3 ms·

Just because smartphones have a higher profit margin for companies, doesn't automatically mean that consumers will buy a smartphone, let alone will want one. N

by Zev 16y ago

Just because smartphones have a higher profit margin for companies, doesn't automatically mean that consumers will buy a smartphone, let alone will want one. Non-smartphones aren't going anywhere. Not until smartphones are given away for free and you can pick one up without being forced to add a data plan.

thyrsus 16y ago
The cheapest data plan available to me is $180/yr. I've got wifi or better access any time I'm not driving, so I'm going to be annoyed if I'm forced to pay for something I'll rarely use.
martey 16y ago
Just because smartphones have a higher profit margin for companies, doesn't automatically mean that consumers will buy a smartphone, let alone will want one. If I ran an American cellular phone carrier, I would be remiss not to push my customers toward using phones with higher profit margins for me. If I needed to get customers to use smartphones by giving them away (with the realization that I would make the money back over the course of their contract), so be it. Consumers may want non-smartphones, but if their carriers are giving them incentives to buy smartphones, I am not sure that mandatory data plans will prevent them from succumbing.
lukeschlather 16y ago
I got my first cell phone in 2008 as a junior in college, recognizing that it was getting to be too difficult looking for internships relying on my landline. I didn't want anything fancy, so I just got the phone that came "free" with the plan. That phone had a camera and a basic Internet browser. Based on that, I'm pretty sure we'll be seeing smartphones offered at roughly the same subsidized price point as a dumbphone by 2012, and I'd actually call that a pretty conservative estimate; they could definitely show up in the first half of 2011. Giving someone a $100-200 phone with a 100mb data cap is nothing, provided you can upsell a reasonable number of them to a 1GB data cap by the end of their contract. I could also see data/text-only phones showing up with 250MB-1GB caps in the near future, possibly rolled in with some VOIP app that bills voice as data. (It's an accident of a minimally competitive marketplace with minimal regulation that we haven't seen these already.)
- evilduck 16y ago
  I've had a smartphone for about 4 years. I don't watch YouTube or stream Pandora daily, but it's my primary means of checking my email, and I browse websites on it daily, along with sending and receiving pictures every now and then. I average about 200-300mb/mo. If I could get a significantly cheaper rate in exchange for a 1gb cap, I'd probably do it.

by Zev 16y ago

thyrsus 16y ago

The cheapest data plan available to me is $180/yr. I've got wifi or better access any time I'm not driving, so I'm going to be annoyed if I'm forced to pay for something I'll rarely use.

martey 16y ago

Just because smartphones have a higher profit margin for companies, doesn't automatically mean that consumers will buy a smartphone, let alone will want one. If I ran an American cellular phone carrier, I would be remiss not to push my customers toward using phones with higher profit margins for me. If I needed to get customers to use smartphones by giving them away (with the realization that I would make the money back over the course of their contract), so be it. Consumers may want non-smartphones, but if their carriers are giving them incentives to buy smartphones, I am not sure that mandatory data plans will prevent them from succumbing.

lukeschlather 16y ago

I got my first cell phone in 2008 as a junior in college, recognizing that it was getting to be too difficult looking for internships relying on my landline. I didn't want anything fancy, so I just got the phone that came "free" with the plan. That phone had a camera and a basic Internet browser. Based on that, I'm pretty sure we'll be seeing smartphones offered at roughly the same subsidized price point as a dumbphone by 2012, and I'd actually call that a pretty conservative estimate; they could definitely show up in the first half of 2011. Giving someone a $100-200 phone with a 100mb data cap is nothing, provided you can upsell a reasonable number of them to a 1GB data cap by the end of their contract. I could also see data/text-only phones showing up with 250MB-1GB caps in the near future, possibly rolled in with some VOIP app that bills voice as data. (It's an accident of a minimally competitive marketplace with minimal regulation that we haven't seen these already.)

evilduck 16y ago
I've had a smartphone for about 4 years. I don't watch YouTube or stream Pandora daily, but it's my primary means of checking my email, and I browse websites on it daily, along with sending and receiving pictures every now and then. I average about 200-300mb/mo. If I could get a significantly cheaper rate in exchange for a 1gb cap, I'd probably do it.