Why do mobiles turn us into idiots?

And this is not about those a**holes who talk loudly in trains all trip (am I the only one who dreads mobiles being allowed on aircraft)? No, I was reading this in the Guardian this evening, as one does......

One of the many anomalies of the mobile music market is that, while a full track bought directly from a network will cost between £1 and £1.50, a 20- second snippet from the same original can be priced at up to three times as much. Globally, this has created a multi-billion-pound business.

Never mind that, the song you bought for £1.50 (twice the UK price of iTunes) will - if bought off portal - set you back a few more quid just for the pleasure of downloading at a speed 1/10th of most broadband internet connections, which are near-free. To continue with the Grauniad...

"With nobody able to explain convincingly just why consumers continue to pay a premium for a novelty product, the ringtone industry is something of a gravity-defying act anyway. One analyst goes so far as to describe ringtones as "digital jewellery", with most concluding that their value is a combination of personalisation and convenience."

I've struggled for years to understand how these markets ever started, never mind how they kept going for so long, so it comes as no great surprise that:

"I think the ringtone business is in peril now because the operators have allowed into the market mobile phones which can sideload MP3s and use them as ringtones," says Andrew Bud, executive chairman of mBlox and vice-chairman of the Mobile Entertainment Forum.

And yet....

But a BPI press release earlier this month quotes research by Informa Telecoms & Media that the western European realtone market is set to increase this year by 56%.

And there is the next conundrum - what makes normally sane and cynical hard maths quant jocks go all dewy eyed and mushy brained when it comes to mobile projections? As one person said at Essential Web 07 yesterday, every year it will be Mobile's Year - next year. (Or in the case of these guys, every year to 2015).

In fact the last session there got me thinking about all this (again).....in essence it was the obligatory "mobile internet" session that is always politely tacked on to internet events, except this time it was without the usual kicking of operators - not because they are now loved, you understand - but because a lot of the discussion, and quite a few of the startups, were about by-passing "Olde Mobile".

Prediction is hard of course, especially about the future, and even more about the mobile future...to quote:

Nobody within the mobile business anticipated the demand for either ringtones or text messages in the first place, indicating the market's unpredictability, says Music Ally's Steve Mayall. And since the industry is rife with unrealistic predictions and hype, that makes it incredibly difficult to assess.

Nope, its easy to assess...just divide by the first number you thought of

However, I was left for the first time with a grassroots feeling, an impression, that people can sense a new world is emerging (and in fact a large number are queueing up for it....).

Or are they just more of the idiots

The iPhone is a part of it..in that it signals serious players from other industries have spotted the gap in the mobile industry and are prepared to go for it. Its also partly because wifi et al has finally made it practical to grab the 2/3 of calls we make from fixed locations, partly because of the side loading capability (and just extra processing oomph of the newer phones) make it easier to get useful apps and content onto phones at reasonable rates...and partly because the pricing strategies of the operators have provided so many arbitrage - and in many cases otherwise unworkable (imho) - activities for mobile data startups worthwhile.

ps I hear you can buy 2 iPhones...anybody want to get me one