The latest buzzword to be passed around by mobile phone retailers and resellers is "handset fatigue".
What is handset fatigue? To start with, it's not badly designed smartphones bending or cracked LG G3s.
The term refers to customers simply having too much choice in the mobile marketplace.
Global smartphone sales are slowing, especially in the EMEA regions, and much of this is down to smartphone saturation - where most people who want a smartphone now have one.
Smartphones have also come on in leaps and bounds, and a capable smartphone can be bought for around £100 these days. Many potential customers simply don't need to buy the latest smartphone, especially if the one that they already use is perfectly ok to use.
I'm not a fan of upgrading for the sake of it, unless I have effectively reached the end of my current phone contract, in which case I'd expect a downgrade to a SIM only contract, or a shiny new smartphone on another 24 month contract.
Certainly, the recently released Samsung Galaxy S7 is a good example of this: The Galaxy S6 that many customers own is still barely a year old. These customers are probably on a two year contract, and does the S7 really offer that many new features to require customers to upgrade? Probably not.
Customers have grown wise to SIM only contracts, and many will use these whilst their current smartphone is still working. Porting your number in/out of a network operator is much easier these days, and given that monthly tariffs for the latest flagship phones is now around the £50 a month mark, it's hardly surprising that people are sticking with what they've got until the contract term ends and they can get a much cheaper SIM only contract.
The other reason that handset fatigue is kicking in is down to the sheer number of new high end phones that are released every year.
Each manufacturer is pushing out ever more phones in the £200+ region, and many of these are now so similar it's understandable that customers can't see the reason to upgrade.
- High end phones are the "feature phones" of today, and marginal improvements between them isn't enough to warrant ditching last years' model for one that has a fingerprint scanner, for example.
Even last years' upcoming manufacturer Huawei is touting their latest handset, the P9, but with a £449 price tag, this is a pretty expensive phone from a manufacturer who is known for decent budget phones. Why would anyone choose this over a Samsung Galaxy S6?
Handsets are all very similar, and to be honest are pretty uninteresting these days. A year ago one of my favourite mobile phone websites Mobile Gazette closed down due to new smartphones being black, slabby phones with no outstanding features. Five or ten years ago, Mobile Gazette was filled with weekly handset releases which made you actually look forward to getting a new phone - as well as wanting a different one only a few months later, as they all had something that set them apart from other phones.
Handset fatigue = Lack of choice in a world of all very similar smartphones.
