To: pyslent who wrote (166356 ) 2/24/2014 2:54:05 PM From: Ryan Bartholomew Read Replies (1) | Respond to ...in absolute terms, more people are excited about flagship phone launches than ever. If by "absolute terms" you mean that there are just more people who anticipate new smartphones, I agree. That's because so many more people care about them and own one now than they did in 2008. However, if you mean user-base-adjusted, then your evaluation of hype is quite subjective... I'd say the opposite. I doubt there's reliable data on phone hype, but I'm rather immersed in the stuff and just don't see it. Take a look at the links comparing the Samsung S5 and iPhone 6 (all rumors at this point, but many will likely be accurate)... they are the two most anticipated phones and yet nothing is groundbreaking or stunning. They're just really nice, and really expensive, phones.You keep saying that the difference between a premium phone and a midtier phone is not as big as it was 5 years ago, but I'm sure you are aware that the sales numbers for premium phones in 2013 were roughly 20 times what they were in 2008, when, as you say, the iPhone advantage was the biggest. That's driven by growth in the overall smartphone segment. Expectations already account for the size of the market. I'm speaking on a *relative* basis: I think that premium-priced phones like the Samsung S5 and iPhone 6 will fall short of expectations, as a shift occurs towards the mid-priced phones that are nearly as good. A mid-priced phone in 2010 would have gotten you what - an LG Vortex? On the high end, you could have paid twice as much for an iPhone 4 that was like an entirely different product category. Now, as I mentioned before, you can buy an iPhone 5 or a Samsung S4, or you can pay half as much for a Moto X, which is almost of the same quality. That's the narrowing gap I refer to.
