Mobile operators blamed for iPhone-less years

Mobile operators have been blamed for holding back handset evolution by failing to understand the desires of consumers.

Asked why it took Mac maker Apple to come in to the industry and launch a phone designed with usability and data consumption as its watch words, Håkan Eriksson, senior VP and CTO of Ericsson, said the iPhone was born because Apple ignored the operators.

He said: "[Apple] did not listen to the operators because all handset manufacturers have always talked to the operators and the operators have basically said don't try a phone that's more than $200; it won't sell. And then you have a constraint between where you can work."

Years of sub-$200 phones put constraints on processing power, limiting what the devices were capable of, according to Eriksson. Yet moving the bar up to $500 enabled phone manufacturers to put in "two powerful processors" - and opened the door to first the iPhone and now its imitators.

"[The iPhone] probably proves that everybody who thought they knew what the end users wanted in terms of interactive interfaces were wrong," said Eriksson, adding that people are now prepared to pay for more processing power in a device.

"I think more [powerful devices] will follow now - when we go into the mobile internet it will come up with devices that are in between a phone and a laptop," said Eriksson.

"You have seen already netbooks and will come back with more devices like that... the maximum size of a mobile will no longer apply, you will have very attractive devices coming not only [from Apple] - they were the first ones that broke that sort of operator pre-defined $200 ceiling. They broke that one and found that there was a market there also for $500 phones."