On Wednesday, 29 August 2001 6:35 PM
Petri Ojala wrote
>> What is the actual manufacturing price for an advanced i-mode handset
>> with color screen and all the bell'n'whistles?
Does anyone know this ?
>> The markets has already shown that it's far from easy to build mobile
>> handdsets profitably.
>> The mobile carriers have been active in absurbing the costs of the
handsets, including the
>> i-mode sets in Japan, but the total mobile market has grown to a
state when this trend is
>> very unlikely to continue.
There is a lot of hype around saying that the DoCoMo phones are heavilly
subsidised, in some cases they are as you get a cetain discount when
subscribing. You can however buy the phones from Laox with no
subscription for quite reasonable prices (way less than crappy GSM
phones) and take them to a DoCoMo dealer to get connected [or not].
If they were truly subsidised would this be possible ?
Given that you can make a PDA with a big color screen, lots of memory,
fat processor, IR, etc. profitably for $300 -$500 then why does it cost
more to make a phone.
Given that as a base it would not be unreasonable for phones to cost
$200 or so.
Also if you have estimated sales of 1 million+ (as most DoCoMo handset
models do) then it is probably a LOT cheaper to make them.
Perhaps Nokia phones only cost so much because of all the money they
spend on marketing direct sales and support. In Japan most of this is
handled by the carrier and we have better cheaper phones as a result.
>> The lack of progress in new technologies is also worrying. I-mode was
>> supposed to conquer the world a long time ago
Said who ?
DoCoMo only started making serious outside investments at the end of
last year. It is totally unrealistic to expect to re-engineer networks
and roll out a service in less than a year.
From there it will take 2-3 years to reach a solid level of acceptance.
How long did it take for the internet to catch on ? For that matter how
long did it take people to get 2G phones ?
Sure, DoCoMo made noises, but Microsoft also promised to release
WindowsNT in 1992(??) no-one took them seriously, but we knew it would
get there [eventually].
Nothing like this ever happens quickly, it's a fair bet the DoCoMo will
roll out iMode in most of the world. All in good time.
Regards,
David Davies
http://www.intadev.com <http://www.intadev.com>
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Received on Thu Aug 30 08:43:33 2001