The market for touch phones is booming, in India and across the globe. Most handset vendors who are riding this trend should be thankful to Apple, who with their iPhone created a market for this category by making the product aspirational both for the geek as well as the style conscious customer.
Surprisingly, touch phones have been around for some time, with the earliest variants being launched as early as late 1990s. The tech savvy customer in India would recall the Sony Ericsson P800, which when launched in 2004, had started a trend that other vendors like Nokia and Samsung were to follow. Why is the category so successful? Perhaps the reason lies in the subconscious behaviour of humans. To touch is more intuitive and hence we feel comfortable with touch screens on mobile phones.
Two important factors contributed to the boom of touch phones. The first is the sizeable improvement of hardware that allowed faster phones, with more-sensitive screens capable of higher resolution to take care of the increasing display size. In customer speak, this allowed the touch phones to be larger in size, and hence allowing better viewing experience. Secondly, the user interface (UI) became more dynamic with the evolution of capacitive screens versus the earlier resistive screens. In plain speak, the former allows the human finger to navigate while the latter needed a stylus. Surfing the phone is now much easier and fun. In fact, along with QWERTY phones, touch phones are becoming the choice for the younger customer.
The user inter phase is getting richer with the screen resolution evolving from VGA to WVGA and now to the AMOLED display. Today, the screens give many times better clarity through vibrant graphics with 3D transitions. One can move instantly from one feature to the next with Cube, Zoom, Reel-like scrolling & Row sliding effects. The ?pinch and zoom? experience on the new generation touch devices makes the experience much more ?real life? and intuitive.
In India, the touch phone platform was used by Samsung to gain market share at the expense of Nokia. The buzz that Samsung created around the launch of models like Corby and Star helped them to gain traction. As with all trends, we are now beginning to see vendors focusing on launching more touch phones at lower price points. Obviously, with the huge ?price sensitive? customer base that exists here, there is considerable value at the bottom of the pyramid for this category.
The last one month has seen the action hot up, with Spice launching an Android touch phone at a very aggressive price point. We can expect other vendors, both Indians and MNCs to follow suit. With booming customer demand, touch phones sales are on a roll. In the times to come, customers may very well use touch phones for surfing the Internet, viewing movies and music videos in the confines of their houses and at their workplaces. The advent of 3G will be the force multiplier that could enhance the demand of these devices.
Newer software platforms like Android, which is being used on touch phones, are fueling further growth. A Gartner study shows Android to be the fastest growing mobile smartphone operating system (OS) in the second quarter of this year. The improvement in technology is leading to further improvements. For example, messaging, which was a bone of contention for the touch devices, is now changing with the launch of new technology like Swype, which entails typing through swiping and joining the alphabets together on the virtual screen to create the word.
Future trends indicate that 40% of the sales of all mobile phones in India will come from touch devices. This is a huge opportunity for all brands as this would translate into a volume pie of 4.5 million handsets per month for the touch phone category. For the number-hungry vendors, this could be the next holy grail. For the consumer, the evolving technology will create more intelligent machines which could perhaps even understand human gestures and take touch phones to the next level. These cellphones are truly giving an entire new connotation to ‘being in touch’.
The writer is CEO, Spice Hotspot