Endeavour Partners - Blog

The $99 heavyweight

In the past couple years, even months, we’ve seen a sharp decrease in the price of smartphones.  With these high power devices more and more becoming necessities instead of luxuries for mobile consumers, and revenue from data and content based traffic rising, carriers are becoming more willing to subsidize these pricey devices to put them in reach of the average consumer.  And recently the $99 price level, previously reserved for more value oriented feature phones, has been shocked by the introduction of a true smartphone heavyweight: the iPhone 3G.

Even with other carriers beginning to increase value priced smart offerings, such as the newly announced $99 BlackBerry Storm, the value per dollar ratio still leans heavily in favor of AT&T and its iPhone 3G.  To back that up, here is quick overview of the best phones currently available on the value menu:

Verizon

1. LG Dare – A resisitive touch screen feature phone offering haptic feedback and a 3.2 megapixel camera.  Limited by a smaller 3″ screen and lack of a true smartphone OS.  Plus the web browsing experience leaves much to be desired
2. BlackBerry Storm – RIM’s first foray into touch screen phones running the standard Blackberry OS 4.7.  While it carries all the enterprise friendly Blackberry features, it has been criticized for having a cramped keyboard and being sluggish.

T-Mobile

1. BlackBerry 8820 – An aging offering from RIM now eclipsed by the Curve 8900.  Usual RIM enterprise features, but suffers from a lack of a camera.
2. Samsung Behold – Another resistive touch screen feature phone lacking a true smartphone OS.  Has sub-par web browsing and lacks WiFi.

Sprint

1. Samsung Instinct – A resistive touch screen phone lacking WiFi and with bad web browing UI.  Also lacks sizable internal storage.
2. Motorla VE20 – Barely deserves mention in this category.  No full web browser, WiFi, or enhanced OS.

AT&T

1. iPhone 3G – Capacitive touch screen device running the iPhone OS, with good web browsing experience, WiFi capability and sizable internal storage.  Lacks expandable memory.
2. BlackBerry Pearl 8110 – WiFi enabled trackball device with limited internal storage running BlackBerry OS.

This overview shows that there simply isn’t a contender to compete with the $99 iPhone 3G.  As these prices continue to drop, smartphone penetration will increase and it will become ever more necesarry to have true smartphones available at this value menu level.  And of course, this topic begs the question: How long will it be before we see the rise of free smartphone offers?  At that point the feature phone may become obsolete and this current value price level may be reserved for even smarter, heavier hitting devices.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 30th, 2009 at 11:29 and is filed under Apple, BlackBerry, smartphones. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.