With the announced release of a series of new smart-phone models, Bulgarian network providers MTel and Globul are expanding their offers on the smart-phone market. The two companies appear to be targeting different segments of the market, however.

First to announce several new models was Globul. On July 22, the company announced the introduction of the HTC Magic handset. At the presentation, the company also said that "within a matter of days" it would introduce a second HTC handset, the Hero, on the Bulgarian market.

The Magic would cost 599 leva with a two-year contract or 629 leva with a one-year contract. Both contracts included 750MB of internet traffic and would cost 24.90 leva a month. No pricing details were available for the Hero handset yet, Globul said.

Both HTC smart-phones run on the Android operating system, an open-source, Linux-based operating system that was first developed by Google and later by the Open Handset Alliance.

On the hardware side, the Magic includes a 3.2-inch touch-screen, a 3.2 megapixel photo and video camera, a microSD slot, GPS and a digital compass, and has WiFi and Bluetooth network-capabilities. The main differences with the Hero handset is that the latter comes with a five megapixel camera and is the first HTC handset to sport a modified user interface, dubbed HTC Sense. Sense promises more flexibility and a user-definable interface, among others.

Along with the two Android-based smart-phones, Globul said it would update its Apple iPhone offer and start sales of the next generation iPhone, the 3GS, on July 31. This introduction comes only four months after the Apple iPhone was officially made available on the Bulgarian market.

One day after Globul’s announcements, MTel said it would offer the Blackberry Curve 8900, with prices starting at 765 leva with a one- or two-year contract for existing clients.
MTel offers four different contracts with monthly fees ranging from 14.90 to 39.90 leva, though the cheapest two come with severely limited internet traffic included.

Apart from running on a proprietary operating system, the major difference between the Blackberry and the HTC and Apple phones, is that the Blackberry has a hardware keyboard. Both HTC and Apple use software-emulated keyboards and the touch-screen for input.

Audiences
Founded in 1997, the High Tech Computer Corporation (HTC) was originally strictly an outsourcing company. More recently, the company has started to produce self-branded handsets, along with operator branded handsets. Its HTC Dream, released in 2008 and marketed by T-Mobile as the T-Mobile G1, was the first handset on the market that ran on the open-source Android operating system.

The choice of an open-source operating system that allows user-modification, along with the lack of a hardware keyboard, and the availability of an endless amount of applications that add or tweak the handset’s functionality, makes the HTC handset seem to fit a more geeky, tech-savvy audience, as opposed to the traditional business segment of the market, where the Blackberry is preferred for its stable and secure handling of email and reliable connectivity with corporate mail networks.

At a recent earnings call, Apple chief operating officer Timothy Cook said its iPhone was selling particularly well with small business and corporate settings. The Wall Street Journal quoted Cook as saying that "almost 20 per cent of the Fortune 100 have purchased at least 10 000 units or more (…) We think we’re just at the tip of the iceberg in terms of what iPhone can do with business customers."

Sales
In a recent article, The Wall Street Journal quoted data from Deutsche Bank analyst Brian Modoff, saying that even though Apple and Blackberry manufacturer Research In Motion accounted for only three per cent of mobile phones sold worldwide in 2008, they also earned 35 per cent of operating profits. For 2009, the difference between market share and operating profits was expected to grow even more, to five per cent and 58 per cent, respectively.

Manufacturers were said to be able to maintain hefty average selling prices on their handsets due to fat subsidies from phone carriers, which reflected the carriers’ ability to charge higher monthly plan prices for phones that can easily surf the Web or handle email, the newspaper said.

Nokia Siemens Networks recently announced that if mobile data transfer keeps up its current growth rate of doubling every year, by 2011, mobile data would overtake voice traffic.

Apple’s chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer was quoted by WSJ as saying that more than a million iPhone 3GSs were sold by the third day after its June 19 2009 launch. "We are currently unable to make enough iPhone 3GSs to meet demand and we’re working to address that," Oppenheimer was quoted as saying.