SMARTPHONES FEATURE
The Clone Wars
The handset market is more competitive than ever, and success is increasingly being defined by performance at the top end. 2012 will be the year of the Windows Phone push but can Nokia and Microsoft really compete with established leaders like Apple, Android and Samsung?
By Mike Hibberd T
he final quarter of 2011 was an eventful one in the handset sector. Nokia marked its return to the smartphone market
and its first Windows Phone product with a great deal of fanfare, while Apple announced in quick succession the availability of the iPhone 4S and the death of its inspirational leader Steve Jobs. Samsung released the first handset to run version 4.0 of the Android OS and Sony Ericsson announced that its tenth birthday would be its last, as Ericsson finally exited the joint venture and Sony absorbed what remained.
Meanwhile Chinese vendor Huawei set out its stall, pledging an assault on the smart- phone market to match the one it has mounted with such success on the infrastructure sector. Alcatel, a handset brand far less prominent
in 2011 than it was in its heyday, surfaced in partnership with Orange and Facebook, as the social networking firm revealed more of the cards it plans to play in the device space. For Blackberry vendor RIM, the situation simply went from bad to worse; leading to the resignation of co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis in January. And these were just the headlines. Behind the biggest stories, the device sector contin- ued to pulsate with activity in 2011, as its constituent parts battled for their place in the value chain, the hearts of the consumer and for supremacy over one another. For all the change, one constant remains: the mobile operator is still the primary route to market for handset vendors. And competi- tion for a place in operators’ portfolios looks
set to intensify. In November Matthew Key, head of the Digital unit at the newly restruc- tured Telefónica, revealed that the firm is planning to slash the number of handsets in its global range by more than half. With a portfolio of around 240 handsets,
there is clearly a lot of fat to cut at Telefónica. But while the firm’s device range is at the larger end of the scale, relative to subscriber base, Key’s announcement reflected a trend visible in the wider industry. Simon Lee-Smith, general manager UK
and group devices at Telefónica, says that the surplus in the portfolio can be explained by a handset strategy that has historically been local in focus, with individual terri- tories responsible for procuring handsets deemed especially suitable for their markets. »
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