The Hindu Business Line : A big leap

Converged Mobile Devices (CMDs), including smart phones, PDA-style phones and BlackBerrys are emerging indispensable tools in these technology-driven times.

Mobile devices are becoming lifestyle-oriented owing to their smaller, consumer-friendly factors and multimedia capabilities. What was once just a phone with simple voice function is now capable of doing so much more — chatting online, taking and editing digital pictures, listening to MP3s and FM radio, streaming videos, video blogging, online gaming and remote controlling household appliances.

While the features keep increasing, it’s time to “Take the office with you. Open and edit documents and email attachments on the move,” as Nokia’s advertisement, on its E90 Communicator mobile device, says.

In other words, instead of a laptop, use a CMD that has most of the features of the laptop. Around 70 per cent of users, while on the move, access only e-mails in their laptops, says G.K. Chakrapani, Country General Manager, Nokia Enterprise Solutions.

And the days are not far ahead when users might prefer CMDs to laptops. Aiding the trend is the price of the CMD, starting at Rs 25,000.

But, as industry watchers stress, this does not mean laptop sales are set to dip. Rather, they are growing, with desktop users migrating to the laptop.

Laptop sales touched 195,000 units in the December 2006 quarter, a 56 per cent growth over the corresponding quarter of 2005. Laptops, available at sub-Rs 20,000, are increasingly finding their way into homes, small businesses and the education sector. High demand from corporates, IT companies, financial institutes and the government continues to drive laptop sales, notes the Manufacturers’ Association of Information Technology (MAIT).

Players in the market

Nevertheless, the growing market for converged mobile devices is also evident from the number of players in the domestic market keen to woo the Indian consumer. O2, HTC (provider of Windows Mobile devices), Imate, Hewlett-Packard, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, RIM (owner of Blackberry brand) and the latest, Apple… the list is impressive.

Take the case of Renganathan, a senior official of a large leather company. For the last five years he carried a laptop but recently replaced it with a Blackberry. His children now use his laptop, at home. “The shift was tough but turned out to be a good decision. My shoulders are free,” he says jokingly of the 1.75-kg laptop.

Myilravanan Nathar, Country Manager (India), O2 (Asia-Pacific and Middle East), says high-end mobiles were once complementing laptops, but are now emerging a good substitute.

Using a CMD one can access e-mail; connect to the office local area network and do remote working; do power point presentations; access back office applications such as an ERP (enterprise resource planning) or CRM (customer relationship management); read reports and office documents; browse the Internet; watch TV (using the DVB-H feature) and listen to music and watch video.

Further, the CMD comes with a camera and can also be used to navigate using a GPS feature, if supported in the device. It can also be used as a storage device. “What more does a traveller need?” he asks.

O2 is launching a new device that has a dual processor with 3.6-inch screen and 2 GB on board memory. It will read an external hard drive and can be directly connected to a projector or a television for presentations without any adaptor.

Products such as these come close to replacing the laptop, he says.

More and more people want fast, remote access to everything — from e-mail, contacts and calendars through to customer relationship management, resource planning and supply chain management systems.

All these are now possible through a mobile, and people need not use a laptop, which needs Internet access using various interfaces, including wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi), he says.

Communicate your lifestyle

Mobile productivity has become more critical and is driving the converged phone sales. Most users want a device that seamlessly fuses work and play, and a compact device to address the connectivity, productivity and creativity needs. It should also help them to communicate their lifestyle to others around, says Nathar.

Take the case of O2’s Xda Atom Life. It addresses such a need with the ‘fastest’ Intel processor of 624Mhz; connects at 3.6 Mbps speed using 3.5 G network and has a on board memory 1GB. This is almost similar to the features of a laptop, he says.

Growing numbers

At present, around 5 per cent of total mobile phones (around 105 million units) in the country are CMDs and the number is likely to increase to around 15 per cent in the next two years, says Mohan Kumar, Vice-President, Motorola Software Group.

He feels that in five years, CMDs will overtake laptops. However, for now, both co-exist, given people’s different requirements. Due to the smaller screen size of the mobile devices, laptops will be used to create content in applications such as spreadsheet or word, while CMDs will be used to extract content from the company’s intranet or backend server.

The mobility edge

What’s driving the migration? Chakrapani of Nokia Enterprise Solutions says users want their mobile phones not only for voice, but also for data, video and images.

Nokia’s high-end mobile users — including fashion designers, doctors and lawyers — want all the features of a laptop in their mobile phones.

There is a tremendous advantage for people using the CMDs, he says. For instance, gone are the days when a person needed to sit in front of the laptop or a PC to make a presentation. Today, converged mobile devices can be synchronised with a laptop or a projector using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.

The person doing the presentation can move around a room carrying only his CMD, with the presentation in his hand-held device, and can interact with the audience, he says.

However, the only problem at present is that when presentations need to be edited, using a laptop is easier, he concedes.

Using Nokia’s E90 Communicator, one can view, open, and edit email attachments with Quickoffice (documents, spreadsheets, and presentations), Zip Manager, and Adobe Acrobat Reader.

It also has text-to-speech message reader, he says.

raja@thehindu.co.in

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A big leap