camera, in the apps and business apps and accessories and connectivity and you just can't find it. Finally you reach into your other pocket to use your other phone to scan the QR code with that older smartphone by another maker and you decide to dig to find the QR code reader in this E7 at your next idle moment.

You need not bother. It isn't there! Yes, Nokia the major handset maker who championed QR codes for 5 years - as a business tool - has for some unfathonable reason left the QR reader off its most expensive phone for 2011. Its most expensive business phone. Not because QR codes are somehow passee or obsolete, no QR codes are now in great growth in all markets. But Nokia in its infinite wisdom has somehow decided this is not something a top-line business phone should come equipped with! Note, Nokia itself has started to use QR codes on business cards! But its topmost flagship phone can't read them. Again, all previous Nokia cameraphones at least back to 2007 came with QR code readers. And you can get one from the Ovi store and download and install it, so they exist. But Nokia left it out from this model! Lunacy. It is a feature increasingly added to business cards, and Nokia's own business cards now increasingly include QR codes, and all recent Nokia business phones read them, but the E7 doesn't. This is regression. This will annoy loyal Nokia owners. It is not a reason alone not to buy the E7, it is yet another way it finds to disappoint specifically loyal Nokia users.

CALENDAR CANT DISPLAY DETAIL

So we update our calendar from the previous Nokia phone to this. And we expected the 4 inch display to give us more, not less. But you know what? The previous Nokia calendars, as far as I can remember, always showed the day-specific detail, by day, when you watched the month view. So if I scrolled to May 4, I see what was the entry on May 4, then scrolling to May 5, I see that detail, etc.

How is the newest greatest most expensive Nokia BUSINESS phone calendar? It cannot display the detail! You have to actually click onto the day, to see whats on it. I see something is entered for May 6 but don't know what it is. How incredibly inconvenient is this for calendar use? And I don't know how your calendar is on your phone (I have used my Nokia calendars for more than a decade now haha) but for us Nokia users, this is a step back into the ice age. What kind of moron approved this 'upgrade' to the calendar? One of the most basic most useful features - a convenience feature, a SPEED feature, to at one glance on any day, see whats coming. Now I have to waste time to click INTO the day to see, and then click out of the day again (risking changes to the entry, or even accidentially deleting it, this being a touch screen and we use it often single-handed, while multi-tasking such as speaking on the phone...)

An UNACCEPTABLE deterioration of a Nokia business phone staple feature. The E7 is regressing very very severely, taking features and abilities we have grown accustomed to, that we depend on, and denying those from us. Again, Nokia help boards acknowledge this problem in the new calendar, but give us no guidance if and when it will be fixed.

NO MICRO SD SUPPORT

And then we have our microSD card slot! The one that is missing. From the E90 Communicator, Nokia had been so kind to offer us hot-swappable microSD slots on the outside, like it should be. Not beneath the battery as many smartphones still today require, for us to replace the microSD card, but Nokia made it so user-friendly for us, they allowed hot-swappable microSD swapping, as we needed, with the slot on the outside, behind a cover. Very very nice. And so, as we tend to do, many of us started to have lots of memories, pictures, music, videos, even whole movies, stored on microSD cards, not to mention for business users the powerpoints and word docs and excel sheets and pdf files. Tons of them on microSD cards. Today we have capacity of 32 gigabytes on the microSD cards (if you don't know, these are the smallest memory cards, about the size of the fingernail of your pinky finger).

And this is the newest most powerful Nokia business phone. And Nokia 'standardized' on microSD in about 2006. So you want to read some files. You see the slots, there is the one for the SIM Card (because no replacable battery, the SIM card slot is a tray on the outside, which some say can come out and you risk dropping and losing your primary work-related SIM card, ouch!), there is the cover for the HDMI slot, and many other receptacles.. but no microSD slot.

What? No microSD slot? Nokia, who 'standardized' on this and taught us loyal Nokia users to get the microSD cards as replacable media. Some of us even got the USB-microSD converter that allows us to use the same microSD cards as thumb drives on PCs with USB slots for exchanging powerpoint presentations etc. But now, the most expensive and most advanced Nokia business phone doesn't come with any kind of memory card slot!

And its not like it had tons of memory, the E7 only comes with 16 GB of internal memory (like I said, today's microSD cards offer 32 GB and soon we'll have 64GB and more). The E7 is essentially instantly obsolete. And definitely is not backwardly compatible with previous Nokia phones. At least before, when Nokia went from a larger memory slot to a smaller size physically, they were kind enough to provide us with a memory card adapter so we could use the smaller card in the bigger slot of the previous phone, to let us conveniently move files and use the card on both phones.

Now, some will argue, that because Nokia offers the 'real' USB connectivity, that just by getting a USB-to-microSD converter, you can use the USB connection to read microSD cards.

(One), this is a horribly inconvenient solution, but even if so, then Nokia should have at least shipped the microSD to USB converter in the box. But (two), it requires the use of the inflexible heavy and long adapter cable from the tiny USB slot to the normal USB connection which Nokia ships. That cable won't bend to fit your pocket. It means you can only carry it in your laptop bag (or purse, if you are a lady or a man prone to carrying a purse). It means (three) you won't have the cable with you always, while the microSD slot was on your previous Nokia superphones always. And even so, it means (four), this adapter cable work-around is VERY inconvenient use when connected. The long cable protrudes half-way across a fold-away table on an airplane for example, if you want to watch your video or powerpoint, or listen to your music etc. Imagine taking a phone call as you were working on a business file. Now you have a long ‘antenna’ protruding from the phone.. We are regressing to the 1980s, two decades ago with the protruding long antennae.. And then what happens when we run out of power? The power cord comes from the same connector as the USB adapter. We now have to make a choice (six) to either use the microSD card or get extra power (by standard Nokia charger or by USB power from a laptop or by the portable spare battery pack USB recharger) but we cannot have both! But almost any other smartphone does not force us into this silly choice, they have the microSD slot and allow us to both use the microSD card AND recharge the phone simultaneously, using both.

The solution is (six), to try to save files from the microSD card(s) onto the E7's modest internal memory, which means soon you are in the perpetual process of deleting files to make room for more. And it effectively defeats all purposes of a high-end smartphone. Can't save music on it, can't save games on it, can't save maps on it, can't save video clips on it, can't save powerpoints on it, can't save ebooks on it, can't save word docs on it, can't save pictures on it, can't save excel sheets on it, can't save pdf files on it, etc. Always something needs to be deleted to make some space.

And inevitably comes the time of choice or accident when (seven) you delete important files for which you had no digital backup. Why? Because Nokia was so cheap, they didn't include a microSD slot on this superphone. Why on earth not? What dumbass designer approved this 'feature'? This is cost-cutting you do on the bargain-basement version phone. For that cheap E-series (the E1) you offer 'only' the USB-adapter cord option, but for the top E-Series, of course you offer BOTH.

Note that there are more uses to the microSD slot than just memory cards. Visa has for example brought a microSD slot compatible micropayment ‘credit card’ solution that converts the standard phone to a near-field capable contactless credit card. But Nokia E7, the most expensive Nokia phone - won’t allow that. There is no microSD slot. This is the least compatible Nokia phone for ages.

Idiots! I cannot cannot recommend this phone. It is frustrating and annoying every single day.

TONS MORE TO DISAPPOINT

And there is more and more and more. The E7 seems to be as if designed by an amateur. Nokia has discontinued FM broadcasting. Why? It was a competitive feature that allowed us to use for example the car FM Radio without an 'iPod connector' or any car kit. The camera has no lens cover yes, but it is totally flush with the body of the phone bottom. The phone has no rubber 'leg' stubs to lift it from the surface of the table top. So now the phone slides on table surfaces - and that sliding will scratch the lens of the E7. The Microsoft office suite app is the simpler cheaper version now (what?) yes, so we can't do the normal type of edits we used to do. That is now a paid extra. Again, I could see doing a cheap version of the Office Suite compatible software for a business phone - if it was the cheapest phone in the lineup, but not for the top model! Not when it was the practise that the top E-Series had full Office compatibility. Come on, Nokia you are nickle-and-diming us to death. This is what killed loyalty of airlines, charging us for pillows and pepsis.

And the pain continues. The E7 is designed as if the design team had collective amnesia and forgot all of Nokia’s rich heritage in smartphones. The camera is not Carl Zeiss branded? Why? The most expensive Nokia phone and no Carl Zeiss branding? Really, Nokia, who is in charge? The accountants clearly. The keyboard has its quirkyness, why only 4 rows of keys? The slider mechanism should have been a bit longer to allow 5 keys so we'd get the dedicated number keys, now we have the often awkward numeric/alpha waiting when typing something with numbers etc. (incidentially some apps of course do not know that this is an E7 and do not automatically reconfigure the presumption of whether the top row of keys is numbers or alphabets and we have annoying instances where the numbers don’t work correctly etc..) And on the keyboard the shift key and function arrow key should have been reversed (did anyone who typed with QWERTY phones especially Nokia previous phones TEST this thing? Those keys cause regular mistyping!)

But these get to the nitty gritty.

This is the flagship Nokia superphone, the most expensive smartphone from the world's biggest phone maker, and the company that invented the smartphone. If Apple re-invented the smartphone with the iPhone, then arguably the N8 is the first full Nokia 'iPhone killer' to show it can do an iPhone clone and stuff much more into it for a lower price, starting with its glorious 12 megapixel camera.

This, the E7 was then to be the trump card for Nokia, to go where Apple refuses to go, beyond the iPhone. The smartphone if a touch screen device had a full QWERTY keyboard 'like it should be'. The smartphone for the mature users, who have used smartphones for more than only a few years.

The technology advances in the E7 are brilliant. HD video recording, HDMI out, full USB connectivity, a bright 4 inch screen, a great fast 8 megapixel camera, and that magnificent keyboard. This could have been the phone of the year, and an early contender for the phone of the decade even. It is that much of a leap forward in its advanced features.

If this E7 was made by a ‘non phone brand’ like say a Lenovo or Dell or Acer, we’d love all the excellence and easily forgive the little quirkiness. But this is ‘Nokia’ - and the buyer of this phone has a long history with Nokia. This is the least compatible Nokia phone ever. The kind of disappointments to loyal users might have been expected say when Nokia switches from Symbian to Microsoft in its smartphones in less than a year from now. But not when it continues with Symbian on the E7. There was no reason whatsoever for any of the severe steps back in the above decisions. No reason whatsoever. It was sheer madness to approve all those faults into the design of the E7. It turned the E7 from the best of phones, to the worst of phones. Where always before, Nokia’s top phones had kept function over form, the phone had to be the best phone Nokia could do, and form came second, this E7 reverses the equation, and in a desperate attempt to mimick Apple iPhone, they put form over function (the Apple insistence of no QWERTY for example). The E7 made form over function decisions in nearly every one of the above mistakes which totally torpedoed an otherwise fantastic piece of pocket electronics. The E7 is the ultimate Nokia phone designed to do the ultimate disappointments to push away the ultimately loyal Nokia premium phone users. This is exactly what is killing Nokia loyalty and profitability, that Nokia nickle’s and dime’s its customers, substituting mediocrity for excellence at the top phone model. This is Nokia shooting itself in the foot. And as this is the first phone released well after Stephen Elop came into power, this is ultimately Elop’s failure. If he knew what he was doing, he would not have let this phone be released in this form. But he clearly doesn’t know what he is doing, and he is now reaping what he has sowed, and he is learning the hard way. The sooner they pull this phone and apologize, and re-design, the more rapidly Nokia’s premium top-end phones can recover some credibility. This E7 is not worthy of the Nokia brand name.

COST, SIZE & WEIGHT WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN DRASTIC

They utterly messed it up. What would it have taken to add a replacable battery? One millimeter of thickness perhaps? But millions of moments of convenience for loyal Nokia users. What would it have cost to add a microSD slot? Nothing if we add the replacable battery because the SIM card would have gone under the battery (where it belongs) and the SIM card would have replaced that SIM card tray where now the SIM card is dangerously exposed.

What would it have cost to add the QR reader which Nokia already has in the Ovi store? Nothing. Its software only. Come on. Just keeping the previous calendar and phone book rather than regress us to having no more use of very important business functions and abilities. To include full Office compatibility is also just software. And while the autofocus would require some hardware as well as software, come on, at this price point, Nokia you have to do it. You can't do a business phone camera that doesn't do short-range scanning and close-up images. It is not a business cameraphone if it doesn't do that.

I could see a revised E7, an E7B, with 1024 resolution ('retina display') resolution on the 4 inch screen, a slightly raised camera casing, with autofocus (and QR code reader); return of the replacable battery, with SIM slot below battery and microSD card slot on outside, and fixing the other bugs like calendar, phone book etc - and that E7B could be out before the end of the year, and still recover a lot of greatness for Nokia. That would be a 'killer' smartphone.

This E7 is a harbinger of things to come from the first Nokia-Microsoft phones too. That change is forced upon Nokia phone design teams and the Microsoft Phone 7 operating system environment will force designers into making painful changes to the classic Nokia designs, which the new buyer won’t even notice and appreciate, but what are left of Nokia loyal customers will immediately notice - and hate. If this E7 is what Nokia ‘designers’ are capable of messing up when they still controlled all aspects of the phone including its operating system and its apps environment, imagine how much worse the ‘next Communicator’ will be when it adds all the Microsoft quirkiness to the Nokia legacy. Ouch.

If I was Samsung or HTC or RIM (or even Motorola, LG or SonyEricsson), I'd study the E7 in particular for its failures, and consider doing a rival. It would not be a big stretch for say Samsung to take the Galaxy version with the QWERTY, and turn it into a superphone powerhouse, adapting most of these super Nokia E7 features, avoiding the errors, and adding a bit of Samsung magic like say the pico projector of the Galaxy Beam - and create a 'hyperphone' the ultimate superduper monsterphone. (The Galaxy Beam by the way has also an 8 megapixel camera and obviously now that the E7 camera is useless, I have shifted to using the Galaxy Beam camera as my daily camera for all camera uses, obviously further enhanced by the microSD card capability so I am not feeling restricted by the storage ability.)

Nokia's flagship phones used to be the showcases of wonderful almost magical things we'd eventually see in other smartphones. And the E7 has tons of that. But I cannot recommend anyone to pay for this phone, as it is so frustrating and disappointing in daily use. Nokia has gutted the phone, removed so many of the standard features loyal Nokia owners have grown to love and expect, for years already. Any loyal Nokia owner who buys the E7 and uses it for a couple of months will break the loyalty to Nokia and is now fully willing to go try other phones, especially as this is the time when we learned that Symbian will be dead, so any E7 owner will also know their next superphone has to be on some other operating system anyway. Then why go with the tiniest OS (Phone 7)? Why not go with one of the big operating systems out there like Android, Apple’s iOS or RIM’s Blackberry?

This is a failure, Nokia, take it off the shelves and fix it. Why don’t you in Sarah Palin’s words ‘Man up’ and apologize, this was a failure. But the Symbian and Communicator line do not deserve this kind of kiss of death. Give us a worthy flagship phone, and you can do it with the simplest re-design of this otherwise very worthy platform. Nokia, you could do that for the last big hurrah for Christmas 2011? Are you honorable enough to do that for us, your loyal Communciator user base? Or did the accountants say there is no profit in loyalty?

Signed: I really really wanted to fall in love with this E7. Instead, I fell out of love with Nokia because of it.

UPDATE May 31 2011 - A rebuttal to this blog! Steve Litchfield over at All About Symbian agrees with some points, but disagrees quite strongly with other points I made. As always, Steve's writing is very well considered and his points have lots of merit. Please read his view to get the counter-balance by someone who is not blinded that the E7 is somehow perfect but who also thinks I may be nitpicking a bit... Steve's response to my E7 review here.

Pyramid Research are Unprofessional and Incompetent - do not buy any of their work in mobile! - this after mindless Microsoft Phone 7 forecast to 2015

Facts are from earth, Pyramid Research projections are from Pluto. No, thats not fair. Pyramid projections are from another galaxy, one where Luke Skywalker fights a Death Star in fantasy-land. Paging the Stats Police!

I am steamed by that Pyramid forecast this week. Usually I do not comment on forecasts, as I am a forecaster myself and we all make tons of mistakes in our forecasts, that is the nature of the beast. It is impossible to be completely accurate, and if by some miracle a forecaster hits it on the nose, that is always an accident. The best we can hope for as forecasters, is to be less wrong than most, and to be right more often than wrong.

But it does not excuse stupidity. And it does not excuse unprofessionalism. Pyramid crossed the line this week with the most absurd forecast of the new decade (to go back to find the previous similarly absolutely ludicrous forecast, we have to go back to the moronic Forrester forecast from 2001 when they promised the 3G licenses would bankrupt the telecoms industry with only 4 operators/carriers to survive out of Europe, haha.)

Yes, this week on May 9, Pyramid Research released its forecast for smartphone market shares, where it forecasted that Microsoft's Phone 7 operating system will not just be the biggest OS in the year 2015, they will pass number 2, Android by year 2013. Yes. Microsoft (with Nokia) would pass Android, in about two years. This from the smartphone operating system vendor (Microsoft) who never even had a quarter of the market before Apple came in and changed the game, and this from Nokia who saw its market share crash by a third in just the past 12 months - against Android which is the world's biggest smartphone OS, and which grew by more than doubling just in the past 12 months and reports very strong growth for this quarter already. Meanwhile, Microsoft's new OS was not even able to outsell the outgoing Microsoft smartphone OS in the latest quarter for which we have full data.

What is worse, from Pyramid, is that they are not willing to tell us why. They show a projection of market shares which is suspicious on many levels and then refuse to explain why. Note that all other major analysts who specialize in mobile have said Android would be an easy dominant number 1 up to year 2015 or 2016 at least (vs Pyramid who thinks Microsoft can pass Android by 2013). And that many have ridiculed Pyramid about this already.

So. Whats the story in Balamory? The Pyramid forecast is as follows (I have taken approximate values from their graph, these may be off by a percentage or two, its the best I could do):

Symbian goes from 38% in 2009 and 31% in 2010 to 25% in 2011 (?) to 8% in 2012 to 2% in 2013
Android goes from 5% in 2009 and 22% in 2010 to 28% in 2011 to 30% in 2012 to 32% in 2013
Blackberry goes from 21% in 2009 and 18% in 2010 to 14% in 2011 to 12% in 2012 and 10% in 2013
Apple iPhone goes from 12% in 2009 to 14% in 2010 to 16% in 1011 to 14% in 2012 to 12% in 2013
and Windows goes from 16% in 2009 to 11% in 2010 to 11% in 2011 to a massive jump to 28% in 2012 and 35% in 2013

STELA BOKUN AND PYRAMID ARE INCOMPETENT

First on the facts. Their base case up to year 2010 is faulty! Massively faulty! The facts are out there, we have several analyst houses who publish smartphone operating system market shares on a quarterly basis, that I also collect here for my blog readers. The full year 2010 market shares are as follows, vs Pyramid

OPERATING SYSTEM . . . . . . . PYRAMID CLAIM . . . . . . REAL MARKET SHARE
Symbian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  31% . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38%
Android . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22% . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  23%
Blackberry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18% . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16%
Apple iPhone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14% . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16%
Microsoft Windows + Phone 7 . . 11% . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5%

Note first, that by Quarter 4 of 2011, the picture is so bad, for Symbian and Microsoft vs Android, that by the last quarter for which we have full data, the picture is this badly distorted against that forecast:

Q4: Symbian 32%, Android 30%, Microsoft OS's both added together (Windows and Phone 7) 3%

The incompetent analyst at Pyramid, Stela Bokun, draws a picture for us, where the 'pattern' of market share decline for Microsoft should be crashing from the 16% it was in 2009, to the 3% it is today, yet incompetent Stela Bokun of unprofessional Pyramid Research shows a graph, where Microsoft 'bottoms out' at about 11% and TURNS TO GROWTH.

In reality from the 5% Microsoft had for all of 2010, the market share was in deep dive all year to the end of the year, and is far worse now. The 'Nokia effect' cannot lift Microsoft Windows/Phone 7 OS market share because no Nokia-Microsoft phones are in the market (and Nokia Chairman Jorma Ollila said quantity shipments of Microsoft powered smartphones would only be sold in 2012).

Meanwhile on the Symbian picture, the crash-dive of Symbian is not correctly depicted either by the incompetent so-called analyst Stela Bokun of unprofessional Pyramid Research. They suggest Symbian was at about 31% for the year 2010, when in reality Symbian had 38% of the market for the full year. And by the last quarter of 2011, Symbian had crashed to 32%, and Nokia statements about Q1 tell us that its current market share for Q1 is about 26%. How the incompetent analyst Stela Bokun of unprofessional research house Pyramid Research can suggest Symbian to finish the year 2011 at about 25% when already today it is at that level but new Nokia CEO Stephen Elop has already said Nokia smartphones will suffer severe decline in market share the next few quarters before Microsoft phones arrive. What planet is Stela Bokun from? They don't deal with facts over there in the bizarre galaxy Pyramid does its Research at.

Other Symbian family members. In 2009, at the start of the point of the reported period by Pyramid, Symbian handsets were manufactured by Nokia, Samsung, LG, Motorola, SonyEricsson, Sharp and Fujitsu, seven of the world's 10 largest smartphone makers. Today Samsung, LG, Motorola, SonyEricsson, Sharp and Fujitsu have all shifted part or all of their smartphone production to Android, which also includes HTC and major dumbphone makers ZTE and Huawei both currently selling enough smartphones to finish in the top 10 for the full year if the pattern continues in 2011.

Most of all, Symbian's Japan leader, NTT DoCoMo has announced a shift away from Symbian, as it sees the end to the platform. NTT DoCoMo, Japan's biggest mobile operator is now favoring Android.

In the Windows Family, before Microsoft's Phone 7, the older Windows Mobile had support by Samsung, LG, SonyEricsson, HTC and Motorola - all which also make Android phones. Today Motorola says it won't do Phone 7. And Samsung has built its own bada operating system, so where Samsung does multiple operating systems, its priority will be bada, not Microsoft. Meanwhile LG and HTC have announced support of the newest OS, the one that Nokia abandoned, MeeGo, being developed by Intel. This is relevant because the world's biggest mobile operator, in the world's biggest market, China Mobile has announced its support of MeeGo. China Mobile subscriber base alone is twice the size of the total USA market.

In the Phone 7 market, all of the previous Phone 7 providers (HTC, Samsung, LG, SonyEricsson among the top 10 biggest smartphone makers) were stunned and angered when Microsoft was said to have paid Nokia 'billions' to join Phone 7. As all of these four makers support Android, and three of them support a third OS, it is easy for them to 'punish' Microsoft by supporting an alternate OS like bada and MeeGo.

PYRAMID 2011 PROJECTION IS PURE FANTASY

The projection of Pyramid's 2011 numbers is beyond reality, which clearly illustrates how incompetent their analyst Stela Bokun is, and how unprofessional Pyramid Research is for allowing this forecast to be released. If now in Q1 we see Symbian crashing in the past 4 quarters from 43% to 36% to 29% to about 26% - and almost all past Symbian partners have 'deserted the sinking ship' and BOTH of the two remaining partners are shifting out - and the bigger partner, Nokia, says its next quarters are going to be worse, it is sheer stupidity for Pyramid's Stela Bokun to suggest 2011 Symbian market share will be about 25%.

For Stela Bokun and Pyramid Research to suggest Symbian now completely halts the most dramatic smartphone market share decline in history (witnessed in previous 12 months) somehow suddenly - and against the word of the CEO of Nokia who said the decline is to continue - then Stela Bokun and Pyramid Research must reveal to us potential customers and consumers and the audience, what makes them think that this trend is broken now?

What do they know that we do not? Pyramid Reserach owe us that explanation, why the 2011 Symbian share is now somehow 'not declining' for the rest of this year, when even Nokia said it will decline? That Pyramid draws it in a picture without telling us why, is rude and misleading and vastly disrespectful of the industry and a disgrace, a slap in the face of all serious professional forecasters who do a tough job in a difficult industry.

MICROSOFT SHARE IS CRIMINALLY WRONG

The far worse 'reporting' that the so-called expert and 'analyst' Stela Bokun of Pyramid shows in their graph, is the Microsoft market share, which they report as about 11% in 2010, to hold steady at that about 11% for this year (before somehow shooting up like a rocket in 2012)

That is patently false. It is a lie. Pyramid Research are lying to its customers. They are not just incompetent, they are liers! Microsoft's market share last year was less than half that! At 5%. and their market share was crash-diving, to 3% by the end of the year. Their current market performance is so bad, Microsoft refused to give the number at their quarterly results for Q1. If Pyramid want to claim that Microsoft's market share will be flat this year - that is going against all facts but if so, they have to draw Microsoft's 2011 market share at between 3% and 5%, not at 11%. And that if Pyramid Research feel Microsoft this year has somehow halted the decline of smartphone OS market share, before any Nokia phones are sold, then Pyramid has to explain 'why'. Why do they think this miracle is happening.

But Pyramid cannot claim Microsoft OS smartphones sold about 11% last year. That is patently a lie. And if they ended the year at 3%, it is beyond any stretch or realism, to suggest they somehow JUMP to almost 4 times better market share this year BEFORE the Nokia phones come - and AFTER Microsoft angered all existing Phone 7 partners with the billions paid to Nokia.

If Pyramid wants to forecast that next year 2012, Microsoft can make the most dramatic growth in market share ever witnessed in smartphones - better than the iPhone mind you - and better than Android did, with only half as many partners most of whom prefer Android (which costs them nothing) vs Phone 7 (for which they have to pay a license fee to Microsoft for every phone) - that is Pyramid's prerogative.

But I am not letting them get away with lies. Symbian's market share last year was nowhere near 31%, and Microsoft's was nowhere near 11%. That Pyramid Reserach shows this kind of bullsh*t to the industry tells me three things - one, they are desperate to get attention. 2, they have suspended any professionalism to sell reports, and 3 they are unethical.

So, can Microsoft become number 1 in 2013. Judge for yourself. Google currently activates 400,000 smartphones every day. Thats 146 million smartphones on an annual basis, and 36.5 million per quarter. That is about 37% market share CURRENTLY for Android, which is growth of 7 market share points from the Christmas quarter. Meanwhile Microsoft ended last year at 3% and is still declining sales. Nokia's market share as projected by several respected analysts will be in or near single digits by end of year, before Microsoft smartphones are sold in meaningful numbers.

Pyramid suggested Android will continue to grow all the way to 2015, but that it would gain to about 35% market share by the end of the period. Android is TODAY above that forecast already! Pyramid are incompetent! And for anyone to suggest, that the world's worst-performing smartphone OS, the one so bad, that several of Microsoft's previous partners refused to launch it, would suddenly have the biggest one-year growth of any OS in history, without telling us why, is abusive to the industry.

Pyramid Research is now on my sh*t list. They are utterly incompetent and unprofessional. Pyramid have to fire the incompetent analyst Stela Bokun for such hocus-pocus nonsense, and Pyramid have to issue an apology and statement that corrects the facts up to year 2010, and remove their moronic forecast/projection to 2011 and beyond. Until they do that, do not buy any Pyramid Research projects, reports, analysis or consulting - and doubt ANY OTHER EXPERT who references Pyramid in the future.

I hate it when someone in mobile industry statistics is giving bogus numbers, it makes us all look bad! Shame Pyramid! Issue an apology NOW and retract that silly forecast and correct the 2010 numbers! Shame!

Mobile and Betting, A natural pairing... or so one would believe

Lets do some mobile betting, gambling and lottery lessons from Slovakia. This week we had the annual Mobile Marketing Forum in Slovakia where I delivered the keynote. I also met up with several friends from the central European region and got to learn of many good stories around mobile, marketing and m-commerce from Slovakia and neighboring countries. I learned a lot, but the one story that stood out was by Milos Prelec who works for Tipos the national betting and lottery company of Slovakia.

WHEN IT ALL FAILS

And Milos started his presentation telling of how Tipos entered mobile betting five years ago. His team developed a technically elegant solution to do sports betting which cost about 10 million Slovak Crowns to develop at that time (about 33,000 Euros or about 50,000 US dollars). The mobile betting service functioned technically in an excellent way, there were no technical faults to it.

So how did they perform in the market? Over the first three months after the service was launched, they achieved a total of 40 bets. Not 40 million bets or 40 thousand bets. 40 bets. The total value of the betting was 26 Euros. Again, not 26 thousand or 26 million. Over three months, the service that cost 33,000 Euros to develop, had total betting activity worth 26 Euros, out of which Tipos would earn its betting commission as a tiny fraction of that. Now Slovakia is not a 'big' European country by population, at about 5.5 million people the country is roughly the same size as say Denmark, Finland or Norway. To put the numbers into a British, French or Italian context, multiply them by 10. But even then, if this was in French context, if you spend that 33,000 Euros to deploy a mobile service which in 3 months manages to deliver about 260 Euros of total value of betting traffic (and a tiny fraction of that is your income as the provider) obviously this is a massive commercial failure.

40 total bets over 90 days by the national betting agency, in a country where mobile phone penetration even back in 2006 was over 100 percent per capita. You can see why Tipos management decided after 3 months that this experiment was a costly error and terminted the mobile betting service. They were further very wary of considering any newer mobile betting and lottery service ideas by their innovation team, even where some other markets would report successes in mobile betting and gambling and lotteries.

WHY DID IT FAIL

Milos was very open and honest talking about this painful lesson for his employer and to his career. Why did they fail? They were too early to the market for several reasons. The payments industry and regulations were not prepared for this. The Slovakian mobile telecoms industry did not offer micropayments at that time due to some banking regulations of that time. So the mobile phone user could not just click to bet on the phone. They had to use a separate payment mechanism for which the user had to register separately online with credit card or banking info.

The service also could not pay out directly to the mobile phone account either as money or any equivalent credits. The pay-out of betting would also have to be settled via a separate account and its payment would be slow and cumbersome, to your bank account or an online payments system (which in 2006 were not very convenient, widely accepted and not easily convertible to cash).

TRY AGAIN, TRY AGAIN

The banking regulations evolved in Slovakia and also the technologies of applications, featurephones (and early smartphones) using Java etc enabled more elegant and immediate types of technical solutions and the mobile industry introduced micropayments to the Slovakian market. Milos had proposed several revised concepts for mobile betting or lottery for Tipos, and eventually his management was willing to try again, two years later.

So they launched sports betting using a Java application and micropayments. They also offered their online betting users a migration path to do their online betting also on their mobile phones. The success today? 8 million euros worth of bets on an annual basis.

Now as the mobile betting was finally proven, the team was allowed to expand the concepts and Tipos introduced mobile casino games style gambling (Blackjack, Roulette etc). That has grown to a 7 million Euro gambling business.

And they expanded again, they then launched the mobile lottery. In just a year and a half from launch, last year the mobile lottery delivered 10 million Euros in lottery payments.

The mobile customer base of Tipos has reached 540,000 (obviously led by lottery users). Note, in a nation of 5.5 million population, this is almost exactly 10% of the total population who now engage with the national betting and lottery provider via mobile phones. Most of their business is not on mobile yet but all mobile services are growing.

SEND REMINDER BEFORE LOTTERY CLOSES

Which brings us to the mobile marketing element, and why Milos was invited to speak to the Slovakian Mobile Marketing Forum. They have of course experimented in and learned to use mobile not just as a betting channel, but as a marketing/advertising channel directly to their customers. Tipos has been expanding their mobile marketing. Why? Because they have measured the effect of their marketing, and mobile marketing consistently delivers nearly twice as big a boost to betting activities than their other main advertising channels, print ads and online ads.

The most successful method? SMS of course. The best-performing mobile ads are the SMS lottery reminders which are sent to regular lottery users one hour before the lottery closes for the week. The SMS reminder includes the link to the mobile web page to do the instant lottery submission. Milos was not able to give us the exact performance of this advertising but I am confident it is in the high double digits in mobile advertising conversion rate.

SOME LAST COMMENTS

Milos Prelec was very open and honest and humble in his presentation, and we could vividly share the struggles his team had gone through with the early problems. Milos ended his presentation with several very valid observations. First, most of their users are older, sports betting, gambling and the lottery are generally not the young person's hobby and activity. Their average users are well above the age of 40. So they had to make the betting, the registration, the payments and pay-outs very easy.

They never spam random consumers, they only contact registered existing users on an opt-in database. And they of course take advantage of any significant events, like just now the world ice hockey championships held in Slovakia.

Thank you Milos, for an inspiring and insightful case study of betting, gambling and lotteries on mobile. Good luck to your team. And for our readers, its yet another example like so many in the past (like Habbo Hotel, like Angry Birds etc) where the developer struggled with a great idea to begin with, and they had to launch and re-launch and re-launch again, until after a long time they figure out what works in mobile. But its worth trying again if you belive in your concept. Tipos gets 25 million Euros in bets and lottery payments annually out of 540,000 Slovakian consumers, meaning an average betting transaction revenue of 3.85 Euros (5.50 US dollars) per active Tipos mobile betting user per month.

If we adjust that for a USA context, the equivalent mobile betting, gambling and lottery business as they have built in just four years in Slovakia on mobile, would be reaching about 31.4 million Americans, who would generate about 170 million dollars every month, or about 2 Billion dollars of betting activity per year. Not bad. Mobile IS the Magical Money-Making Machine.

Whats Happenin' in Mobile Marketing? MMA Forum Asia review - the most astonishing event ever!

I do about 20 public speaking events every year and regularly speak on all six inhabited continents. I get to see most of the 'usual suspect' speakers and companies on a regular basis and know most of their stories. I also follow the industry with a passion and try to keep abreast of the developments, especially where they relate to industry innovations in mobile, and the statistics relating to this business. As I tend to know most of the stories that I've seen just in the previous few weeks at previous conferences, for me, a typical conference may yield one or two good tidbits or cases or stats, that I will find so useful in my work, that I end up creating slides about them and speak about them in my upcoming events or workshops.

The MMA (Mobile Marketing Association) events are famous for very high quality speakers of very innovative brands and companies in the mobile marketing area. I've done MMA events on several continents and even done a keynote to the MMA Global event in New York City, so I kind of knew what to expect when I landed in Singapore this week. I knew that mobile is very high growth area here in Asia where I live here in Hong Kong. And I've observed that the advertising and marketing industry has recently jumped into mobile with both feet. Trusting that the wild and wacky (some would say crazy) mAd men of Madison Avenue are now bringing their best creativity to mobile as the newest (ie 7th) mass medium, the most inventive, creative, innovative and magical space of mobile, in 2011, is definitely the advertising and marketing side of mobile media.

Thus I had high hopes for the MMA event in Singapore. The biggest growth region of the strongest growth industry on the planet, and of that, its most vibrant and creative sector. Boy was I surprised. This was so much more than I could have imagined. It was by far the most astonishing event I have ever attended in over 250 public speakerships over two decades. Just read this blog and see how much creativity, how much innovation, how many factual actual stats and case studies and real world results were reported. There is so much material, that I could well write a whole book out of just the stories told at this MMA Asia Forum of 2011 in Singapore.

TRYING TO BE FAIR

Now, it was a two-day event, I was called into some press interviews so I could not see all speakers. We had two streams for part of the event, so I missed some speakers. And on Day 1 the event had severe WiFi connectivity problems and many heavy Twitter users lost a lot of time being disconnected and attempting to re-connect, so my Day 1 coverage is far weaker than that for Day 2. I have tried to collect quotes and observations from the Twitter streams to supplement my own notes.

I have tried to keep the order roughly in the sequence the speakers first spoke, but as several were seen more than once (gave presentation and sat on panel, for example), I have tried to collect all statements by any one speaker, into just one paragraph by that speaker which somewhat messes up the pure chronological order, but I think for the random reader of this blog, it makes more sense to see all statements by one speaker in one section of this blog rather than sprinkled all around it. But with that, lets go to the stories.

START DAY 1

Greg Stuart the new CEO of the MMA, opened the event and pointed out that: "Asia is the heart and soul of mobile. There is more innovation and excitement about mobile here than anywhere else." How prophetic considering the event. I ask you the reader to consider any event you ever attended, and did you learn this much new as I did at the MMA event this week.

UNILEVER BIG INTO MOBILE

Next up was Rahul Welde VP Media Asia for Unilever. Unilever is one of those cryptic brands for me that is difficult to pin down, which toothpaste is their brand, which deodorant, which detergent, which ice cream, etc. But as he spoke, the audience heard several of the world's most famous mobile ad campaigns. One of my faves currently is the Virtual Wake-up Girl campaign in Japan by Axe the deodorant brand. (I only didn't know it was a Unilever brand). He also showed that the concept works in other markets not as advanced as Japan, where the wake-up is only as a sexy voice service.

What was new to me was what I believe is the first successful mobile social network that is brand-specific. Pond's Dream Girl is a youth social network on mobile, set up by Unilever in Indonesia. Rahul also talked of how mobile is used to teach consumers to brush their teeth twice per day in many emerging world markets using celebrities like sports stars in India teaching their kids to brush twice. And in less developed markets, SMS messages to receive airtime credits is a good campaign method, as Unilever uses in Africa with contests on Omo detergent packages rewarded with airtime credits.

MORE SPEAKERS

My keynote was next. I will not cover it here (I have it at the end of this blog) because regular readers of this blog, and my Twitter followers will tend to know most of the stats and cases I mentioned.

Next up was Naveen Tewari, the CEO of inMobi who gave us many good stats. For example in Asia, consumers from age 18 to 64 prefer to shop via mobile than via web. Only older than 65 year olds prefer web over mobile. More amazingly, 80% of Asian mobile users are also mobile shoppers. Somewhere here, possibly it was inMobi but might have been some other speaker, showed a good slide (but my picture has the branding of the slide obscured), which said that 61% of consumers wont return to a website they tried to access on mobile that was not easy to get to (ouch). 40% said they'd then proceed to a rival's mobile website (ouch-ouch). And 19% would consider it a negative impact on the owner brand of the website, if the mobile site is not easy to access on a mobile phone (triple-ouch!). (Tomi comment - as so many pointed out during the MMA Forum, most people who surf the mobile web do NOT have smartphones today, most use featurephones and there are many - especially in the Emerging World countries - who do so on very simple crude old second-hand WAP phones. Test your mobile website for simple phone use! Remember 'No phone left behind' and do not fall for the iSyndrome here..).

Andrew Knott Chief Digital Officer of Euro RSCG quoted Eric Schmidt: more content is produced every 3 days today, than in the entire history of humanity up to year 2003. He also pointed out that while the world had a recession past two years, there was no consumer recession in the use of mobile

Anuj Kumar the Executive Director of Affle showed us a campaign in India using a cricket sporting athlete to star in Maruti Suzuki campaign, with SMS and IVR (Interactive Voice Response). (Tomi comment, in India and many markets where illiteracy is still a major issue, voice-oriented services are still a big growth opportunity)

CHERRYPICKS OF HONG KONG

Then we heard from Jason Chiu the CEO of Cherrypicks in Hong Kong. He showcased several exciting campaigns, I didn't catch all details but a few: First, another superb Japanese invention by D2C and one of my current fave stories of how magical AR Augmented Reality can be, is the the iButterfly AR butterflies of Japan. They exist locally, each is regionally unique and obviously only seen through a mobile phone when hunting for the iButterflies. This service is now coming to Hong Kong (so cool! I will have to collect a few to show when I travel elsewhere). The marketing side is, that each butterfly carries coupon by a sponsor, to reward its capture. Then Jason talked of the Hennessy location-based 'stamp' collector, where virtual stamps would be collected at bars serving Hennessy. He showed a cool AR drinks mixing guide based on codese embedded on coasters in bars and pubs.

64% SAVING IN VISITOR AQUISITION COSTS

After all that AR and science fiction-ish futures stuff, what did Jason Chiu of Hong Kong, a country of high smartphone penetration, say about mobile marketing today? "SMS and MMS are still best channels to reach mobile consumers". He then showed their award-winning campaign for the Hong Kong Trade Dev't Council (who runs congress center and conferences, Hong Kong is a major global congress hub with massive events here for anything from say toys to watches to telecoms). The campaign was designed to lure visitors to the Congress Center by offering free passes to conferences. The campaign started with incoming visitors to Hong Kong, by targeting them at the Hong Kong International Airport, with targeted visitors from 31 countries, based on their phone number (international country code prefix). The campaign also offered passes based on the location for those who approached the Congress Center. And for domestic Hong Kong residents, the campaign targeted segmented users, such as owners of Blackberries. The campaign was extremely successful, going now into its third year. They have achieved a 64% savings in congress visitor aquisition costs.

MAGIC OF AR 3D EYE GLASSES

I was totally blown away with Jason's last example. As part of working with the trade conferences, his company has the opportunity sometimes to do some showcase mobile solutions. For the eye glasses and sunglasses congress, Cherrypicks designed what many at the MMA Asia Forum thought was the coolest campaign yet seen, an Augmented Reality eye-glasses tester - which worked in 3D! So its not just like all previous AR samplers we have seen, that only let you 'overlay' that T-shirt over your body. You cannot turn your body sideways and let that virtual T-shirt turn with you. It stays flat, 2D in front of you no matter how you spin your body. Not with this cool 3D eye-glasses AR tester. You use your cameraphone to take a picture of yourself, you position that face to a specific set-up on the screen. Then you pick your glasses, and they appear 'overlayed' on your face, like any AR solution. Except now, if you pivot your head turning left or right, the 3D eye-glasses will twist with your head, so you see the side-view of your face with the glasses! This is magical (and shows how much AR is the bleeding edge of innovation in mobile today)

MY PANEL - ALL SAY mAD WILL DOUBLE THIS YEAR AGAIN

My panel was on the topic of the Brand's View on the Potential for Mobile Advertising and Marketing. We had three brands in the consumer space, represented by Danilo J Mojica II, Director of Wireless Consumer Division at Smart of Philippines, Aditya Save, Head Media of Marico in India; and Victor Hernandez Luhan of Unilever out of Singapore. Daniel pointed out that he was a schitzophrenic brand on the panel, as Smart being the biggest mobile operator/carrier of the Philippines, was both a consumer brand and a mobile advertising media channel. Marico is like Unilever, a FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) company out of India.

I was not able to take many notes but jotted down a few, and gathered a few comments also from Twitter commentary on the panel. Perhaps the most telling point of these big brand owners in three Asian markets, was what they said about their mobile ad spend. Bearing in mind that the global mAd market doubled last year, each of Smart, Marico and Unilever said when I asked point-blank, how will their mobile ad spend grow this year. All said it will either double, or grow by more than double this year.

Some quotes. Victor of Unilever - In Asia, mobile is more important than digital. Danilo of Smart: the best of mobile advertising is not yet out there (ie not invented yet). Aditya of Marico - India has more mobiles than TV and PC added together. Danilo of Smart: mobile will challenge legacy media. Victor of Unilever: Mobile is becoming centerpiece of many marketing campaigns, not just the periphery. Victor of Unilever: focus today in Asia is on featurephones, not smartphone

The panel agreed that now the main task is to figure out what consumers want from you not what you want to give them. We also talked of pricacy and all supported opt-in permission based marketing activities. I reminded the audience of the MMA's long-running efforts to promote permission based marketing and that the MMA has issued guidelines about it. I also mentioned the books by Tony Fish (My Digital Footprint) and by Ajit Jaokar, Alan Moore et al (Social Media Marketing). And yes, while regular readers and my followers on Twitter know how negative I am about the smartphone apps economic viability today, I said it at the MMA event in public, that inspite of the big growth in SMS, MMS etc today, smartphone apps will be relevant everywhere this decade, all marketers will need to master the use of apps in brand mobile marketing strategies.

SMS IS NOW READ WITHIN 3 MINUTES

Avtansh Sharma of Alcatel-Lucent/Optism told us that 90% of SMS are read within 3 minutes. For context, that stat was 4 minutes two years ago, and 5 minutes in the middle of the past decade. Wow.

MORE COOL SPEAKERS

Joshua Maa CEO of Madhouse - told of the China market, which is immense and diverse. China has 900M mobile subscribers, 300M mobile internet users - and 340 mobile phone handset brands (ie Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Apple.. thats four!) with over 7400 individual phone models (most markets have between 1,000 and 2,000 individual phone models in use). Also before you think the iPhone iOS app store is the only thing going, China alone has over 30 app stores! Joshua then showed us the Pepsi Music case study from China with a 'Battle of Bands' united 3 screens TV, web, mobile - and had 83,000 players joining.

Aman Narain of Global Head of Remote Banking for Standard Chartered Bank told us of the new language of digital marketing today. The language has words such as: Follow, Like, Check-in, Share (haha, sounds like 'Communities Dominate' to me..)

Hannu Verkasalo CEO of Zokem: apart from voice, SMS and MMS are the most engaging features of mobile in terms of reach, frequency and engagement. Adult oriented apps not popular, probably need bigger screen. Zokem measurements found that iPhones have 9 apps vs Android devices with 8 vs Blackberry with 3

My very dear friend Madanmohan Rao the Author and guru had a very insightful presentation just as I struggled with my WiFi connections and I missed taking notes on most of it. One of his many pearls was a comparison of Asia. Asia is very varied. Mobile ads in Japan are AR, South Korea financial and games, Indonesia smartphones/blackberry and Twitter, China cosmetics, Hong Kong near field Octopus, Philippines SMS and remittance, India rural sports entertainemnt and education. I wish I had a chance to see his total presentation again, I missed so much more of it. Oh, and Madanmohan mentioned the 7th media concept recognizing me, thanks!

99.7% OF PLANET DOESN'T OWN A TABLET PC LIKE iPAD

Jeff Tennery Sr VP of Millenial Media: 8% of media consumption is mobile but only 0.5% of ad spend (which suggests mAd has a huge gap to close, and will grow strongly in years to come). He offered stats for ebay on mobile 2010: value $2B, double in 2011. And on the iPad and rivals, Jeff pointed out that 99.7% of planet does not own a tablet PC

MOBILE COUPON REDEMPTION FROM 5X TO 25X BETTER THAN PAPER

Ogi Redzig, VP Sales APAC for Navteq/Nokia - Ovi: 100M use Ovi maps daily. M-coupon redemption rates b/w 5%-25% vs paper coupon 1%

MORE AND MORE AND MORE

Chris Hobson COO of TxtEagle - to engage with next billion you need to use featurephones, we use talktime/airtime as as incentives

Patrick Mork CMO of GetJar has done 1.8B app downloads so far. in 2010 GetJar revenues $2.1B vs $1.7B on Apple

Firat Ertem Head of Marketing of Rabarba - Pepsi m-campaign with rich content - 2.9M users in Turkey. Pepsi ringback tone 12M calls, 3M uniques,

Shinta Dhanuwardoyo, the Founder of Bubu - Indonesia annual phone market 40M, 35% are local branded. Blackberry sells 4M units annually ie has 10% of total phone market - and Blackberry clones sell 16M, ie 4x more than genuine BB, and QWERTY phones form half of Indonesia handset market! Esia 'Islamic' phone - with prayer reminders, digital Quran, and embedded prayers, has sold 700,000 units. Also in Indonesia, 92% of Facebook users in Indonesia are thru mobile (is 2nd biggest country of FB users).

DAY 2 - COCA COLA SAYS SMS IS FIRST PRIORITY

Then a true bombshell announcement that was referenced by at least half of the following speakers. Gavin Mehrotra, Director of International Media for the Coca Cola Company, started his presentation stating categorically that "SMS is the number 1 priority at Coca Cola in mobile" and that you need it to reach just about every person on the planet. He later added that the mobile web is number 2, and smartphone apps are a distant number 3. Talk about shock and awe. The world's undisputed number one advertising brand, Coca Cola says categorically, SMS is priority number 1. Wow.

SMS INCREASED VENDING MACHINE SALES BY 14%

Gavin talked of Coca Cola's long involvement with SMS, as the world's first SMS vending machines were invented by Coke in Finland in 1999 (Tomi comment: actually it was even better than that, yes by Coke yes in Finland yes in the 1990s but not 1999, it was in 1998) and recently they launched Coke vending machines in Spain - increased vending machine sales by 14%, excellent in a mature market for soft drinks. SMS enabled mobile activation by Coke is still just scratching the surface of whats possible. Coke waits for 20% inflection point before going mass market. In Japan 1M vending machines, Coke m-payments and m-coupons increase frequency of use. In Japan Coke uses Mixi and Mobage Town for social networking on mobile in marketing. In Argentina AR use of coke bottle itself to manipulate avatar on PC screen.

Still, mobile ad spend by Coke globally is less than 1%. Coke finds that its mobile banners get 3% CTR. In Australia ran LBS campaign of 'find secrets' that were hidden in a mall, was a success. Gavin very kindly mentioned me and some of my stats referencing me first as 'the man with the hat'. And no doubt just to make me happy, he added a cool stat from a Coca Cola perspective to my collection: "Just about every person will have mobile in one hand. We hope they will have a Coke in the other hand." Gavin said there are 1.7B cokes served daily.

SOUTH KOREA IS DIGITAL CONVERGENCE

Sunyoung Lee CEO of Isobar of South Korea gave us some great examples of mobile marketing and digital convergence from South Korea. It is common in South Korea to use mobile phone as remote control such as car, home keys, lights, air conditioning etc. She showed a cool Chevrolet AR campaign in Korea - find one of the parked AR Chevys, get coupon by sponsoring brand like McDonalds. Then Sunyoung ended with what really sets South Korea apart from the rest of the world, the extent to which convergence has already happened there. She showed their integrated 'Family Board' on idle screen of flat panel TV, post content & control via phone ie pictures etc. Able to send to friends and family, ie let grandparents watch pix of kids on their TV in their home. Also replace black dead big screen with lively moody things like aquarium (feed the fish with mobile), etc or see what sky is like with stars above your home (even on cloudy day) etc. She said it was their mission to help consumers to create time, not just find time or kill time.

TURKEY PROBABLY EUROPE'S MOST ADVANCED mAD MARKET

Next up was Sinem Soydar, the Head of Mobile Advertising of Turkcell. 3G launched Turkey in 2009, today 31% of Turkish subscribers have 3G (wow! in just 2 years!) In 2010 Turkcell's mobile advertising unit ran 1,600 individual mAd campaigns for 353 brands in 50 industries. The unit, staffed by 22, delivered 56 million mobile marketing messages, and achieved 700 million mobile web impressions. Their mobile marketing reached 20 million mobile subscribers. And the most astonishing number, Turkcell has already built an opt-in permission-based database of 12.1 million customers! They incentivize their opt-in customers with rewards of airtime and 'jingle tones'.

SOLD OUT IN 20 MINUTES

Sinem gave several great examples of the uses of mobile media in its rich forms. Renault MMS campaign for tickets to car show. Sold out in 20 minutes. 7% response rate. Flo Shoes opt in SMS/MMS campaign 500K SMS, 400K MMS got 160K responses (20% response rate). Turkey has a lot of Ringback tone advertising similar to radio ads (won awards).

4M OPT-IN FOR PEPSI BRAND ALONE, JUST IN TURKEY

Turkcell offers several free media content ie m-magazines funded by ads: Weather, womens' healthcare, food, cooking, automobiles. Pepsi campaign with famed Turkish TV actor on SMS+RBT, get code from lid of Pepsi, send code of SMS, get airtime and messages from the actor. Pepsi theme ringback tone for free to those who replied, those RBT jingles heard by 4x bigger audience than responded to SMS. Pepsi also MMS with embedded video. cross-platform mobile+TV campaign got 75% participation rate. Achieved 4M opt in for Pepsi. Turkcell has an easy, active opt-out mechanism but under 1% churn out from opt-in database. Sinem said "The key to success is permission - then consumers see messages as offers, not ads."

MORE GREAT SPEAKERS

Joseph O'Konek CEO of CSL the Hong Kong mobile operator/carrier - HK has 186% penetration rate, 5.3M 3G subscriptions (to population of 7M). We are good friends with many of the speakers and Joseph and I go back many years speaking on many events together. So he knows me and my passion about stats, so he surprised me when he talked about penetration rates around the world, and asked me (out of the audience) if the CIS stat (Commonwealth of Independent States, ie the 'former Soviet Union' countries) stat is for real - they have the highest mobile phone penetration rate. I yelled out, yes, Ukraine, Russia etc have very high penetration rates and regionally yes, CIS is the global leader right now. Thanks Joseph, that was very nice of you to engage me from the audience. The next drinks are on me! He continued with the stats and industry facts telling that more people in Africa have mobile phones than have access to clean water. Complexity of mobile phones quadruppled in 5 years. Data used in the world in 2015 in one day, is same as was consumed in one month in 2010. And Joseph reminded the audience that "The way to reach everyone is SMS"

Rachel Ooi of Ericsson stated that ad spend follows eyeballs. Eyeballs are shifting to mobile.

Christian Cadeo Head of Mobile Google Asia - Admob now doing 60B impressions monthly, USA biggest, 1/3 from Asia. Mobile search doesn't cannibalize online search, are complementary. Bulk of m-search in Asia is from non-smartphones. And Christian gave a great one-liner bit of advice contrasting mobile web to fixed web. "when you design for mobile web, design for the thumb, not for the mouse."

COMMUNITIES DOMINATE EVEN IN MALAYSIA

Ranganathan Somanathan CEO of Starcom Medivest Malaysia - showed the 4 C's of mobile marketing (which is slightly modified from our "Flower Diagram" on the cover of the book Communities Dominate Brands, the signature book of this blog). He listed it as Currency, Conversation, Community, Content. We list them as Commerce (vs Currency), Communication (vs Conversation), Community and Content. But its essentially the same thing and good that this model is being promoted around the world...

BLYK - OUR INDUSTRY'S BIGGEST GURU, ANTTI OHRLING

Then we had a rare treat: Antti Ohrling the Chairman of Blyk. Antti is my personal grand guru to mobile advertising and marketing. I first saw him mesmerize an internal meeting of the biggest egos and hottest mid-managers when I was employed at Nokia and we had Antti present his views of what mobile would mean to media and advertising, about 11-12 years ago. I was literally the youngest and least influential of the hotshot execs in that exclusive meeting of Nokia's top executive talent, and like all others, we left that meeting with our brains aching, and fully congizant that Nokia was facing a revolution in media, led by that gadget in our pockets.

Antti remembers that meeting but obviously I was silent and he and I didn't meet at that time, so he didn't know until years later when we met, that I had been in that audience at Nokia HQ. But I am certain that Nokia's deep passion into pursuing a strategy of media on mobile, from N-Gage gaming and naming the N-Series the 'multimedia computer' to Comes with Music, Ovi, Navteq and maps - stems from that one earth-shattering internal meeting at Nokia. Antti was at that time the CEO of Finland's most award-winning digital agency, Contra and in very many ways, could be seen as the grandfather of mobile advertising and marketing worldwide, through especially his indirect influence of those who came and commercialized some of his early ideas.

But Antti didn't sit still. He joined with former Nokia President Pekka Ala-Pietila and the son of past Finnish President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Martti Ahtisaari, his son Marko Ahtisaari a very influential Nokia executive, to launch Blyk, the revolutionary mobile marketing channel and MVNO in the UK and expanding to many markets since. I have had many opportunities to sit with Antti over a good whisky and ponder the near future of mobile, marketing and media, and every time I leave the meeting with my head abuzz with new ideas and new views to the existing world. He is not just a giant, he is a genius in this industry. And we had the privilege of hearing him speak on insights into youth marketing in India (where Blyk recently launched). I could write a chapter just on the insights he shared. Let me try to do justice to the observations in this blog.

Antti told us that mobile is 1st medium in India and that by next year 1 out of every 5 mobile phone users in use in the world will be in India. Mobile messaging is a youth medium. Blyk in India launched 5 months ago on Aircel, and have 1 million paid youth users today on SMS and MMS. (and I have to stop right here. Just to see the context, the Blyk concept is so potent, they reached 1 million users on mobile in less than half a year. In a USA context, its equivalent to 400,000 youth audience! Ask any youth media if that is astonishing. Take the UK or France or Italy, the scale is 100,000 in less than half a year. Compare this to say circulation of youth magazines or audience of youth TV shows or listeners to youth radio channels. But yes, sorry, lets get back to Antti's words.

I loved this anecdote. Antti said "5 years ago when I spoke in the USA about SMS, they hated it. Today Coca Cola says SMS is first priority." (regular readers of my writing know I had the same experience at a conference in Florida ten years ago, US mobile media audiences HATED hearing a European talk about SMS. They thought SMS would never succeed in America). Yes yes, lets get back to more Antti:

1 MILLION YOUTH AVERAGE 25% RESPONSE RATES ON BLYK

Antti told us that the youth of same age around world are more similar to each other, than they are to people of other ages within their country. Its not who they are, or where they are, its what they are up to, today. (youth change their preferences and activities so fast that) all info on youth of past is obsolete. Blyk offers relevant messages, sends 6 per day, not same messages. for ads on Blyk in India to 1M users, get average response rate of 25% (ie 125x better than online CTR). "we engage youth in dialog, to find out what they think are top cool and relevant brands in India".

A Blyk survey of 25K India youth found top brands of choice - top 6 are Levi's Facebook and Jockey, Reebok, Adidas, Nike. What makes brand cool to youth? 4 things in this order (in India): 1 value for money, 2 make me cool, 3 cool friends use them and 4 cool ads. What if parents start to use brand, will it still be cool - 80% (in India) said yes, only 20% said no. If you could wish for anything what would you want - 17% job/career, 16% happiness/world peace; 33% love/romance.

YOUTH WANT TO BE LISTENED TO, TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY

Then on Blyk's philosopy, it is open marketing where consumers co-create marketing experience. As he is prone to do, Antti again quoted our Alan Moore 'We embrace what we create'. When you start to see the youth as brand ambassadors and product developers, they become your most effective marketing asset. Asking via SMS is a simple way of engaging with young people on mobile. "What do youth want most of all? To have their opinion count. So listen to them." Involve them; product development is marketing. Let them get involved. Look at Blackberry and how youth taught RIM that the formerly business-smartphone is also suited for youth chat, rather than RIM deciding to expand its non-funky, non-cool, non-game-non-music boring non-colorful Blackberry, to the youth segment. It was the youth who taught RIM management, not the other way around. RIM openly acknowledges this, they were utterly astonished by youth adoption of the BB in many Asian markets. And after seeing more than a decade of creativity and innovation in the mobile marketing space, this is what Antti advised the audience: "We need more innovation even more today in the mobile marketing industry."

(One last observation. Blyk has said many times it was designed based on principles from our book Communities Dominate Brands, and it is the first new company built as a 7th mass media pure mobile media company. It is the first 'baby' born of our book with Alan Moore and we are both immensely proud of our little contribution to this huge success. Now we see ever more those lessons spreading and more companies thriving in this space. But for me, to see that Blyk manages to capture a million youth in India in just five months, years after the first Blyk launch in the UK, and still true to all those principles we outlined in our book and on this blog for the past 6 years, it truly makes my heart sing. Thank you Antti for sharing those thoughts with the MMA Asia Forum and my very best congratulations to the Blyk team in India and the rest of Asia).

MAXIS OF MALAYSIA

We are not even nearly done with the event. Next up was Heather Wee, Head of New Media of Maxis. And echoing the Coca Cola keynote, Heather said that "Mobile marketing in Malaysia is all about messaging, SMS and MMS." Needs to be relevant, targeted, opt in. Less than 10% of phones in Malaysia smartphones but double annually. Smartphone users consume 5x more than 3G dumbphones, and 10x more than 2G dumbphones. "I was so happy to hear Coca Cola also say their nr 1 priority is SMS" (was worried she'd be out of touch somehow in an industry of apps and AR etc). Heather advised the audience that "Any brand can embark on their digital strategy through SMS. SMS is trusted, has to be opt in, permission based. SMS works." And that brands need to be careful not to spam or annoy customers, "you don't get a second chance to make first impression" (she kindly mentions me and our discussion at lunch about incentives).

25% OF TOTAL SUBSCRIBER BASE ACCEPTED OPT-IN ADS IN 10 MONTHS

Heather spoke a lot about their opt-in database and the results are uplifting. In just 10 months they achieved 2.9M opt in subs with OutThere Media and it is currently the biggest opt in subscriber base of any operator/carrier in Asia. They give rewards in airtime credits and free messages. (Tomi comment - the number is about 25% of Maxis total subscriber base - achieved in less than a year! Don't think opt-in is impossible!).

Heather also shares dome numbers with us from Maxis. Some campaigns get 50% response rates on Maxis. Nokia N8 campaign got 47%. Comparing SMS/MMS to mobile web banners - Heather told us that Maxis banners get 5% CTR. Heather's top 5 tips: engage with customers, keep it simple, keep it fresh, incentivize and tie with other media.

CONQUER CHINA WITH VIRTUAL FLAGS

Joseph Tsang the GM of Icon Mobile showed us North Face China campaign race to conquer China, plant VR North Face red flags in China, claim any place as yours, the first to plant the flag, gets it. Your apartment building, your school, the bridge near your home, and then in true North Face philosophy, get the audience to go seek the adventures, who climbs that hill first, who swims to that island in the middle of the river, etc. Plant the first flag, its yours. A big map of China was at the North Face flagship stores and visible on the web and on mobile phones where you could see the red flags as they started to populate places in China. 651K flags in 18 days.

MOBILE RESULTED IN 106% INCREASE IN SALES WORTH $2M

Was this successful? You betcha! 106% increase in sales (each planted flag gave a coupon for North Face goods at their stores). 300% ROI. 15M RMB in new sales (abt $2M) mainly through 2 flagship stores in Shanghai and Beijing. Joseph reminded us that mobile is only device that can engage anywhere at any time. Mobile should be integrated, not done alone.

SILLY STATS MOMENT (BY NOKIA NO LESS)

Chris Schaumann Head of Online Sales & Marketing of Nokia SouthEast Asia-Pacific gave an interesting prediction that "more people are expected to use the internet via mobiles than via PCs in 2014". What annoyed the statistically minded amongst us was of course that someone from Nokia should not be making such a 'prediction' after the Nokia (then) CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said already back in 2010 that the majority of the world's internet access IS on mobile (has been since 2009). Chris should have known this but is perhaps forgiven, as he joined Nokia after OPK had famously made that statement. But also, it is quite unforgivable for a Nokia exec not to know that, as Asia was the first region where this trend was observed and Asia has had majority of internet access from mobile rather than PC for four years already. Tsk-tsk, Chris, please check up on your numbers and especially, don't go contradicting past Nokia execs with 'obsolete' stats..

MORE GOODIES

Dilip Mistry, Head of Mobile Advertising for Microsoft - MS earns $2B-$3B annually from advertising

Sandy Monteiro, President of Universal Music SouthEast Asia - Mobile is the most important platform for music. Music industry has more info on its consumers than ever before because of mobile. And Sandy offered us a great rule of thum - the motto of brilliant ad should not be 'have you seen this ad' it should be 'have you seen this'

MOBILE OPTIMIZED WEBSITE GREW SALES BY 125%

Ronnie Liew, Sr Technical Director of R/GA Singapore - consumers are buying jewelry on mobile from Tiffany's mobile website. When they made mobile optimized website (vs same on both PC & mobile) increased conversion rate on mobile by 125%. Ronnie also showed a very smart, simple, AR based running shoe-tester for Converse. You point your cameraphone down when you stand, then the AR shoe appears replacing your shoe. Clever, simple, powerful. Ronnie added "If you don't change, everything will change anyway, you will be the one who has to step back, or be left behind."

STILL MORE SPEAKERS

Sonya Madeira of Globe the mobile operator/carrier of the Philippines - HSBC credit card campaign on SMS, MMS and m-web - more credit card sales, 15% signed up for credit card, call centre prepared for 800 calls per day, was utterly swamped receiving twice that, 1,600 calls per day. Globe has 23M subs. Sonya pointed out that "Very different skills needed for mobile marketing done via SMS, these skills are not found in traditional ad agencies." Its not 1 to 1 marketing, its 1 to 1 million. "its not a profile, its a person. Focus on relationships"

Jojit Alcazar, Head of Mobile Advertising at Smart (the national rival celco to Globe also in the Philippines) echoing the same themes as Sonya "SMS usage should focus on keeping customers engaged." (our Alan Moore would be so proud). Tactical promos need to evolve into longer campaigns. Mobile should be part of campaign (with other media)

PITCH SHOOT-OUT: GREEN BILLING, WEBCAMS, AR CAR ROBBERS

There was an interesting new mobile service shoot-out, each innovative company who was selected to this final, had 6 minutes, were allowed no powerpoints, and had to demo their solution on a phone, with the phone screen projected to a big screen. Not surprisingly there were several location-based services that I think are mere modern copycats of 10 year old concepts from Japan, so I wont' bother to mention those here on this long blog. But we did see several very innovative and creative examples. Nigel Hembrow of Greenpost - smartphone app - put your bills onto converged mobile & web service, no more killing trees. Cool 'green' solution. Varun Arora of Go To Camera - very simple monitoring via webcams and mobile, ie monitor your pets, kids, grandparents, office etc. Also includes smart motion detector.

CAR-JACKING VIRTUALLY IN AUGMENTED REALITY

And to show the AR space is so hot, Anders Fardigh of Monterosa Sweden showed their case for promotion of the Mini. The ran a 'Mini car-jacking' campaign in Stockholm. The concept - find out who has the AR Mini now, go grab it from that person. When your phone is near enough, you get it, then run away with it. The last person to have the Mini wins the real car.

OUT THERE MEDIA

I left the event to catch my plane, just as Kerstin Trikalitis of OutThere Media was about to chair her panel. But I want to make this mention here as a preview - occasionally on this blog we have singled out some fresh new companies that are truly amazing, that you have to keep your eyes on, that seem to be destined to be huge. Companies (or services) like Admob, Blyk, Flirtomatic, Angry Birds, Layar etc. There is a new one now to add to your radar, this is another game-changer company: OutThere Media. They do permission based mobile marketing on SMS and MMS, and already support millions of subscribers from Europe to Asia and launching in the USA. Maxis for example at this event kindly mentioned OutThere Media as their provider. This is a rare company that truly understands how to deliver satisfaction and engagement through mobile, with averages in those astronomical spheres, of 25% to 35% to 45% response rates, yes across millions of consumers in all markets, over thousands of campaigns for all major advertising brands. Kerstin is a dear friend of mine and I've kind of had part of my eye on their company since the very early moves with Tomato Plus out of Croatia. Now I can say, this is one of the hottest strongest young new companies for the 7th mass medium, and if you're a telco, book a meeting with them now. If you're an advertiser, don't go for banner ads, if available, get your ads on the networks using OutThere Media and messaging, and get far more satisfied customers.

I know that as she moderated a panel, Kerstin didn't get a chance to talk very much about her own company and the successes they are having. But she shared some numbers with me already at the event during a break, and promised to send me some more shortly. I will be doing a separate blog about OutThere Media, but for all who read this blog, that is now a new hot company to monitor, they are likely going to be huge very soon.

MMA SPEAKERS

Finally we had great observations and comments from several MMA execs. Michael Becker MD MMA North America: 47% of Americans get news on mobile. Kaiser Health saved $275K in no-shows by SMS reminder service. In Turkey SMS signature is accepted as legally binding digital signature in contracts. Also Michael spoke of the "Evolution of mobile marketing from SMS to... SMS."

Greg Stuart the CEO of the MMA - internet has remade business models, brands, careers. Mobile is now doing the same

Rohit Dadwal MD of MMA Asia Pacific said 'people are same everywhere: they want honesty, respect and integrity.' 'Permission and Privacy have been key words at the conference today' and 'There comes a time in an emerging industry when everybody speaks the same language: that time is now in mobile marketing.'

And on Twitter. One of my tweets that was very widely retweeted was the one where I remarked that it was bound to happen, but now I've seen it - one US based speaker actually claimed that Steve Jobs had invented the smartphone. And a funny line from Twitter, @andrewknott1 tweeted 'perhaps unsurprisingly there are a lot of Finnish accents'.

MY KEYNOTE

For those interested, my keynote on Day 1 was entitled: Mobile Advertising: A View of the World. I showed examples outside of Asia, stats and cases built around the 8 unique abilities of mobile as a mass media channel (Only mobile is Personal, Always carried, Permanently connected, Payment channel, Accurate audience measurement, At point of creative impulse, Captures social context, Enables Augmented Reality). I showed the Nokia stat we look at phone 150x per day ie once every 6.5 minutes of every waking hour. I shared the Jeffrey Hazlett of Kodak observation that mobile phones replaced photographs as the only things we'd run into a burning building to save.

As usual, I sprinkled my presentation with stats (and SMS). I mentioned the Retrovo study that 10% of UK youth think its ok to send SMS while having sex. An Ipsos/Google study of US consumers finding 70% of smartphone owners use the phones in stores while shopping. I showed the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) latest stats from the US newspaper industry that daily newspapers have circulation of 34 million, and contrasted that with the ComScore measurement that 118.5 million Americans consume news on a phone, ie news on a phone is consumed by 3.5 bigger audience than total newspaper circulation, which is also bigger than US online consumption of news which is 105 million Americans according to the Newspaper Association of Ameria. (and the biggest media channel to deliver news on mobile - even in America, even in this time of the iPhone and Android smartphones ... is.... yes... SMS!)  I gave the latest count of how much Kenya's GDP has shifted to SMS based mobile payments - 30% this March according to Grameen Foundation. I showed the m-education stats from South Africa where Nokia and MXit developed math exercises for high school students together with school books publisher Maskew Miller Longman, and mobile phone math practise helped boost math scores of the students who took part, by 14%. And I showed the Young and Rubicam cheeky rule of thumb for creating mobile services - that at any point in time when consuming mobile services, of the audience, 10% is watching TV, or 10% is in the dark, or 10% are nearly asleep, or 10% are drunk (or any combination of the above on a good night some weekend). The stats got a lot of attention and were widely retweeted.

The main point of my keynote was the case examples from around the world and I expressly did not show Asian examples to the Asian MMA Forum, knowing most other speakers would cover those. So I showed some of my current favorites from the rest of the world, where we have had recent innovations in mobile marketing. I mentioned Adidas's simple SMS campaign on Mobinil's network in Egypt using Alcatel-Lucent's new Optism platform - that reached an audience of 200,000 and achieved a 35% response rate. I showed the Nivea intelligent sun screen bottle and SMS integration from Finland, where the system uses location info and real time weather to know how sunny or cloudy it is at your beach, and sends you an alert via SMS to your phone when it is time to put on a shirt. I showed the USA example by Daffy's 'Window Dressing/Undressing' case of the clothing store where passers-by were invited to send SMS instructions to two models who would try on different clothes. They would need to strip down to underwear to be able to put on the next outfit of course. The female and male models attracted 1,500 SMS messages in a 3 hour period, including marriage proposals.

I showed the do-it-yourself postage stamps idea from Germany that has already spread to Sweden and Denmark (receive a unique alpha-numeric code to your phone, order and pay via premium SMS). And I showed the TextMyFood example from America which lets restaurant patrons send their orders and request their bill, directly via SMS. I showed how far Finnair's mobile check-in solution by Book-It has evolved now using the new powerful interactive variant of SMS, called iSMS and allowing Finnair to upsell its unsold business class seat inventory in real time while the economy class registered Finnair frequent fliers are in the airport, being processed through security etc. I showed how Flirtomatic of the UK uses advertising inside a social networking service in an innovative way with the use of the Flirt Bomb (sending 25 flirt requests generated by Flirtomatic, to suitable mates for you, ie girl flirters to boys, etc) at the cost of 3 UK pounds per burst, guaranteed to get you many new friends instantly. And I showed the Augmented Reality toy car version of the Ford C-Max that you can 'hold in your hand' and play with, such as open doors etc, all through AR. I added the news that Ford became the first major global brand to state categorically just a few months ago, that they will make mobile central to every ad campaign they run in the world.

The last case as usual, I showed something that seems like magic. I showed the Tesco (UK supermarket chain) shopping list, which lets users generate their shopping list via the phone. Tesco's will then re-arrange that shopping list based on which store you are going to (or in already) and re-organize the list based on the order of the items in the aisles of that shop. This is magical to the consumer and saves a lot of time. Meanwhile I showed the brilliant, near devious mobile advertising dimension now open to Tesco. They can now get permission from shoppers asking if they want relevant coupons for discounts and offers, which are only applicable to what you buy - and who doesn't want this? Then Tesco will know that Mr Ahonen, who regularly buys Pepsi, is in Tesco store number 86, approaching aisle 4 where the soft drinks are (and that I have Pepsi on my current shopping list) and asks Coca Cola if it wants to serve a Tesco customer in store 86 who has 'Pepsi' on the shopping list, a targeted ad of "2 for 1" of Coca Cola. All this while making me happy as a customer, selling the ad to Coke making thus more profit for Tesco, and not losing sales (in fact if I redeem the coupon, Tesco sells 2 bottles of Coke rather than 1 of Pepsi, so Tesco gains in its sales as well) and all the while, Tesco never reveals my name or phone number to Coke, so it protects my identity.

This is the future of advertising, and I pointed out, the Tesco shopping list solution is the first time in the economic history of humankinds, that we have solved 'Wannamaker's Riddle' the famed ad man who famously said 'I know that half of my advertising is wasted, but I don't know which half.' Now we know. Through such innovations as this Tesco shopping guide, we know exactly when a consumer is at the point of making a brand choice, and we can influence that very exact point, with no wasted advertising effort.

TO SUMMARIZE

I find it hard to summarize this event, there was so much, so very very much. But yes, perhaps the biggest bomb news is that Coca Cola says SMS is priority 1 and mobile web is ahead of the apps today. We saw regularly statistics that mobile copies of the web such as banner ads easily do 10x better. But that is under-delivering on the true potential. When done properly and intelligently, using 'engagement marketing' methods, with opt-in and targeted offers, now thousands of campaings reaching millions do 100x better than web advertising, and yes, achieve 25% to 45% to 50% response rates. That mobile optimized websites increase sales by 100%, that mobile campaigns will achieve cost savings of 50% or more and have returns on investment easily in the 300% ranges. Many of the most astonishing futuristic concepts are now built around Augmented Reality (like the 3D sunglasses in Hong Kong and iButterflies from Japan) and virtual reality (like the virtual flag-planting in China and the Mini virtual car-stealing game out of Sweden) but even very simple campaigns on SMS, MMS, IVR, RBT and voice can yield massive results. Yet many of the biggest gurus and experts said you've seen nothing yet, we are only at the beginning of a journey into the amazing. Mobile advertising will double again this year, what will the Asia MMA Forum look like next year?

That was the MMA Asia Forum in Singapore, according to my notes. It was the most fact-filled, case-loaded, stats-supported, event of the biggest brands, biggest names and true influencers of the mobile marketing industry. Everyone I talked to, felt they had learned massively from attending the event. I also want to thank in particular the most prolific live tweeters whose tweets contained many of the exact quotations and stats that I mention in the above. My very dear friends Madanmohan Rao the author (tweeting as @madanrao ) and Susanna Hasenohrl of Blyk (tweeting as @sannajanonkorva ) deserve special mention! Both are prolific, must-follow twitter superstars as well.

And to those who missed it, the next MMA event is in New York City now in June, so get yourself signed up while they still have seats. Be there or be square. The MMA events are now so bleeding edge and yet so commercially practical, that you walk away with practical solutions that will instanly double your sales, cut your costs in half, increase your customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Elop 'Burns Boats' in Shifting Symbian to Accenture: He had to do it to focus Nokia staff

Last week, Nokia announced that 7,000 jobs would be cut from the handsets side of Nokia, saving the company about 1 Billion dollars in salary costs. 3,000 of those were the shifting of Symbian and its staff from Nokia to Accenture, where Symbian development is now effectively outsourced. A few notes about the Symbian move. This is something Elop had to do, and do fast.

1. Nokia had seen perilous declines in profitability in its handset unit. This kind of cost-cutting is necessary. Rivals like Motorola and LG are still making losses and SonyEricsson was barely profitable. Nokia's profitability was on a severe downward slope, one of the answers is job cuts. This was to be expected. CEO Stephen Elop was tasked to rescue the company and many expected cuts in the 5,000 - 6,000 range. That he did 7,000 tells the investors that he is acting decisively and boldly and is not afraid to take on entrenched interests such as the unions.

2. The outsourcing of Nokia non-core functions is normal operating procedure at Nokia at various reshuffles. As in the past, when Nokia grew some departments strongly, in response to a rapidly shifting world, Nokia would often find it could not hire the right competences or not manage them well, unless done in-house. But that is expensive. As the various new processes then matured, it was normal for Nokia to shift them to outside companies from companies like Satama to others like Accenture. This shift of Symbian staff was to be expected and is not a surprise.

3. It was actually the right thing for Stephen Elop to do. He had to 'burn the boats'. Like Spanish conquistador Cortez is said to have done (some disagreement if he did), when he landed his army in Mexico to fight the Aztec Empire, he (so many believe) burned his ships with his troops to see, there was no possible retreat. They had to fight or else perish.

This is the toughest year Nokia has faced since it was on brink of bankruptcy back in the days of a multi-industry conglomerate some 3 decades ago (when Nokia made just about anything from toilet paper to television sets, from rubber boots to military computers) What Stephen Elop needs is the clearest single-minded focus of all of his employees, to work on the task at hand, make Nokia's transition to Windows Phone 7 smartphones a success. He cannot afford the backroom bickering that all the disgruntled Symbian staff might be doing at the water cooler.

Now he has outsourced the whole problem to Accenture. If any of the former Nokia Symbian staff grumble there, it is not sapping Nokia morale. And if Accenture staff say nasty things about Symbian (and by infrence Nokia) in public, they can take action. The employees who were shifted to Accenture will know, they narrowly missed being fired outright, and will mostly feel happy that they now have an employer who is at least committed to them and their skills, not looking to get rid of them.

Now Symbian the operating system can do its death in peace and quiet, without much further stain on Stepen Elop's early career, soon becoming just a footnote of tech history. And for however many handsets Nokia still makes on Symbian (very likely will do that promised 150 million but probably not many million beyond that), Nokia can focus on the hardware only, again distancing Elop from Symbian and what came before him.

This was the right thing for Stephen Elop to do. We may agree or disagree on his choice of Microsoft Phone 7 as his new smartphone operating system but once that decision was made, he had to get rid of MeeGo, Qt and of Symbian, all which have no place in the future with Microsoft (Ovi will be obviously refocused to utilize the Microsoft partnership). This was the right thing to do.

Meanwhile on that knowhow. What a rich deep resource pool was shifted to Accenture in the move! Whatever you may think of Nokia smartphones and Symbian of late, it was this smartphones software group which did most of the heavy lifting and inventing, seeing an improbable, unlikely future, and made it happen. Remember, Nokia sold touch screen smartphones long before there was an iPhone. Nokia created the world's first pure gaming smartphone half a decade before the iPhone emerged as the world's favorite pocket gaming device (Nokia did that with its own app store too long before Apple launched its app store) and the world's first consumer-oriented smartphone. Obviously on the enterprise side, long before there was a Blackberry, there was the Communicator, as Nokia invented the smartphone itself, and then early in the previous decade, Nokia was the first phone maker to split its smartphone business into divisions, one focusing on enterprise smartphones and their apps. Nokia was the first phone maker to audaciously claim that what they offered for the pocket was a true computer - something today in the iPhone era, all PC makers agree is true. And while Symbian was indeed an old operating system, it was designed for phones or pocketable devices, it worked very well with smartphone also of modest performance specs, and did have most of those things that were missing from the early iPhones, and also missing from many rival operating systems early on, like multitasking, folder views, Microsoft Office suite compatibility, while being the most compatible system around supporting just about everything including Adobe Flash of course.

Symbian is an old and obsolescent operating system, that is true. But it was kept alive with continuous updates where all of its contemporary operating systems had been killed along the way. Symbian had always been developed with backwards compatibility (an expensive option, but one much better for developers and end-users than deciding to not have it, like Microsoft did last year when they announced that the new smartphone operating system Phone 7 would not be compatible with Microsoft's legacy OS of nearly ten years, Windows Mobile). And Symbian was being developed always to supply multiple handset makers, another factor that added costs (compared to say Apple or RIM or HP/Palm whose operating system only needs to power smartphones for one maker, addressing one specific customer segment). Where many complained that Symbian was out of date, in reality, it was the operating system of choice by Japan's NTT DoCoMo, powering their smartphones/featurephones which by most measures are the most advanced phones on the planet. So there was (and still is) life left in that operating system, inspite of its age.

That Symbian had survived this long and still remained viable - and the latest iteration, Symbian S^3 is quite user-friendly even as a touch-screen OS - is testament to the hard work and dedication of the Symbian development staff, led increasingly by Nokia. That Nokia itself had achieved one massive milestone after another in the true inventions and innovations of smartphones (even if to modest successes in some cases, where Nokia's invention was clearly ahead of its time - this is no crime, look at Apple's Newton, which while failing the market, is still seen as the first modern PDA).

The smartphone environment and the operating systems and app stores we use today are all richer and better because of the pioneering work done by Nokia and its smartphone developers. Much of that staff, in particular on the side of the software and OS skills, has now shifted to Accenture. What Accenture gains in this transfer of knowhow, is an immense depository of the deepest knowhow into the future of digital convergence. If Accenture wants, it can use this as a big stepping stone to building a bigger future for Accenture in the digitally converging space.

I wish all my friends and colleagues at Nokia/Symbian and now Accenture the very best. The options if you had remained at Nokia were not good. But hopefully at Accenture your skills will be recognized and celebrated and you will find a new career and greater success there.

Symbian is dead, long live Symbian..  :-)