Entelligence: Voice still the killer app for mobile devices
Every Thursday Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter Research contributes an interesting item of gadget-related research data:
There's a lot of new phone functionality on the market and it begs the question of what is important to us cellphone customers. We've done a lot of research here and the results aren't surprising but a lot of vendors ignore the data nevertheless. According to a recent JupiterResearch survey, the cellphone is the most important mobile device for consumers by a wide margin over anything else for almost 80% of consumers. That's backed up by the fact that the most important mobile function is voice communication for nearly the same number of users.
The analysis is simple. U.S. customers just aren?t yet as interested in mobile data nor have the carriers done a good job in explaining the value proposition of mobile data over voice. Worse, vendors keep bringing devices to market that actually compromise telephony features.
Except for a small minority of users, voice remains the killer app for mobile devices and any phone that compromises this feature at the expense of secondary data functionality will be doomed to niche status. In the future, we?ll talk about how many devices users are willing to carry with them on daily basis and what those devices are.
Michael Gartenberg is vice president and research director for the Personal Technology & Access and Custom Research groups at Jupiter Research in New York. Contact him at mgartenberg@jupitermedia.com. His weblog and RSS feed are at http://weblogs.jupiterresearch.com/analysts/gartenberg.
