1 billion mobile phones sold in 2006

IDC and Strategy Analytics reports a near-25% rise from 20065 and predicts 1.1billion sales for 2007. See this nice summary.

No surprises that China & India provided most of the growth. Nokia remains the market leader with a third of all phones sold. Congratulations to Sony-Ericsson for 61% growth to overtake Samsung as the third largest manufacturer.

Feature Prioritization - Parts 2 & 3

Part 2 covers :

• Grouping the features into clusters
• Why some high-ranking features shouldn't be added to the product anyway
• Feature Interdependencies ('snowballs')
• Product Road Mapping

Part 3 covers:

• Product management - the difference between new and mature products
• Raising money with your road map.

iPhone announced

Blogged to death elsewhere (see Apple site and Steve Jobs keynote at MacWorld, but these are the things that made it fascinating:

• Most impressive is the touch sensitive screen and its capabilities has been baked into the operating system - slick scrolling & appearance of QWERTY keypad when you need it for example.
  
• iPhone switches from portrait to landscape mode based on the way when you rotate the device. A proximity sensor detects when you put the phone to your ear, so that you don't 'press' any on-screen buttons.
  
• Zooming in on photographs & webpages
  
• Sync with iTunes - seamless - kinda as you'd expect: music, podcasts, contacts, calendar etc
  
• Auto switching between EDGE (ie mobile) and wi-fi. (3G to come)
  
• Conversations in SMS Messages - I like the way that the history of sent and received emails displayed together and not separate Sent and Received folders.
  

Apple have filed 200+ patents for their iPhone.
Available in June in US (using Cingular exclusively); Q4 in Europe. Asia next year.
Cost starts at $500.

Feature Prioritization (Part 1)

A number of people have asked me '..... so how do YOU do product management?'.

I've decided to articulate the processes that I use: Feature Prioritization & Product Road Mapping (Part 1) . Part 2 to follow in the very near future.

Comments welcome, of course.