AT THE Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the world’s biggest annual trade show for the wireless industry, Apple is everywhere and nowhere.
Apple doesn’t do trade shows but the shadow of the iPhone hung over the event, with the world’s biggest handset makers introducing new copycat phones and services that ape key features of the iconic device.
The handset business will produce more than a billion phones this year, but is suffering a crisis of confidence brought on by sharply changing business models that has only been exaggerated by the global economic slump.
“Imagination is expensive in a year such as this,” said Richard Windsor, a technology analyst at the conference who is with Nomura Securities in London.
The giants of the phone industry – Nokia, Samsung, LG Electronics, Sony Ericsson and HTC – are humbling themselves to copy a company whose phones account for only 1 per cent of handsets.
A year ago, phone makers with quick-acting design teams came out with the first touchscreen iPhone look-alikes. This year, they are going further by seeking to duplicate the iPhone’s user interface software.
Privately, an executive with a major European telecommunications operator complains: “Everybody is trying to catch the iPhone. They are pushing things out to market that just aren’t ready for prime-time.”
Analysts say the clones often perform slowly and are less intuitive for users than the iPhone.
South Korean phone maker LG Electronics introduced an entry-level smartphone using Microsoft Corp’s Windows Mobile operating system and a new iPhone-like look called “3D S-Class User Interface”.
The most obvious difference with the iPhone is that LG’s GM730 gives users three-dimensional views of its features and applications, which appear like cubes rather than pages, as they do on the iPhone.
However, a demonstration of the iPhone wannabe reveals a characteristic flaw familiar to personal computer users. LG’s logo and then the Windows brand hang on the screen as five, 10, 15, eventually 30 seconds pass. The phone is booting up, just like a computer, but unlike many of the faster phones.
Apple has sought to scare away competitors by threatening legal action to defend the hundreds of patented ideas it has rolled into the iPhone.
The proliferation of “me-too” products is a trap because products must take shortcuts or sacrifice profit margins to undercut Apple on price.
That digs equipment makers into a deeper hole because smartphones have been faster growing and more profitable than other handsets.
The phone industry is envious of Apple’s AppStore, which lets iPhone users download thousands of small software programs to personalise the way they play games, listen to music or find directions.
Letting users decide which software they add to phones marks an upending of long-standing industry practices of tightly controlling device features, based on what handset makers and their key customers, the operators, thought best. The roll-call of companies announcing their own software stores this week included Nokia, Microsoft, LG and the Orange mobile network.
