AT&T Stops Selling Nokia E62

Recently, AT&T announced it would stop selling the Nokia E62. This doesn't seem like that much of a surprise.

When looking at forum traffic as far back as January of this year, it was obvious the Nokia E62 just wasn't catching on. The E62 was first available through AT&T (then Cingular) in September 2006. By January 2007, it only captured 0.2% of the posts in the top cell phone forums.

Compare this with the Samsung Blackjack: The Blackjack was released through AT&T in November 2006. By January 2007, it had captured 0.64% of the posts in the top cell phone forums.

Even the Wi-Fi enabled E62 sibling, the Nokia E61, had far more interest. This is especially surprising since the E61 is not available through a US carrier (and hence no carrier subsidy).

Buying unlocked phones in US

Since the announcement of iPhone's price tag (and other events, like Nokia opening up flagship stores), many have been wondering: will users shell out for an unsubsidized (and locked) phone? It's a fair question. Much of Moto RAZR's recent success has been attributed to massive carrier subsidies, despite its initial price tag of $499.

According to Boardtracker, there were 66K+ threads about unlocked phones in the last year.

New Phone Plan: 0 minutes, unlimited data

I recently downloaded Fring on my cell phone. Fring is a mobile client for Skype, Google Talk, MSN Messenger, & SIP. Think of it as Trillian or Pigdin for cell phones. Using Fring, for example, I can make Skype voice calls using the mobile data network (or a WLAN data network - my phone has an 802.11g antenna). I've tried making voice calls.. it actually works! There's a slight delay, but it wasn't more noticeable than on a computer.

This got me thinking: why have voice minutes at all? Through Skype (or some other SIP service), I could buy minutes and call any phone number. Skype charges 2.4 cents/min to call the US. Cingular's charges vary, but taking my plan, it's 11.25 cents/min ($40/450 min). This, of course, doesn't include nights & weekends, mobile-to-mobile min, etc. Including those, I would need to talk for 1666 minutes/month, to get a rate of 2.4 cents/min. This is only domestic calling. Layer on international calling and the equation looks much different.

So here's my proposal: a service plan with 0 voice minutes and unlimited data. Perhaps I could try to do this with Sonopia.

Smartphone without a data plan?

Jupiter analyst Michael Gartenberg posted a "factoid" today: a non-negligible percentage of a certain smartphone being sold in the US without a data plan. I don't think this is that surprising (assuming smartphone means a phone with a QWERTY keyboard). For an avid txter, a keyboard is key (pun intended). There just aren't that many phones with keyboards aimed at the texter/non-email crowd (the Sidekick series is the prime exception that comes to mind).

Here are some people that fit this description.

Forums - a leading indicator?

Last week, the consumer advocacy blog, The Consumerist, had a couple posts of the "confessions of an X sales rep" form for wireless carriers (Sprint & Verizon). These posts [1] [2] have been featured prominently on Digg [3] [4] ( & possibly other social bookmark sites). What's fascinating is that they don't provide much new information.

Most, if not all, of this information has been in forums posts at a number of different wireless forums. In fact, one of the first Digg comments on the Sprint story is to check out the Sprint Users forum [5] (which incidentally has 871,583 posts by 110,380 members).

Thanks to someone putting the information in a bite-sized post and the good reach of The Consumerist [6] it appears this information is now being exposed to a larger audience.

• If all this information existed in forums already, why did it take so long to get exposose?
• What other information is buried in forums?

Why forums matter

With the explosion of consumer-generated/fortified media, why look at an old school technology like forums (bulletin boards, message boards, ...)? Despite the fanfare of blogging and social media, we believe that forums have a number of differences when compared to other social media:

• lower barrier to posting a thought: someone else (the forum owner) has set up the structure, all a user needs to do is login and post if they have a thought, question, or comment
• more diverse contributor base: it's not uncommon for forums to have >100,000 unique posters

Analyzing forum behavior has the opportunity to provide an insightful glimpse into conversations that are occurring. This is unlike analysis of blog, which measures the reach/influence of ideas.

Here's a purposefully vague 2x2 that briefly illustrates the point: