Cost of mobile phones likely to curb future growth, concludes report
The mobile industry should look at the social context of mobile phone use to ensure future growth in the sector, concludes a MobileUK report carried out by the Work Foundation's iSociety project. To find out more about the everyday use of mobile phones by their UK owners, the authors of the report, James Crabtree and Max Nathan, spent time with four individuals, their families and friends. According to their findings, cost remains a highly significant issue for the majority of users, and often defines their relationship with their phone and network. 'There is a myth that talk is cheap. In fact, for most people, talk remains an expensive worry that needs to be kept under control,' said Mr Nathan. 'For this reason, the sort of explosive mobile telephone adoption seen in the late nineties is unlikely to occur with third generation mobile services and future mobile provision. Instead, the move from the present generation's mobile telephony to the next is much more likely to follow the gradual upgrade from narrowband to broadband,' claims the report. The report also found that most people still use mobile phones for voice calls, which is also expected to curb the growth of advanced technology. The report makes several recommendations on the development of this market technology in the future. In particular, it points to the popularity of both mobile phone calls and text messages, and concludes that any services that tempt users to interact or transact using their phones will have to be easy to use and must work properly.
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