Android - the retail experience

I just stopped off at my local branch of Carphone Warehouse on a whim, to have a quick look at what's being sold and how. (By coincidence, this is actually CPW's first ever store, opened in 1989).

It's been a while since I'd been in there, and one particular thing caught my eye - the removal of the Apple iPhone point-of-sale island, with the live demo phones. Instead, there was a podium with dummy Samsung devices.

There was also, against the wall, a specific Android display. It was awkwardly placed, so I had to keep getting out of the way of people moving around the shop. It has a display for four phones - the Samsung Galaxy S, Motorola Milestone (European equivalent of the Droid), an HTC Desire and an empty space where there was supposed to be a SonyEricsson X10.

I thought I'd have a quick play with these, to see how they looked to a potential customer:

- The Milestone didn't appear to have a SIM in it, or it was otherwise not working properly. A click on Maps from the homescreen gave me a "waiting" logo for about 60 secs and then told me it didn't have an Internet connection.
- The Desire was switched off, and it wasn't immediately obvious how to switch it back on (the phones are held fixed in clamps).
- The Galaxy S had a demo running. All attempts at button-pushing to take me to the menu failed. I gave up. Nice screen, though.
- The X10 wasn't there

Net result - major fail. They might as well have been plastic mock-ups bolted to the wall.

Honestly, could you imagine that in an Apple - or even Nokia - store? Or an Apple display in a normal phone retailer?

I'm guessing that the point of sale material was either put together by CPW corporately, or the specific store itself. I'm sure you'll appreciate the slightly vulgar irony of the abbreviation for "point of sale".

Now clearly, this is just a one-off visit, and I haven't been Android-shopping anywhere else. And clearly, they're selling devices by the bucketload. But if my experience is typical, I'm unsurprised that people aren't generally buying them for their apps, but because they are now the typical "default high end devices" in much the same way that S60 Nokias used to be.

Sooner or later, I expect we'll see Google develop a retail presence, either under its own brand or specifically for Android devices. Until then, the in-store experience is going to be driven by the individual manufacturers rather than any form of unified pitch to the customer.

(Separately - no sign of 3G-embedded laptops either, all of them are sold with external dongle modems. Who would have predicted that....)

EDIT - by an amusing coincidence, GigaOm has an article today on smartphone retail as well, featuring Best Buy, which owns half of CPW in Europe

BT WiFi smartphone application

I've just seen BT's announcement of its new iPhone and Android app, offering free WiFi access at its Openzone and FON hotspots to its Total Broadband subscribers.

I'm trying to think through the purpose of this, given that it doesn't directly generate any extra revenue for BT, either in terms of the app download or hotspot access fees.

My initial take is that it is primarily aimed at making BT's ADSL service look better value to reduce churn, or tempt across new customers. I've been using the free Openzone WiFi access on my laptop for a while, but not generally on my iPhone. I see it as a useful value-add that offsets the fact my home broadband isn't the cheapest or fastest I could get.

But it could also be a way of doing a more convenient "managed offload" solution for the UK's mobile operators, rather than the current approach which needs separate logins at the hotspot for Vodafone, Orange etc. While some users are able/happy to navigate through the "WiFi roaming" pull-down menus or splash pages, I bet that others are put off. If all that could be done at the back end, recognising the device and its host operator automatically without user intervention, it would improve compliance and allow BT to tell O2 or Vodafone or 3 exactly how much of their macro data was being offloaded.

Alternatively, it could just be a stealthy approach to get a BT-branded client onto a lot of smartphones for use in WiFi zones.... with the second or third upgrade suddenly adding extra new features such as BT VoIP or Vision IPTV or something else. I'm a firm believer that an upcoming trend will be operators launching apps to run over each others' phones/networks - if their PR departments can work out a way of sidestepping accusations of hypocrisy over disparaging use of the term "over the top". Actually, BT has some prior history here - I believe it was the first to launch a VoIP client (for Corporate Fusion) intended to operate on other operator-supplied devices.