One Mobile Phone for Each Wife
The best part of a global show like Mobile World Congress is that you get tuned in to how the rest of the world lives. When it comes to mobile phones, most Americans expect to carry one phone and sometimes will carry a Blackberry for e-mail and regular handset for phone calls. After watching one person after another pulling out a never ending variety of handsets over the course of the day, I started polling people as to how many handsets they were carrying.
The typical person from EMEA or Asia was carrying a minimum of three phones. One person pulled out four, jokingly said (I think) that he had one for each wife. The typical explanation was a Blackberry for e-mail, an iPhone for applications, and then a Nokia or three depending on countries (and marital status). This could explain the relative health of the mobile phone space.
As for iPhones, universally, they were jail broken (manually “adjusted” to allow it to used on any mobile carrier’s network). People looked at my AT&T iPhone with a mixture of pity and disgust usually reserved for naive children. Invariably, they would show me a great application, then shake their head and say that I can’t get it because my phone was “on network.”
Social networking on mobile phones seemed to be in the early adopter phase. While I saw plenty of tweets and Facebook updates, I did not see many people using their phones to deliver them.
As the next major wireless show, CTIA, starts in less than a month, we will report back if there is a major difference in phone habits from the U.S. based attendees in Las Vegas.
Written by Rob AdlerLast 3 posts by Radler
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Tags: Apple, AT&T, Blackberry, CTIA, iPhone, iPhone 3G, Mobile World Congress, trade show pr, Trade shows, tradeshow pr, Vantage Communications
April 15th, 2009 at 6:38 am
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June 10th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
The Crowd at Mobile World Congress is certainly NOT representative of “how the rest of the world lives.” As a professional in the mobile space, when I attend MWC, of course I’m carrying multiple devices, especially for demo purposes if I’m trying to show a client run-time or demo apps running on different platforms, both open and proprietary.
However, that is certainly not indicative of how “most” people operate in the real world. If you really believe that, then please cite a reference with data about how many handsets people in EMEA carry. The reality is that it’s not all that different. Most real people (not people in the industry) have one handset. They may have old handsets that they don’t use anymore and they don’t carry them around with them.
June 10th, 2009 at 6:42 pm
Fair point. I was referring more to business users. Still, you would not see people carrying 3 or 4 phones at a U.S. wireless trade show like CTIA.
June 11th, 2009 at 3:58 am
Of course you see people at CTIA carrying multiple phones….we’re all mobile professionals with cool demos to show. I have been known to have more than 25 distinct models in my travel bag, because various OEMs have licensed our technology for their handsets and each produce several models per year.
June 11th, 2009 at 11:26 am
Let me be clearer. I was not referring to demo phones. It seemed to us that people in Europe were carrying multiple phones for their own use. Blackberry for work, iPhone for Apps, Nokias for phone calls. In the U.S., I do see some people with an iPhone and Blackberry or Blackberry and feature phone. But more often, I see people yelling into their iPhones.
July 26th, 2010 at 11:20 am
Apple can also make phones that are much better than what Nokia can bring.;,”