Manage a diverse range of handsets, don't just stop selling them
17. Aug, 2006 
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It seems only yesterday that operators were switching off their analogue mobile networks, yet now its the turn of the retailer to make to turn off the switch. Online retail brand Dixon’s reports they will stop selling analogue radios and that the death is imminent also for portable stereos and CD players. I guess the portable tapeplayer and VHS are already ‘dead’ by their reckoning. For mobile operators, the problem is confounded by the need to actually support all this old tech stuff.
In the mind of the consumer these leaps and bounds may come as a surprise, yesterday’s technology is still current. It’s also evident in how we use everyday devices and what we carry on us – mp3players instead of CD players or casetteplayers, mobiles with radios instead of portable and who needs the ubiqiutous boom-box, when you can stand at a bus stop and play music from your mobile?
In the mobile industry, the phones we sell today are so different from what was on offer a few years ago, but many customers are not upgrading. Walk the streets, sit on a bus, watch what your customer is using for a handset. Reality is that many people are still using a that is now 3-4 years old. As operators move customers from 12 to 18 – 24 month contracts, this will start to raise another problem. It’s a small percentage of an operators base that upgrades every 12 months and can potentially access new services like streaming mobile TV, radio and music downloads. As the majority of customers are locked into a contract handset, they are still going to expect support for this terminal and expect products to be developed that will work for them.
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