Networking sites key to driving smartphone sales

Leading mobile phone manufacturers are betting on the popularity of social networking sites (SNS) to drive smartphone sales.

Joining a slew of phone manufacturers who have woken up to the benefits of value addition, Samsung has released into the market a range of entry-level smart phones with integrated social networking widgets (applications) on their home screens.

The move comes just months after Nokia released the N97 which also comes with similar widgets on the standby window.

Leading the fray is the iconic iPhone, which has established a lead in the value addition market by offering over 50,000 applications that enhance the working of the phone.

In Kenya, the strategy is geared towards capturing a larger share of the mobile internet market, which has grown by 60 per cent over the last year.

Banking on the growth of social networking in the country, mobile manufacturers are betting on offering real time updates of events on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other informational applications on the home screen to appeal to tech-savvy consumers who are the greatest users of social networking sites.

“The integration of social networking sites to mobile home screens has been the exciting thing,” said Ms Dorothy Ooko, communications manager at Nokia.

“People want to have feeds from social sites streamed to their phones in real time. Previously, you had to go to your mobile browser and log in each time you wanted to see what is happening on Facebook,” she said.

Mr Dearn Kimani of Samsung Electronics, mobile division, says that the phenomenon is meant to enhance customer convenience, adding that the youth are the main target market.

Samsung has released several new models into the market hoping to tap into this growth, launching the B3410 and a colour series of S3653 — collectively called Samsung Corby.

Alcatel has also bounced back into the Kenyan market with a low-priced (Sh9,000) smart phone — OT-800 focusing on SNS applications.

“The widgets eliminate the three or four-step process of getting to a website of your choice. With the applications, one can go to a site with one touch of an icon,” said Mr Kimani.

The mobile application revolution was pioneered by Apple’s iPhone which now has an estimated 10 thousand active applications in its online store.

Observers note that the large number of both free and for-sale applications for the iPhone have been behind its huge success in the smartphone market as it gives users more functionality through the numerous widgets.

According to a recent study by Gartner, an ICT research and advisory firm, Applle’s iPhone had a 17.1 per cent share of the worldwide smartphone market in the third quarter, making it the third largest mobile firm after Nokia (40 per cent) and Research in Motion (20 per cent).

Locally, however, the iPhone is not as popular as it is in developed markets.

Rival manufacturers are taking to the applications’ approach but since it is difficult to build a large application store like Apple’s, they are starting with the SNS whose usage is rising among buyers of smartphones.

A few weeks ago, Nokia ran a series of marketing campaigns using celebrity endorsements to promote the N97.

Primarily using Facebook, Nokia pushed one of its major selling points of its new breed of mobiles, which is the ability to customise the home screen by selecting applications relevant to one’s lifestyle.

Popular websites

For instance, there are news feeds applications from wire agencies, a weather application for planning one’s day, and Facebook which is more popular here than its SNS rivals — Twitter and MySpace.

Driving this move are insights that reveal that Facebook is among the most popular social marketing websites in the country.

According to State of the Mobile Web, a snapshot study released in April this year by Opera, a software maker, Facebook was the most visited site in Kenya, beating Google and Yahoo to second and third place.

The data was complied from mobile subscribers who access the net through Opera’s mobile browser and is indicative of the general browsing trend.

Despite players banking on the projected rise of mobile internet to drive smartphone sales, analysts say that data pricing for individual mobile users is high and could stifle the mobile as an internet platform.

Mobile operators’ charges per megabyte (MB) for individual mobile data range from about Sh3 to Sh12.

The size of each page transcoded is an average of 120 kilobytes.

Taking a tariff of Sh10 per MB, this means that a credit balance of Sh100 will run out after opening 80 pages.