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Blaring speakers, stages crammed with dancers, smoke machines, LCD screens looping advertisements, a vast sea of people, game shows, announcements and of course mobile phones of every shape, size and functionality. Mobile Asia 2008, held at the capital recently, was a celebration of how the device, once a luxury, has become ubiquitous and now plans to boldly go where no silicon has gone before. But it wasn’t just to showcase new tech-toys waiting to invade markets, instead the four day event marked the evolution of the device and how it plans to capture all tiers of the nation, becoming the sole gateway to mankind’s communication needs.
“Under the aegis of the Indian Cellular Association, we showcase our products at Mobile Asia every year. It’s the one tribute to the rapid growth of mobile telephony in our country and to show the future to consumers,” explains Asim Warsi, general manager-GSM marketing, Samsung India. The numbers prove it; India now has over 240 million subscribers, who buy 6 million handsets a month. That’s not all, baring the metropolitans, the vast expanse of the country boasts of a mere 20 percent mobile density.
The mobile producers know that the next billion users are poised to emerge from India, making it one of the most vibrant, competitive and profitable markets in the world. There is no option, but to grow. “India is a country of a billion people, we have to now complete 80-meters of a 100-meter race, and this distance will come from the rural country areas. Of course, the existing users will keep upgrading,” adds Warsi.
 While manufacturers braced themselves for the 80-meter dash with FM and multilingual handsets, it was the focus on the veteran users that drew the crowds. “The early users have already upgraded to their third phones. They now want well-rounded features; a VGA camera will not do, instead at least a 3-mega pixel camera with a basic e-mail client has become a need,” says Lloyd Mathias, director marketing India and South west Asia of Motorola mobile devices and chairman of the event, “The phone has become a part of the self, no one leaves home with out house keys, wallet and the phone.” For this set of users, the flavor of the year was ‘experience’. With mobile blogging, picture and video sharing immigrating from the PC to the phone, the lack of 3G networks did not stop Internet applications from flowing into the hand. “The revenue model can come up later. Its not about creating applications for a handset, its about creating a solution and developing a handset around it,” explains Bob McDougall, sales director of the Nokia India cluster. 
“The mobile phone will be into gaming, into location, into the Web, into facebook, sitting on your hand—your gateway to everything. That’s the future,” says McDougall. This is the future that the manufacturers are waiting to service. As users have become comfortable with sharing their lives on the Internet, they want to be able to capture and post from a device that is omnipresent in their lives. This is where the phone has emerged as the perfect bridge between the real and virtual worlds.
Applications like GPS and maps have made exploring the real world a lot easier than their paper counter parts, while GPRS and Wi-Fi have enabled users to share what they find. “Five years ago we had vaguely heard about bloggers. Today we personally know so many. Five years ago we didn’t know what social networking meant; today we have Facebook for friends and linkedin for our business contacts. The phone will take over all these functions,” adds Mathias.
But it’s not only functions, but also their access that has changed. In a global iPhone hangover, every mobile phone creator has been trying to make touch the default input mode of the device. “Our main and future models all have touch pads now.
 In some there are two LCDs one for simple viewing and the other for input. It’s the user interface that will make our phones different from everything else,” says Anil Arora, business group head-GSM, LG electronics India. Warsi seems to agree, “2 years ago when we came out with the e760, the shake became a evolution in graphical user interface and physical usage. That trend continues, today various models use a music wheel, touch control, in some, the menu changes as you click at different options.”
Yet for all the new toys, Mobile Asia saw a complete lack of gesture-controlled phones. With Apple expected to file patents for the ‘pinch’, that helps enlarge pictures and make menu selections, the competition hasn’t been able to counter it with anything. The other disturbing trend was the spread of DRM protected content from computers and music players to the mobile phones. Although revenue generation models for games, music, movies and videos, have not been settled on, the industry seems adamant on locking down all content before it can reach the hands of the user. But one thing was clear, from just talking to the all-in-one communication device; the evolution of the mobile phone has begun.
Phones with unique new tricks:
Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1: A large touchscreen as well as a full QWERTY keyboard, with smart “panels” that show live updates of all your information.
LG KF600: An intuitive touch-based menu that changes with your selections.
LG KF510: A touch surface which has interactive lighting and “emotional animation”, glowing when touched to show the user what options are available.
Samsung F490: Killer looks and light weight, with a 3.2-inch touchscreen and 5 megapixel camera.
Samsung SGH i870: A tiny trackpad smack in the middle of the phone that makes selecting and clicking as easy as using a laptop or PC. – arjun.jassal@chip-india.com |
