My first mobile phone memory. Well, it was the company’s actually, one of us was asked to take it home with us at weekends to handle any urgent calls, which rarely came about. The phone was a Motorola. It was like a house brick and had a charge of around 30 minutes, provided it had been on charge for most of the day. These were the hazy day’s of ‘loadsamoney’ and ‘yuppie’ Britain and the ‘not so mobile’ handsets were a status symbol rather than useful.
Motorola competed with Erickson at the time, then came the introduction of Nokia. I don’t recall how their speedy rise to fame came about, I think it was a technology thing. They were so far ahead at this stage, particularly business contracts. A N others included Erickson, (soon to be Sony Erickson) Motorola were still there in part (remember “Hello Moto”) with a host of others coming up on the blind-side either through aggressive marketing, acquisition or technological advances.
And then to recent times. What has made Apple number one in the UK? Technology, cool, i-Tunes? maybe all of the above. Blackberry competes on a business level and Samsung seems to have captured some of the youth market, largely down to price. HTC for windows was a nice idea but I’ve heard nothing but complaints because let’s face it the i-Phone (with the exception of email where Blackberry clearly wins) is where everyone wants to be. Touch screen technology is the future and nobody does it better than Apple.
Who’d have thought, that the first incarnation ‘i-Brick’ would become what it is today; a pocket-sized touch-screen computer providing multimedia functionality keeping you in touch with the world.
But what about Nokia? Clearly they dropped the ball somewhere along the line. Maybe it was complacency and how could they ever foresee the rise of Apple in mobile. Whatever it was lost them the number one spot so quickly as sales dropped like the proverbial brick and market share crumbled. Now their plans have turned to the youth market, clearly they have accepted they can’t compete with Apple and Blackberry. They are adopting a strategy which revolves around social media and experiential. Maybe their new, shiny marketing arm can pull it off. After all, there’s a new shiny market born every day – those who won’t know about their fall from grace and most certainly won’t be aware of the house brick!
