Part 3 - Manufacturers, Conclusion, Raw data

Style, design, usability, and brand are factors in many of the products that we buy. Why do people buy a Mercedes when most people know that Lexus are of the highest quality, BMW 3-series are the best handling, or that KIAs are the best bargin. It’s because of design and sometimes the prestige of a respected brand people choose a phone over another.

These are the brands of phones that my friends carry:


As we can see from the graph, many people carry a Nokia or a Sony Ericsson. In the industry, Nokia leads in marketshare while Sony Ericsson holds the fifth spot behind both Motorola and Samsung.

I’ve presented you a lot of graphs and you’ve been asking me about my sample population. My sample population are my friends. Most of them are Chinese with a mix of Canadian-born and Hong Kong-born. My statistics techniques are very primitive but I’m going to give some ideas to explain the graphs that I’ve presented.

Most phones my friends are using were approved by the FCC in 2002 and 2003. At that time Nokia had the largest marketshare, making it highly probable that a phone purchased would be a Nokia. Many of the Sony Ericssons belong to Hong Kong Chinese who are very into Sony things - they have Sony TVs, Sony desktops, Sony Camcorder, Sony VCR, and Sony digital camera. I admit that I have half of those Sony electronics.

The large number of people having bar-type phones can be explained by looking at the manufacturers of the phones my friends buy. Until recently, Nokia has only released bar phones. Sony Ericsson mainly produces bar phones as well. Their exceptions are the Z200 (not designed by Sony Ericsson but just branded by them), the Z600, the Z1010, and the upcoming S700 and S710a. That already accounts for 59% of the sample population.

Colour screens began to become affordable in late 2002. Many of my friends are split between phones made in 2002 and those in 2003 so the 50/50 split is evident in the cell phones by colour screen graph.

Only recently has camera phones become affordable and available throughout the lineup of service providers. I’m sure in the next two years a lot of my friends will have camera phones. The Motorola V220 camera phone can be had at Rogers for $49.99 with a 3 year contract.

I wanted to do a price survey to find out the dollar amount people paid for their phone but that information was difficult to collect and varied a lot because the value of phones depreciate quickly.

Everyday we see people around us. We take notice to what people wear, what people drive, what people carry with them. Perhaps after reading this blog you will take notice to what kind of phone someone is carrying with them. They’re convenient and something that almost everyone carries around with them. Looking at the raw data, you can see most people still view their phones as a mere communications tool. But that is exactly how cars started, as a mere transportation tool, and look at it now.

Raw data is available

If you have any suggestions or comments, feel free to send them my way by leaving a comment.