So your cell phone has a brushed-metal shell, can flip and slide four ways and has more buttons than an airplane cockpit. Big deal.
The new status symbol is what your phone can do — count calories, teach Spanish, simulate a flute, or fling a monkey from a tree.
With the advent of touch-screen technology and faster wireless networks, the new competition and cool factor revolves around thousands of fun, quirky (and even useful) programs that run on the phones.
The popularity of such applications for Apple’s iPhone, the leader of the transformation, is driving a fierce competition among the makers of the BlackBerry and Palm devices, and even Google and Microsoft.
It heralds a new era in the allure of a mobile device — the phone is no longer a fashion statement but a digital bag of tricks.
“Just having the iPhone a year ago was special, but now you have to exceed that,” said James Katz, executive director of the Center for Mobile Communications Studies at Rutgers. “The apps are a wonderful, wild and woolly world of interpersonal bragging rights.”
“It’s status for the rest of us,” he said.
Since July, Apple has posted more than 10,000 programs to its App Store; nine out of every 10 iPhone users have downloaded applications — more than 300 million overall, though those include software updates and repeat downloads. Some applications are free (like Stanza, which lets you download and read books), while others typically cost $1 to $10.
Other applications help users navigate roads, find friends and local restaurants, and play odd games, including one called “Sapus Tongue,” in which the user swings the phone to see how far he can fling an animated monkey on the screen.
Recognizing the business opportunities, the other major cell phone and software companies are getting into the app act.
Google recently introduced the Android Market, selling applications based on Android, its operating system for cell phones. In the spring, Research In Motion plans to introduce an application store for its BlackBerry devices. Palm is thinking of retooling its software strategy, while Microsoft is in the early stages of creating its own store for phones running Windows Mobile.
Users say some programs can genuinely help productivity, but more often than not, they are time-wasting and sometimes — by showing off the powerful computing power of phones — jaw-dropping.
One popular application called Shazam lets users hold the phone up to a radio to identify within seconds what song is playing and by whom — and then give users a way to buy it on Apple’s iTunes Store, of course. The current most popular download, which costs 99 cents and has an impolite name, lets the phone simulate the sound of flatulence.
The applications have also become a form of social currency, as users compete to find the latest quirk, show off to friends or best one another with their discoveries.
Peter Szurley, a lawyer in San Francisco, used his phone at a meeting two weeks ago to break the ice. At an Italian restaurant, he started the meal with a new client by pulling out his iPhone, putting it to his lips, blowing into the microphone slot and moving his fingers across the touch screen. From the phone emanated the sounds of a flute.
The application he was showing is called Ocarina. A 99-cent program that turns the phone into a digital flute, Ocarina is one of the most popular applications, having been downloaded by more than 400,000 iPhone owners.
“He was just blown away,” Szurley said of his lunch companion. “He had a BlackBerry. You can’t do that with a BlackBerry.”
The concept of add-on applications long predates the iPhone; for a decade, hand-held devices made by Palm have had software as diverse as a bartending guide or a renal artery stenosis calculator for doctors.
But the concept attained mass-market popularity in July with Apple’s introduction of the App Store. An iPhone user can download software to the phone in seconds.
For its part, Google has about 300 applications available. Among the most popular is ShopSavvy, in which users scan the bar code of any product using the camera built into the G1 smart-phone from T-Mobile. The application, which is free, then searches for the best price online and delivers the information to the phone.
Google says it earns nothing from the applications. Instead, any revenue is split between developers, who earn 70 percent, and, in the case of the G1, with the carrier.
While Apple takes 30 percent of all revenue from the store, selling applications is not just about the fees. Offering applications also helps Apple sell more iPhones. Its current advertisements, and those of its carrier partner, AT&T, market the applications, not the phone.
Matt Murphy, a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins, which operates a $100 million fund for iPhone application developers, said this was a new kind of business: selling people not the phone itself, but the applications that can come with it.
“What you can do on a phone is driving the kind people buy,” Murphy said. “Whatever phone offers the best applications wins.”
