One of the never-ending debates I used to get into, when I was focused on writing about Symbian, was the line-up divide at Nokia. Over the years, the Finnish manufacturer stuck with 3 major product categories: multimedia or Nseries, office and productivity or Eseries, and the rest that recently became known as Cseries. You could see where they were coming from: every user is different and you can’t cater to all of them with the same feature set. However, this differentiation angered a lot of fans who were rightfully claiming that they have a job *and* a personal life, and they couldn’t find one device that fits both needs.
Fast forward a few years, and as I glance across the mobile scene, I see the same dilemma overshadowing Nokia fans, and the exact opposite looming its head dangerously to HTC and Samsung. Whenever I read any new product announcement from either of these two, I can’t help but get bored. From 800MHz to 1Ghz, from 256MB of RAM to 512MB, from 4″ screens to 4.3″ screens, the differences are all “bigger, faster, better”, yet they are all tantalizingly similar. I am not talking about HTC vs Samsung, I am talking about inside the line-up of each manufacturer separately.
Can you remember one time you checked an HTC or Samsung product and thought “wow, that is a camera!” or “dang, this will really help me do my job” or “now this is one for the 24/7 music audiophile in me”? No. Yes, there are cheaper products in the portfolio, yes there are more expensive ones with “bigger, faster, better”, but there is no device that jumps and screams at you that it is the first in its class for a certain action: camera, music, video, gaming, office, maps,… All their devices fit into the “good at everything but excellent at nothing” category.
The obvious: Don’t blame Android
I was first ready to cast all the blaming stones on Android, thinking that the open platform put a focus on the “computer-side” of smartphones, with processors, memory and screen standing in the headlight, while making any search of excellence in other areas irrelevant. Then I thought that they are doing the same with Windows Phone 7, and I also remembered Sony Ericsson. SE might not be the beast that they were a few years ago, but in terms of Android, they are trying to bring a difference to the table: the Xperia Arc has some really nifty photography tricks up its sleeves, and there’s the rumored Playstation phone for gamers. Plus, it’s not a new practice: Sony Ericsson have historically had a Walkman series for music fans and C series for imaging.
So is it a matter of choice from both HTC and Samsung to not create a device with a stellar feature? Well, for HTC it is quite a given: the Taiwanese company has no background in any sector and probably doesn’t have the expertise to push the envelope in some direction, except UI and software. But Samsung has made a clear choice: they are an electronics company, so they have the imaging, multimedia, music… know-how, but they decided to keep it separate from their mobile unit.
The explanation: It’s a matter of feasibility and strategy
Why does it have to be black or white, I hear you ask? Well, unless you argue the need for a 1000$ phone, I have always explained during my heated Nokia debates that you can’t have everything. Apart from being a philosophical statement, in terms of mobile phones, you are constrained by price and size. So some companies like Nokia or Sony Ericsson, will decide to put a major new feature in their device, sacrificing physical space inside their model and a good chunk of the overall retail price, at the expense of getting the base of basic in some other areas, to even things out. Other companies, will settle for neither excellent nor basic, but good, for every single component, like Samsung and HTC.
So eventually, any company’s choice is between a highly differentiated portfolio that caters to specific needs, or a monotone portfolio that caters to everyone quite similarly.
The downside: History will remember them as?
Going back to Nokia, everyone can remember the legendary E71 that became the Blackberry for the masses, the E90 that set a standard for mobile computing, the N93 that brought stellar video recording to mobile devices, the N95 that was the first commercial 5MP smartphone with a GPS on board, the Navigator series that shipped with free navigation, a car holder and charger, the N91 that brought the best loudspeakers and many innovative music features, and recently the N8 that made stellar photography with life-like details possible on a smartphone.
When we look back, what will we remember the HTC Desire as? Or the Samsung Galaxy S?
The upside: It’s a winning strategy
While in 2007, it would have been a challenge to find a lot of people who had heard of HTC, and Samsung was still a dormant beast, these two have awakened quite theatrically and are now a major force to be reckoned with. Their shares in overall mobile phone sales have been growing steadily at the expense of Nokia, Sony Ericsson (which I cited as following an opposite strategy) and Motorola.
Graph courtesy of Horace Dediu on Asymco
The difference is even more staggering when you look at smartphone sales alone. One can’t help but notice that the “good at everything” is paying up its dividends for HTC and Samsung, while the “excellent at some things” isn’t really polishing things up for Nokia or SE.
The Conclusion: Stealing the pie after it’s baked?
As I was writing this article, an anecdote started forming in my head but the more I think about it, the more I realize it might be the closest thing to the truth. It seems to me that one side is bringing the innovations yet failing more and more to sell them, while the other is waiting for them to go mainstream, get smaller and less expensive in order to implement them and make profits. It sure seems like that, doesn’t it?
Note: thanks to @_Nexus with whom I had a short Twitter conversation regarding his disinterest in the current HTC line-up, which ended up inspiring this lengthy post.
