January 10th, 2008 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Other news | No Comments »
EA Mobile’s vice president Travis Boatman has stated that the iPhone is
hurting the smartphone and to the mobile games / applications market at
CES 2008 in Las Vegas.
The argument is really simple. Buyers of the iPhone are mostly early adopters, which have always been good to help the market evolve by buying the newest and fastest technology first. Now with the iPhone, the regular mobile games market has no longer access to this group of consumers. If those consumers would have sticked with buying the latest SonyEricsson or Nokia phones, they would have still contributed. On the other side of the story, critics think that the iPhone has triggered interest in smartphones from consumers that else would have never bought one.
The argument is valid, but it feels strange to see it come from EA Mobile as EA Mobile has always been one of the happy few to be developing mobile games for Apple’s iPod platforms.
