Keeping up with the smartphone market is like shoveling snow into a furnace. You just can?t win. Amazon alone gives you 185 choices. World wide smartphone sales in just six months hit $2.2 billion. Amazon lists manufacturers? suggested prices from $599 to $249, but free in most cases with a service contract. So where?s all that money coming from we wonder, rhetorically.
Trying to decide on which phone to get puts most people in a quandary. Besides the 185 at Amazon, if you are into bargains, NexTag has a list of 2,708 used phones to choose from. How do you compare them all? Well, New Smartphone Reviews can lend a helping hand. They?ve accumulated 17 of some of the latest, and many of the older, models in a comparative chart. Screen sizes range from 3.1 inches to a big 4.3 on the Motorola BackFlip. You can choose from eight operating systems, including Snapdragon from Qualcomm, five carriers including Vodaphone, two flavors of WiFi, 802.11 b/g or b/g/h, and six different sizes of memory with 512MB ROM being the norm.
Touch screens on the list come in capacitive, resistive, or transmissive. Weights range from 117g to the Nokia N900 that weighs in at a comparatively hefty 181g. Cameras on the chart mostly offer 5MP, four have an impressive 8MP. Nokia N8 and Blackberry Storm 2 have the least. Finally, only 5 out of the 17 offer a physical keyboard. Some phones try to be all things to all people. The recently announced BlackBerry Torch 9800 smartphone for AT&T with a Blackberry 6 OS, is the first slider Blackberry phone. It combines a BlackBerry keyboard with a full touch screen.
You?ll need a spreadsheet to analyze all the upcoming choices from LG, much less what is already on the market. LG has 92 possibilities on their website. If you are into the latest and greatest, LG is ramping up to put out 10 new smartphones before Christmas. The company predicts it will sell five million by New Year?s Eve. The Optimus smartphones will use a dual-core processor manufactured by nVidia with its Tegra chip. Also, rumors are being floated of an HTC Shubert which is said to have a Windows Phone 7 operating system. So many phones, so little time to try them all.
And who profits from the plethora of choices? Because of the related R&D and marketing that will be necessary at LG to launch 10 new phones, Chang Ma, vice president of marketing for the mobile devices division, says his unit isn?t likely to return an operating profit until early 2011. Smartphones in LG?s just completed second quarter returned a disappointing market share of only 1.2 percent.
However, money can also flow from a sector closely aligned to the smartphone. ?There?s an app for that? is another means of filling the coffers. Research2guidance, mobile research specialist in Berlin, says the number of apps downloaded hit 3.8 billion at an average price of $3.60 USD. They predict that sales of applications for mobile phones just might reach $15.65 billion by 2013.
