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| Are cell phone analysts no longer trustworthy? |
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Posted By: Sindre Lia |
Posted On:
Thursday, September 13, 2007 |
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With the explosion of the smartphone market, there's also been an explosion of clueless cell phone analysts:
Nowadays, many cell phone analysts are spending more time creating headlines than publishing respectable market analysis. Unfortunately, that's a bad thing for consumers in the long run.
Stop licking major industry players' backs:
The most obvious examples related to "quick and dirty" cell phone analysis are related to the growing smartphone industry. In the early days of smartphones, they all had pretty much the same price tag and they were all used for the same purpose. In other words, it was an easy market to analyze.
Right now, however, the smartphone market is evolving faster than ever and as such it's no longer easy to come up with a good analysis of the market. We urge cell phone analysts to spend more time on understanding the increasingly complex market, than on licking the major industry players' backs.
iPhone price drop was indeed a big deal:
Last week and its iPhone price drop turned out to not only be a sad week for consumers, but it also made it easy to catch quite a few cell phone analysts with their pants down. Every analyst that is quoted along the lines of "Look at the mobile industry in general, and the price drop was bound to happen anyway", has created perfect examples of "quick and dirty" analysis. We can only hope they did it because they were incompetent, and not because they had just bought Apple stocks.
Sure, any unlocked phone can come at a premium price and then the price is dropped when the phone is being picked up by carriers. If early adopters had bought an unlocked iPhone at $600, and the price fell dramatically two months later, nobody would have noticed it. However, considering the fact that the iPhone is an unsubsidized locked phone, and coming with the industry's worst contract, Apple should be more careful about their next move in the mobile market.
Regardless, whenever you come across a report or article saying that the price drop was not a big deal, make sure to remember this: It was indeed a big deal. |
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