Vodacom has released a series of Vodafone mobile phones, which offer basic smartphone functionality at cheap prices, but are unlikely to bring more South Africans online, according to WWW Strategy MD Steven Ambrose.
Ranging from the R400 VF340, which boasts WAP access and a VGA camera, to the R600 VF546 with qwerty keyboard and Zulu and Xhosa language options, Vodacom says the phones will “provide revolutionary functionality at an affordable price”.
What the phones essentially offer is basic Java capability that allows access to features, but not the same kind of functionality as a smartphone with an operating system. These phones are called “feature phones”, and according to Ambrose, the market for them will die out in the next two to three years.
According to research conducted by World Wide Worx, the South African mobile market is polarised between a low end that uses only the basic communication features of a cellphone, and a high end that has contracts or company phones packed with functionality, but which seldom makes use of this functionality.
World Wide Worx has also observed the emergence of a third market, in the middle, which has discovered the functionality mobile phones can offer and makes use of it. Ambrose believes the Vodacom phones are aimed at this market. However, he theorises that as smartphones become cheaper, this segment of the market will rather aspire to a name brand and the feature phone will become obsolete.
Ambrose says the pricing on Vodacom's offer is reasonable, but one must bear in mind that there are other phones on the market with similar capability. A network connection is practically standard, says Ambrose, and the feature phone market is an incredibly competitive one.
Digital divide
Vodacom says: “These phones are aimed at making Internet connectivity accessible to a much broader segment of the population - typically those who previously could not afford this kind of functionality.”
Ambrose, however, argues that people seem to misunderstand the Internet. While the phones will offer people a browser and access to applications like Mxit, this is a far cry from real Internet usage or closing any kind of digital divide.
He says the phone may encourage people to use a portal on the Internet provided by Vodacom, which will give them the ability to download content. It may even give them access to applications like Mxit, which use data. However, until a user consciously goes online to surf the Internet in the same way as they would on a computer, they cannot be considered an Internet user. There is much more standing between South Africans and Internet usage than a device, says Ambrose.
Ambrose believes that, while Vodacom's offer in and of itself is no revolution, it may serve the purpose of exposing people to things that can be done on a mobile device, and maybe in their next upgrade, users will go a few steps further.
“It's the start of a process,” he says.
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