Quocirca's Straight Talking: What next for mobile email?
Emerging markets, synchronisation and unified apps
The BlackBerry hasn't locked up the mobile email market yet. There's still plenty of new ground to cover - especially for consumers, says Quocirca's Rob Bamforth.
After so many years of growth for mobile email among business users - thanks to the addictive and ubiquitous BlackBerry - you might have thought the whole issue of the mobile email market opportunity was dead and buried.
But it's not so cut and dried. There have been a number of products and services aimed at the mobile consumer but despite the success of mobile email in certain broad business user sectors, consumer services have not really taken off.
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A mixture of challenges to do with the technology - the diversity of handsets and limited scope of the network - coupled with the charges levied by those in the value chain - operators, software companies etc - has slowed mobile email becoming a universal consumer service, even in the mature mobile telecoms markets.
Here the masses will use SMS when on the move, and email, IM or other social networking applications when at a computer, as they generally have access to both devices.
In many emerging markets the availability of computers is more limited than that of mobile phones, and email on the move then has the potential to become a more interesting proposition for the mass market. The primary problem remains, though - how to provide a universal service, no matter the handset, for a reasonable price.
Sophisticated synchronisation software has offered part of the solution on smart phones but the challenge of getting similar functionality onto all devices including the lower cost mobile phones has kept the universal solution at bay. Synchronisation solutions company Synchronica, which has presence in emerging markets, has found a way to address the issue with the acquisition of Axis Mobile.
The combined company's offerings ensure a huge range of handsets can be used for mobile email, via a wide variety of mechanisms - SMS, WAP and full-blown synchronisation - so mobile operators can target mobile email products to emerging markets. Operators might consider this to gain additional revenue, or simply to build loyalty, depending on the lie of the land in the particular market.
Given that some markets have greater mobile phone adoption over PCs, a technology solution that covers all handsets combined with an appropriate carrier tariff proposition could make mobile email a mass-market first in less developed economies.
Meanwhile, in the more mature mobile phone and fixed broadband markets, the opportunity for mass adoption of mobile email might look slightly different as social networking sites and instant messaging tools on the desktop have significant appeal to the mobile user.
The challenge here is no longer simply access to email on the move but access to a whole bunch of different communication systems - email, SMS, IM and social network sites, blogs and microblogs - from a coherent and manageable interface.
On the desktop, this is an issue dealt with at best with some form of unified communications solution, or at worst through the use of separate windows and overlap control. But on a mobile it is a much more pressing problem due to a lack of screen real estate and a thumb-jabbing interface.
New hybrid tools could provide universal interfaces but that would undermine the look, feel and brand of certain applications - and at this stage it's still impossible to say which ones will survive and thrive long term.
Mobile email company Visto has come up with a solution it believes is flexible enough to allow the underlying tools to have their own identities, but provides an overarching veneer of control that aggregates updates, alerts and the presence or state indications of each tool on a mobile screen.
This is another direction mobile email can legitimately take: not so much a universal denominator that appeals to the widest and potentially remotely dispersed group but a universal aggregator that appeals to the most gregarious group.
Meanwhile, the early pacemakers of mobile email for the business user - predominantly RIM's BlackBerrys and Windows Mobile devices from the likes of HTC - are widening their appeal by building the broader application platform message on top of the solid reliability of push email.
The new kid on the block, Apple's iPhone, looks like it is already muscling in on the business email market - and will force others to up their game. Despite several years of consolidation the mobile email market is not ready to settle down to its pipe and slippers.