卦Trigram 2.0
Asian Snowcrash

The IHT has a good piece today on Nokia. The Finns are roaring ahead, dominating the handphone market, and in particular are being very successful at penetrating developing markets.

This is particularly important for them because this is where adults are buying their first ever phone, and mindshare is established. That’s a valuable asset; in a recent catchup with Niti, I found myself noting that “I speak Nokia” - which is to say that because I started off with a Nokia I now find their interfaces intuitive, and Moto and Sony-Ericsson (for example) are now slightly less so. Of course, consumers are pretty sophisticated, and will choose according to their specific needs, but that “mental lock-in” isn’t to be dismissed. That’s especially relevant in the developing markets where a new phone may be a significant investment, and someone who finds a brand reliable may well stick with it faithfully rather than experiment.

However… as the article suggests, Nokia can’t rest on their laurels. There are lots of hungry competitors out there. The IHT mentions Korea’s LG, and uses Shenzhen-based ZTE as an example of the many Chinese phone manufacturers who are innovating like crazy.

Nokia, and the other phone companies, have two ways forward - more innovative design, and mobile services. This is why Jan Chipchase’s work is so fascinating - to go into the rough, developing parts of the world, look at how people live, and sift out insights into how phones and services might fit in. A research lab on its own is no longer enough, mixing it up with the people is needed - perhaps phone R&D will develop into an anthropological/sociological discipline of its own, like something from a William Gibson novel…

Jan gave a fascinating talk at the TED conference, at which he shared some of what he’s learned. His slides from this presentation are available on his personal website.

Another example of Nokia’s approach to R&D was given at the recent LIFT08 conference in Turin, where Younghee Jung (is she a member of Jan’s team, or working elsewhere in Nokia? I think so, but I’m not sure…) gave a presentation on a design project Nokia ran with communities in the developing world.

Both videos are worth spending a bit of your time on.

What, I wonder, are the ZTEs and Meizus doing along these lines? And if they’re not, why not?

Losing my phone recently has focused my attention on design issues in the industry; as I’ve mentioned, I’m hanging on and using my old Nokia 6108 while I wait for my chosen new model - the Meizu M8 - to arrive on the market. The 6108 was the first Nokia model to be designed in China, in Beijing to be exact. Meizu are based in south China, in Guangdong, and seem to be quietly building up a global following, based on the number of web sites dedicated to their products. A couple of weeks ago I also wrote about CECT, another Chinese phone company, and their model with biometric security features - and again, judging from the number of comments, it seems that without the company apparently trying very hard, they seem to be building up a global customer base attracted by the feature sets of the phones, which aren’t provided by the global brands. I know from my own time spent in Beijing, that mobile phone shops are everywhere, and there are many, many local brands.

Given this context, I found an article I just read in Asia Times Online extremely interesting. In China’s phone makers in speed dial mode, Olivia Chung mentions that the Chinese government has just liberalised the rules on phone handset manufacturing and distribution. This means that local manufacturers will be released from a bottleneck that’s been inhibiting their activity. The key market is the rural Chinese population, who are extremely price-sensitive, and have little or no brand loyalty. This means that to makes sales, manufacturers will have to design low-cost phones with very diverse feature sets.

For years, we’ve seen Japan held up as the main source of innovation in the phone sector, with technologies and phone-based activities far in advance of anything we get in ‘the West’. Japan, however, is a very local market: not so many of its innovations actually transfer to other locales. China, however, is different: it’s using the same technologies as ‘the rest of the world’. This means that very soon we’re going to see the fast-forward innovations of Chinese manufacturers, honed in the frantic fight for domestic market share, producing phones that people elsewhere in the world will find highly desireable.

These foreign buyers may not be all that numerous for any given manufacturer or model, just part of the Long Tail. However, it’s inevitable that some will become evangelists for their phones, and brand awareness will spread. It’s also pretty inevitable that there will come a breakthrough product, one that just happens to meet an unexpected demand, and that will really bring Chinese phones to global attention.

The global brands, especially Nokia - through the activities of Jan Chipchase and his colleagues - have been taking an anthropological approach to user needs for a long time, with the aim of designing phones to meet social and psychological niches. (Nokia recently opened the world’s largest Flagship Store in Shanghai, an indication of how seriously they take the Chinese market). Chinese manufacturers will be doing the same by designing a multitude of handsets, letting them loose in the market, and seeing which ones sell: design through survival of the fittest, rather than design by research. I wonder which will be more effective..?

Heh, I’m guessing there’s a niche to be filled by someone: distributing information on new Chinese phone models, and translating the user manuals…

Update 25 Nov 2007:

For some more background information, see this summary of a 2005 report on the Chinese mobile phone design market.

A year ago, I bought a Nokia 6708, largely for the stylus input and Chinese dictionary. I was pretty happy with it at first, but I have to say that I gradually became more and more dissatisfied. It blue-screened quite a bit, frequently hung and needed a reboot, and regularlt seemed to just turn itself off. It took ages to boot. The lack of letters on the keyboard gradually became a real nuisance. I found that I hardly ever used the Chinese dictionary. The USB connection to my Windows XP laptop was really fussy, and hardly ever seemed to work, so I couldn’t transfer files. The camera quality was pretty lousy. I began to think about getting a replacement.

Then two weeks ago I accidentally left it in a taxi. I’ve filed lost property reports, but it hasn’t shown up and probably never will. I’ve been using my old Nokia 6108, but it’s really obsolete now - especially as I can’t transfer my contacts from my laptop, and there’s no way I’m going to type them all in manually! I had been planning to hang on a few months until Meizu MiniOne is released, but now I can’t wait that long.

Actually, the timing is a bit serendipitous. I’d also been thinking that I need:

• a music player. The Zling Nax (Chinese clone of an iPod Nano) that I bought as an experiment is actually pretty crap, with terrible battery life and sound.
• mobile internet. The 6708 was actually internet-enabled, but my current phone plan doesn’t include data transfer; I signed up for this plan when I first came to Singapore in 2002! My contract has long since expired, but I’ve never got around to changing anything

I’m even more convinced that I need mobile internet after reading this O’Reilly Radar article by Peter Brantley. The points he makes about the way the Millennials (he just says “younger generation”) work - constantly online, social, self-organising, flat hierarchy - are spot on, and remind me of things I was thinking about quite a bit last year: how is this going to work out in Asia? The cultural changes and power shifts that are being driven by ubiquitous multimedia technology, social tools, and mobile internetmean that it’s not just about management styles any more. Here in Singapore, the government is reaching an uneasy modus vivendi with the internet-enabled voice of its citizens, but I’m not sure how it’s going to work out. During the recent protests in Myanmar, we’ve seen how important mobile phone cameras and internet access were - to the extent that the junta were forced to simply cut off all internet access to the outside world. China, of course, will be watching all of this very carefully indeed. However, I’m straying into what’s going to be a separate blog post!

So: I need a new phone, mobile internet, and an mp3 player. To get internet access, I need to sign a new contract. If I sign a new contract, I get discounts on a number of handsets, one of which is the Nokia N73 “Music Edition” which, to be honest, seems to cover all bases, except that it doesn’t have wifi… Seems to be a good choice, though, at S$368, which is what M1 are offering…