Feature phone + social networking site = social mobile phone
In the mobile phone rivers and lakes in the past half year, besides the strong apple, the most popular star in the Chinese market is the social networking site Renren.com and Kaixin.com.
The world’s top mobile phone giants, including Nokia, LG, Motorola, and Sony Ericsson, have shown goodwill to the two social networking sites, actively requested cooperation, and used social networking as the most important function to attract consumers.
On September 17, 2010, LG, the world’s third-largest mobile phone manufacturer, launched five products, all of which are built into the most popular SNS social networking sites, including Renren, Kaixin, Sina Weibo, Facebook and other popular social networking website clients; Nokia, who is struggling to get out of Apple, also regards social networking sites as heavy weapons for counterattacks. On September 14, of the four mobile phones released, there were two main social features and a deep cooperation with Renren; the previous 8 At the end of the month, the Nokia N8, the most important flagship model in 2010, is also focusing on network interaction.
It was Sony Ericsson and Motorola who hoped to make a breakthrough through SNS earlier. Both of these companies are faced with a difficult situation in which their performance is severely declining. Under circumstances where they cannot rely on simple hardware competition to create enemies, they have chosen to win over Kaixin.com and the players behind Kaixin.com are rapidly expanding.
In fact, this is a win-win move. When the mobile phone competition is no longer a hardware competition, but more is the use of Internet applications stick to the user, the application has become the focus of competition; when the social network site facing the excitement after the loss of users, investors are no longer optimistic about the bottleneck The mobile terminal provides another entrance beyond the PC and reactivates a large number of users.
Mobile life
After experiencing the crazy outbreak in 2008, social networking sites face growing troubles. 360 laps and ant.com have recently closed their operations, and early social networking sites like Hane.net have long disappeared.
The top two happy nets (kaixin001.com) and Thousand Oaks Renren.com are also caught in such a predicament. According to Alexa's global website traffic rankings, since March 2010, Kaixin's global rankings have started to slide down to 100.
According to the data provided by Kaixin.com, currently there are 86 million registered users of Kaixin.com and there are 25 million registered users per day. Since its establishment at the end of 2007, it took only one year for Kaixin.com to rapidly accumulate 60 million users, but in the following period, Kaixin.com only received 26 million new users. It is believed that wireless will be the new development engine of Kaixin.com.
Renren's latest ranking data on Alexa is also rampant. With the development of time, the homogeneity of games in social networking sites is serious and many players are bored. The loss of white-collar users in cities is serious.
In fact, Renren realized this problem earlier. On December 1, 2009, the company began to implement a wireless strategy and cooperated with a number of mobile phone manufacturers to launch wireless clients for all models of mobile phones. The SNS social service based on the Internet was further extended to the wireless field.
“We believe that in the next five years, China’s use of mobile internet may well exceed that of PCs, which means that more than 50% of users will use mobile terminals to access RenRen in the next five years. Why is SNS on mobile terminals? What's hot? My personal opinion is that it has two of the biggest features, one is communication and the other is games.†Liu Jian, COO of Thousand Oaks Interactive Group, told reporters.
Only in China, the mobilization of SNS is still in the stage of layout. In the more mature markets of Japan and the United States, some data have already proved this trend. In the Japanese market, the number of mobile SNS visits is 3 times that of the PC version. Facebook’s recently released data also shows that there are 500 million people who visit Facebook every month. Among them, 150 million are accessed through mobile devices, accounting for 30 percent of the total. %. In 2009, Facebook accessed more than 60 million mobile devices each month. The speed of development is very alarming.
The mobile migration of social platforms is a general trend.
Detour
Apple rewritten the competition rules of the mobile phone industry, posing a serious threat to all the traditional mobile phone giants. The iPhone has taken the lead in the field of smartphones. Since its launch in 2007, there has been no mobile phone to compete with it.
For those of Apple's competitors, the approach may be to avoid the edge and walk around. On the one hand, it binds social functions and focuses on the huge user base behind social networks. On the other hand, it extends the function of the Internet on feature phones, attracting young and price-sensitive consumers through a cost-effective and well-designed appearance.
LG's new five mobile phones are the "cookies" and "socialist" series of sweet series for young consumers. All five products are built with the most popular SNS social networking sites, video site clients and other mobile terminals. At the same time, each mobile phone has a different personality appearance and function, but a common feature is that all are non-smart phones. The price is only 1,000 yuan in the early stage, LG Electronics China Mobile Communications Vice President Ren Weiguang said, is aimed at there is still a blank middle market: smartphone price threshold is high, ordinary feature phone features a single, poor network connectivity.
Nokia is also trying to blur the boundaries between smartphones and feature phones, breaking the Apple PC by using feature phones that are close to the smartphone network and only cost about a thousand dollars. Like LG, the recently launched new category includes feature phone C3, and social networking is the main push feature.
According to Fu Zhihua, deputy director of the DCCI Internet Data Center, the previous mobile phones were mainly divided into two parts: one was non-smart phones; the other was smart phones. However, it can be seen that the future development of the mobile phone market is very important in the direction of Internet mobile phones and Internet-related terminals. The boundaries between non-smart phones and smart phones will become increasingly blurred.
Is it a new beginning for mobile phone manufacturers to join hands with social networking sites?
Spring of social phones
The upgrading of feature phones will bring greater opportunities for mobile SNS.
Although smartphones have made eyeballs in recent years, it is still feature phones that dominate the sales share.
In a general sense, a smart phone generally refers to an open architecture mobile phone product with an operating system. It has high-end entertainment and business functions and allows a third-party programmer to program specifically for its operating system.
The Feature Phone adopts a closed embedded operating system. Third-party programmers can only write applications on them. They can't program applications and install or uninstall programs randomly. The main difference between the two is that Technical inclination.
Currently, there is an overlap between Internet-enabled smartphones and traditionally emphasized mobile phones.
According to the latest data from market research firm Gartner, global handset sales in the second quarter of 2010 were 326 million, of which smartphones had only 61.6 million, accounting for less than one-fifth of the total.
If the feature phone further increases the scalability, for the application of the mobile Internet, the promotion effect will be much larger than that of the smart phone. After all, the user base amounts to hundreds of millions, and the upgrade of the feature phone will bring greater opportunities to the mobile SNS.
According to Analysys International's analysis, mobile SNS users prefer to use mobile client software to access mobile Internet content in choosing ways to obtain network content. Among the surveyed users, 71.3% prefer to use mobile client software to obtain mobile Internet content. Another 19.78% choose to search for mobile Internet content using a mobile phone. WAP users choose the WAP integrated portal as 6.3%.
Currently, mainstream smart phones can almost always support mobile SNS client software, and feature phones also support more applications to meet the needs of more people.
DCCI Internet Data Center Fu Zhihua believes that Chinese mobile Internet users have very distinct Chinese characteristics. The proportion of mobile phone users in cities and rural areas is about 30%, and the demand for rural users to use low-end mobile phones to access the Internet is even stronger, because rural areas can There is no urban diversification of the terminal on the Internet.
After all, for most people, the price of smart phones is still high. If feature phones can find a balance between price and function, it may be able to drive a new wave of sales.