Opinion: What's next for Asia's mobile industry?

By Andrew Lim on 13 October 2008, 1:32pm

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Qualcomm, the company behind many a 3G chipset, recently invited Crave to visit mobile phone companies in the Far East, so we could get a better idea of how the Asian mobile market is developing, particularly with regards to 3G. It's easy to assume that South Korea and particularly Japan are miles ahead of the European and US mobile markets, but what we found is a little more complex than that. Certain areas, such as mobile TV, are definitely more developed than anything we have here, but the struggle to create value through new products is as difficult there as it is anywhere else.

We started our tour at Samsung in a complex in Seoul that houses around 20,000 employees. One of Samsung's challenges is that it's so large, and releases so many products, that consumers are overwhelmed by the number of phones it has to offer. During our meeting with some of its mobile execs, there were hints that Samsung no longer strives to constantly be at the bleeding edge of the market, but aims to make more "meaningful" handsets. Whether or not this means it's going to slow down production rates and create clearer product lines has yet to be seen -- but we hope that's the case.

When we asked Samsung whether or not a more meaningful portfolio of phones would involve services such as Nokia's Comes With Music, Samsung wanted to make it clear that it didn't want to offer services that competed directly with networks.

Equally keen to side with the operators was LG, which explained that it had to take operators' needs into account before launching products -- and therein lies a major problem for the two Korean behemoths. Having to balance consumer needs with network needs makes for a very complicated process, so what's the solution? Enter Google Android and the open platform.