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Intro
This article explains what phones you as a customer are going to be marketing to.
This applies to both Unicast Lite and Unicast Pro.
Why is it important to know the phone?
First of all, you need to know the target phones in your area because not all phones have the same capabilities to accept Bluetooth messages.
As you may know, the phone market is not made up purely of one type of phone made by a single manufacturer. In fact, the phone market is spread between more than 10 major competitors who each produce many different models and types of phones.
If you plan to use Bluetooth marketing in a single location, you may know what the most popular phone in that area is. For example, it is a common, but often accurate assumption that business executives use Blackberry Smartphones, so if you plan on Bluetooth marketing your campaign in a business orientated area – you are likely to find a lot of these phones.
Phone capabilities
Unicast uses the Bluetooth OBEX push protocol which is the standard for transferring data between devices. Different phones carry different capabilities and likewise the capabilities of Bluetooth may or may not be supported.
We know from our research that Apple iPhone's do not currently support the OBEX protocol (read more about iPhone Bluetooth compatibility)
Some Blackberry’s support the standard OBEX push protocol, including:
- 8100 series (Pearl)
- 8300 series (Curve)
- 8800 series
- 8900 series (Curve II)
- 9000 series (Bold)
- 9500 series (Storm)
However, to get a Bluetooth file sent from one of your nodes running Unicast you will have to take a different approach (read more about Blackberry Bluetooth compatibility)
The rest of the potential market and will be explained in the following section.
Market Share
At the end of 2008, Nokia had the leading market share on phones.
You have a good chance that when sending to a Nokia; it is going to support the standard OBEX protocol as so many of their models have done in the past.
Nokia have held onto a great market share for a number of years now and is been the most popular brand of phone. The next major competitors in the phone market are held by Samsung, LG, Motorola and Sony Ericsson.
The capabilities of any make/model cannot be guaranteed by us but you can take this information as a guide to what manufacturers you are likely to be delivering your campaigns to.
Because Apple and RIM phones make up a combined share of less than 5% of the market, you will not be missing out on a great deal of the market by not marketing to these phones.
By looking at the figures below for 2008, we can get an idea about what share each manufacturer has over the market:
- Nokia: 38.6%
- Samsung: 16.2%
- LG: 8.3%
- Motorola: 8.3%
- Sony Ericsson: 8%
- RIM (BlackBerry): 1.9%
- Kyocera: 1.4%
- Apple (iPhone): 1.1%
- HTC: 1.1%
- Sharp: 1%
Other: 14.1%
If we assume for a moment that phones manufactured by Nokia, Samsung, LG, Motorola and Sony Ericsson all have standard Bluetooth OBEX protocol capability then the possible phone market percentage that can be marketed to is around 80%.
We can make this assumption based on the architecture of the phones, for example; a good majority of the models put out by these manufacturers can run Java applications and/or run on a Symbian operating system, and often with similarities in phone software you will find similarities in hardware capabilities.
A small percentage of these phones by these manufacturers may be too old and do not have Bluetooth technology on board, which would take the percentage down a little, but it should be noted that this figure can only increase with time as people upgrade to better phones with Bluetooth technology with the standard Bluetooth OBEX protocol.
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