Nick Jones

One of the interesting things I can do as a Gartner analyst is to mine some of the data that we collect from our web site. I just trawled through the anonymised search strings for the July to September quarter and in the mobile / communications domain the topic people were searching for information on most frequently was ….. mobile devices. Adding together generic searches such as “mobile device” and “smartphone” with searches for specific devices such as “iphone” or “blackberry” shows me that mobile devices make up about 2x as many searches as the next most popular comms-related topic which was unified communications. This is only fair, mobile devices are much cooler and more interesting than unified comms which is a topic I detest because it misses the point about the real purpose of communications. The interest in devices also mirrors my experience at US symposium where many of my client meetings were about device selection, device vendors and platforms.

One of the joys of an analysts job is I get to play with a lot of mobile devices lent to me by kind-hearted vendors, and last week in the US the two handsets I used most were the Nokia E72 and the Motorola Blur. The E72 is a very worthy successor to the E71 and is the best Symbian business handset I’ve used to date. It looks good, has nice email software, and a good keyboard. About the only quibble I have with it, is that I wish the new optical sensor were a bit more sensitive. The Blur is also a good handset, if a bit chunky, and it makes me think that Moto may have turned the corner. The Blur also illustrates how fast  Android is maturing into a credible platform. I was less captivated by the social networking widgets all over the Blur’s main screen mostly because I don’t use them. I have a theory that you can either have a life or talk about your life. I choose the former so don’t use Facebook or twitter much.

I’ll be at the Symbian show tomorrow, and will likely have some thoughts to report on afterwards. Next week I’ll be at Gartner’s European Symposium in Cannes; hopefully I’ll see you there.