Genuity Research reports from CES
Canada’s top-ranked tech analyst, David Hodgson, filed this summary note from Vegas today:
“During our visit to CES, we found the convergence boxes, all-in-one handheld computers/phones, mobile TV, Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD, and location-based services (i.e., GPS) to be the major themes. This was all trumped by Apple’s San Francisco-based iPhone announcement.
We are beginning to see the first generation of true all-in-one devices, as highlighted by products such as the excellent Nokia N95 or the new Apple iPhone. In the past, high-end devices were focused on doing just a few things well. Increasingly, consumers are going to want to see everything done well on a single device.
While the first iPhone being delivered this year may be somewhat expensive and lacking a few technological features, the longer-term implications of the iPhone platform are far-reaching. For the key competitors within the smartphone market, Nokia, Motorola, and Research in Motion (RIM), Apple’s iPhone will require them to carefully look at the products that they are currently offering in a new light, and to push their products to new levels of convergence and ease-of-use.
For RIM, whose bread-and-butter is the lucrative enterprise market, the release of Apple’s iPhone is a threat to its rapidly growing consumer-related (i.e., Pearl) business opportunities, given that we would expect Apple to introduce multiple phones at multiple price tiers in the coming 24 months, and its expectations to sell a whopping 10 million phones in 2008. The consumer business is approximately 25% of RIM’s revenue, but this is expected to grow, according to street estimates.
As for an enterprise-friendly Apple iPhone with integrated secure push e-mail messaging, this is not likely to be of strategic focus, at least over the next couple of years.”
MRM
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