CES turned out to be a huge waste of time, and while I am slightly upset that I didn’t get to spend time with our very own Will Park and Simon Sage, I am pleased that I saved myself a flight half way around the world to look at 3D televisions and have fat balding public relations people trying to stuff USB keys with press releases down my pants. The coolest thing out of the show, and this is my personal opinion here, was the integration of Skype into televisions from Panasonic and LG and 720p video calling. It may be niche now, but in 10 years when every television on the market has a built in webcam, WiFi and Skype, then that’s going to change everything. Fathers and mothers traveling on business can call their children and see them in glorious HD, lovers and sex addicts will have a new way to share their most intimate moments, and education can potentially become an incredibly rich experience.
All that aside, this is a mobile blog. In that department there was nothing interesting. Maybe the HTC Smart, but for the most part CES was a snooze fest, and it comes as no surprise since the global wireless industry has their own event next month in February, known as Mobile World Congress, and North America’s wireless industry has CTIA in March. Something that I didn’t read about out of CES however, until now, was that Qualcomm has officially made their BREW mobile operating system free. No, not free as in open source free, but free as in hey baby, can I buy you a drink?
That changes everything.
Sure there are already two incredibly high quality free mobile operating systems on the market, Symbian and Android, but neither of them come prepared for you to simply slap onto a set of hardware and shove into the hands of consumers. Google isn’t going to help you run Android on the handset you’re developing, they’re busy cranking out new versions of Android every few months, and the Symbian Foundation is Nokia’s bitch so don’t expect any technical assistance if you’re a competitor. Qualcomm on the other hand is in the business of selling all the parts needed to make mobile devices. An OEM can realistically go to Qualcomm and request an application processor, modem, screen, and oh yea, software that will run on said pieces of hardware with little to no tweaking, and then pump out a handset to market. True, BREW isn’t a smartphone operating system, but most people really don’t need native applications.
Yes, you heard right, most people don’t need native applications. Give a man a web browser, Google Maps, and the ability to send and receive phone calls and texts and he’ll be incredibly happy. Right now the most deployed dumbphone operating system is Nokia’s S40. No other operating system comes close in terms of competing, but that’s now suddenly changed. AT&T has already said that they’re going to a large chunk of their 2011 dumbfone portfolio run BREW, and we’ve already seen HTC jumping into dumbfone territory, so what’s next is potentially be BREW taking over the world.
Sensational prediction, I’ll give you that much, but building a smartphone isn’t really the easiest thing to do, and it’s incredibly risky considering the costs so smartphones still need to be sold at a high margin to reach profitability. Maybe a quick pump and dumb, old school low margin high volume mid to low range market is exactly what the wireless industry needs.