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AT&T pushes quick-messaging phones
Growth in smartphones has been through the roof in the last couple of years, as devices like the iPhone and BlackBerry are subsidized to price points palatable to the mass market. But AT&T executives said Wednesday that smartphones are not for every consumer. And the company sees a huge market for smartphone-lite devices. David Christopher, chief marketing officer for AT&T's wireless unit, said that about 35 percent of the handsets AT&T sold in the fourth quarter were smartphones. "What about the other 65 percent of phones we sell?" he asked.Good question. Christopher said that increasingly the company is selling more of mid-tier messaging phones for customers who want some smartphone features but not all the bells and whistles."Smartphones are overwhelming for some people," he said. "So in quick messaging phones we don't try to do everything. "The problem is that no one has done a very good job of providing mobile applications for these phones, Christopher said. AT&T said it's trying to fix that problem by encouraging app developers to write for the BREW platform from Qualcomm. Other carriers, such as Sprint Nextel ,are partnering with app store companies, like GetJar, which offer applications for these phones.Meanwhile, AT&T is also focusing on adding some key features to this class of phone that provides the most popular and useful functions in a smartphone at a much lower price and with far fewer confusing extras.Adding to its existing list of devices in this category, the company launched four new quick-messaging devicesat CTIA. The Samsung Strivehas a vertical sliding keyboard. It's the least expensive of these new devices at $19.99 with a two-year contract after a $50 rebate. The Samsung Sunburst is a GPS-enabled device that is $39.99 with a two-year agreement. The other two phones are not on the market yet and pricing is not yet available. The Pantech Link, which will hit store shelves in a few weeks, has a full keyboard, while the Pantech Pursuit has a full touch screen and vertical keyboard. It will be out this summer and will come with the ability to geotag.These phones will be among the first handsets to take advantage of new services and applications AT&T has developed especially for this category.For example, AT&T has enhanced messaging for these devices. Instead of offering simple text messaging, the company has added the ability to thread messages to follow a conversation as well as group messaging that lets subscribers"reply all" to messages.The next-generation messaging functionality also allows people to embed multimedia such as pictures into regular text messages.Christopher noted that these functions have been available for some time on smartphones, but they haven't been available for lower-end messaging phones.In addition to the messaging, AT&T has also launched several services that are hosted on AT&T servers and can be accessed via the Internet. It's launched the AT&T address book, which allows users to manage their address books from a PC and sync their phones to backup address information. This means that when a phone is lost, stolen or damaged, all the address information isn't lost too. This offering will come free to subscribers of quick messaging devices, Christopher said.AT&T has also launched an Internet-based service to help these subscribers manage and store their photos. Customers can upload photos to a server in AT&T's network where it's stored in a personal "locker." The photos can also be uploaded directly to social networking sites. AT&T will charge 35 cents per photo upload and $10 a month to upload up to 50 photos.And finally, the company announced Wednesday a new music service that integrates several functions that could be found in multiple music applications into a single service. For example, the music service allows people to identify songs or artists as you would with applications, such as Shazaam, by holding the device up to a radio. Users can also add artists and music directly to a streaming radio playlist, as well as preview, purchase and download songs right from a single application. This service costs an additional $6.99 a month.AT&T requires its quick messaging phones have some kind of data plan.Subscribers must spend $20 a month on top of their voice service for either a texting or a data plan or any combination of plans. AT&T offers texting plans for either $5, $15, or $20 a month. And its data plan costs $15 for unlimited access on quick-messaging devices only.AT&T also requires smartphone subscribers sign up for a data plan, which costs $30 a month.Factor in the extra cost of the photo sharing and music services, and subscribers could actually spend more on their monthly service than a smartphone subscriber using an iPhone.iPhone subscribers can pay a yearly fee to have their contacts, photos, and iTunes music backed up in the Internet-cloud using a service sold by Apple. The quick-messaging data plan costs $20, plus $10 for the photo service, plus another $7 a month for the music service, which adds up to $37 a month.It's clear that AT&T wants to encourage customers to purchase data plans, since pricing pressure is making it difficult for carriers to make money on voice services. But Christopher said he is confident that this class of handset will appeal to a large group of customers."I absolutely think there is a market for these phones," he said. "These phones are a lot less complicated than smartphones. They cost much less than the smartphones and the data plans are less expensive. And there are a lot of people out there, who are interested in that."

Oops! Yahoo dumps Britney
But Yahoo is doing things differently this year, notably by promoting lists of top trends in search grouped in certain categories. The topics include not only top news stories (led by Saddam Hussein) and tech trends (no surprise here, YouTube), but also trends in the environment, a category devoted to pet food, recalls of toys and other goods, kids' search trends, and searches on Yahoo's Delicious bookmark sharing site. Given that 2007 marks the 10th anniversary of the Kyoto Protocol, former vice president Al Gore triumphed at the Academy Awards with his film An Inconvenient Truth and took home a Nobel Peace Prize for his environmental work, and we saw companies left and right were going "green," the environmental category was a no-brainer. The searches indicated a shift away from people seeking basic definitions and data about the climate crisis to seeking information as to what they could do to help make a change, said Raj Gossain, senior marketing director at Yahoo Search. Global warming-related searches also made the top 10 of kids' search trends. In the tech category, behind YouTube, was: Wikipedia; Facebook; an Apple triple-hitter with iTunes, iPod, and iPhone; Nintendo's Wii; Microsoft's Xbox 360; Sony PlayStation 3; and Guitar Hero, the simulated rock-guitar computer game that has become a sensation. The company did give a nod to the seemingly insatiable thirst people seem to have for stars by creating a "Celebrity Downslides" category, topped by none other than Britney Spears, who seems to be busy shuttling between shops, courthouses, and rehab these days. While I applauded Yahoo's efforts at a deeper societal discourse, I couldn't help asking Gossain what the top search term was. After initially declining to provide it in a phone interview, I received an e-mail the following day with Yahoo's Top 10 search terms list: Britney Spears, WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment), Paris Hilton, Naruto, Beyonce, Lindsay Lohan, Rune Scape, Fantasy Football, Fergie, and Jessica Alba. That's six female celebrities, a theatrical wrestling company, fantasy sports, a medieval-themed online game and a Japanese anime comic series that I had look up on a search engine. The Yahoo 2007 Top Trends lists is here. Google has released its list of the 10 fastest rising U.S. search terms for 2007. They are: iphone, webkinz, tmz, transformers, youtube, club penguin, myspace, heroes, facebook, and anna nicole smith.