Mannerisms

Joong-Yong Yun, chief executive of Samsung Electronics, told the Sunday Telegraph that Samsung is currently focusing on low-end handsets and handsets for emerging markets, rather than the high-end phones capable of video downloads and 3G Internet access.

The reason is simple: people aren’t buying high-end phones. Malcolm Penn, CEO of analysts Future Horizons, recently warned that there was a large and increasing inventory of high-end phones but a shortage at the low-end.

So, is the mobile phone running out of an ability to add functions? For the mobile phone industry it is a devastating question because it has always been supposed that the mobile phone was the core of an electronic system that would be almost infinitely expandable by adding new functions.

Funnily enough the electronic watch pioneers of the 1970s thought the same thing. Although it never happened for the electronic watch, which remained strictly a device for telling the time, it did happen for the PC which had a great, 20+ year run, of adding functionality, until it slumped into commoditization around its current set of functions a few years ago.

So is the mobile phones’ functionality going to stop at voice calls, texting and photography?

Despite all the talk of TV to the mobile, HSDPA and HSUPA high-speed access, of the mobile becoming an electronic payment device and even becoming a ‘personal electronic assistant’, the industry may have to come to terms with the fact that people mainly want mobile phones just for talking.

.