People Forming an ‘Intimate Relationship’ With Their Smartphones, Bells Labs Official Says
People are developing an “intimate” relationship with their smartphones that’s “changing the fundamentals” of the entire communications industry, said George Rittenhouse, president of Bell Labs at Alcatel-Lucent, during a keynote Friday at the Competitive Carriers Association conference. Other speakers featured on the panel from the New Orleans event agreed that the new generation of “iconic” smartphones means major changes for the wireless industry.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.
"Two thirds of the people in the United States sleep with their smartphones,” Rittenhouse said. “Think about this. That’s something that’s so intimate. We check our email. … I like to listen to audio books with my smartphone and whatnot. Actually thinking about it as a phone is misleading. You sleep with a computer that does all sorts of things for you that has a phone application on it.”
David Owens, Sprint Nextel vice president-product management & logistics, said the growth in smartphones is a real challenge to carriers. In Sprint’s post-paid business, 90 percent of subscribers are buying smartphones, with most buying “iconic” phones like the Galaxy series or HTC One series, Owens said. “The impact is enormous because it’s really the entire buying community has moved up to those phones,” he said. “They tend to be the highest subsidized devices and, two, the usage characteristics are the highest with the devices. So it’s a challenge from a financial perspective, but the satisfaction for consumers, it’s the best it’s ever been.”
Data use is also a challenge, Owens said. “We think the usage will stop at X, and it keeps blowing past X. A good example is we just launched the [Galaxy] Note 2. It’s the highest usage product that we have on the network.” The growing tendency of subscribers to use their smartphone’s camera shows the impact of smartphones, Owens said. “The cellphone industry is destroying the camera industry,” he said. Sprint launches about 60 handsets a year, he noted. “Think about that one, that’s basically launching one a week,” he said. “We launch about 300 accessories. We have a process that I have to go through to sign off on all of them so I have to go in front of our senior execs every week and it’s every single week."
"I think the operative word here is iconic and not exclusive,” said Tony Lau, staff vice president, handset product management at MetroPCS. One key for small carriers is that iconic phones are offered with basic features that require less development, Lau said: “It enables access by smaller carriers much easier than … two or three years ago when there were more exclusive products and not iconic products.”