Well - since Motorola is promising the first GPRS models during the summer, you'd think that volume sales can be reached by Xmas. I'm not sure what to believe in the light of the current WAP situation... Ericsson just delayed the R320 again. It's possible that some manufacturers want to go directly to WAP-GPRS and skip the WAP with current 9,6 kbps speeed.
It's not clear how rapidly the volume sales of the new mobile internet models will be ramped up - either in Europe or Japan. I'm still waiting for IDO to stop NTT-DoCoMo's market share gains. So far, the boring old i-Mode is going on like a locomotive; IDO is just shuffling its PDC customers into its new CDMA network with no overall market share gains. I bet that this was not what IDO and DDI envisioned when they decided to spend billions on a new network.
The Sprint situation is also deeply weird - the mobile internet initiative was launched in the summer with much fanfare. By the fourth quarter, Sprint's subscriber addition growth had plummeted near 30% while Voicestream had soared near 200%. Even more strangely, AT&T also passed Sprint in growth competition - without a mobile internet initiative.
It seems that the mobile internet is no universal growth potion. Some operators make it work with even a rudimentary technology - some end up with flops in their hands. I think that the worst possible mistake you can make is to look at the lab results and project market success from the absolute, theoretical data transfer speed.
In the real world, things like content and handset specs will end up mattering much more. Even if i-Mode ends up losing the speed contest to its competition - does that matter if it retains a clear content and handset superiority? Even if Sprint managed to launch its mobile internet program 9 months before AT&T - does that matter if the Nokia 7160 will end up outselling the lame-o Neopoint ten to one?
I think we will end up recognizing that mobile phones are still consumer products. And consumers aren't engineers. What GPRS in America will have is the full Motorola, Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens model range that was originally designed for the massive Europe/Asia market. If the 1XRTT phone competition initially consists of Kyocera, Samsung, Neopoint and LG I have my own ideas about which way the US consumers will break.
Tero
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