Interesting times for followers of the third generation mobile saga. Hutchison 3G finally unveiled its pricing for services and handsets yesterday. It's all pretty expensive at the moment, although we can expect prices to fall quickly as the other players get involved. They will all try to attract a mass market soon enough - they need consumers to pay off the vast bills incurred in building the networks.
Meanwhile, Nokia has warned its colour and camera handsets will fail to meet targets this quarter. Predictably, the new handsets are failing to cause us all to replace perfectly good black and white phones, because you don't talk in colour.
Interesting services and content (terrible word) helps a lot. Vodafone Live! is meeting with a some success because it offers things to do with those colour screens and cameras. And sales of camera phones will be boosted when the networks finally get their acts together and allow us to send picture messages from one network to another.
Unfortunately for Nokia, they don't make phones for Vodafone Live!, and the networks are taking their time to sort out the cross-network message thing, so sales could stay disappointing for a wee while yet. But they, and others, are still predicting the global mobile phone market will grow by near 10% next year.
Question is: will that growth go to Nokia? Some of the 2.5G phones arriving from the far east look much more attractive than Nokia's comparable offerings, and Nokia has upset some in the industry by carefully protecting its own brand, on its phones and through online services like Club Nokia.
