SI618 Exploratory Data Analysis (2014 fall) Project Final Report. Smartphone Specs Data Analysis. Yuqing Zhou

Transcription

1 1. Motivation and Introduction SI618 Exploratory Data Analysis (2014 fall) Project Final Report Smartphone Specs Data Analysis Yuqing Zhou In the past decades, we witnessed the amazing revolution of smartphones (see Figure 1 below for a shortlist of smartphones from 1990s to present). Not only did they change the appearance, but the specs as well, including (but not limited to) size, battery life, display resolution and camera. In this project, I will be exploring the interesting facts during the revolution and hopefully get some hints on what s going to happen next. Four exploratory questions: Figure 1 Smartphone revolution history timeline 1) How does the big brother Apple s iphone affect other smartphone companies? 2) Why iphone is successful? How about its future? 3) How much does the technology improved during the last decade in smartphone industry? Identify the technology innovation leading companies. 4) When do companies like to release their new phones? 2. Data Source The smartphone specs data can be extracted from the phonearena.com ( It is an online database in HTML format. There are 3311 smartphones recorded (from 1998 to present). Important variables include phone ID, dimension, weight, display size, resolution, pixel density, screen-to-body ratio, camera pixel, system chip, system memory, battery capacity and officially announced date. Python was used for data extraction from website. Then the data was stored in SQL database and saved as CSV file. 3. Methods 3.1 How does the big brother Apple s iphone affect other smartphone companies? First, count the total number of phones released since 1998 for each brand (e.g. Samsung). Then sort it and select the top 10 smartphone companies which released the most new phones since Plot it as a histogram sorted by the total number of new phones released. 1

2 In addition, the time series (yearly) data was also plotted as the jitter plot for the top 10 companies. Finally, the 10 phones released by Apple since 2007 is then plotted next to the previous time-series plot. 3.2 Why iphone is successful? How about its future? First, select four specs including screen-body ratio, screen pixel density, camera megapixels and battery capacity. Then, plot the jitter plot and boxplot of the four selected specs for all phones in one year interval and apply smooth function to fit a trend line. Finally, draw the same plot for iphones without boxplot. 3.3 How much does the technology improved during the last decade in smartphone industry? Identify the technology innovation leading companies. For each spec (e.g. screen-body ratio), plot the jitter plot in one year interval. Apply the smooth function to fit a trend line as an indicator for technology improvement trend. Then, use boxplot to identify upper outliers for each year. Those outliers are recognized as industry technology innovation leaders. 3.4 When do companies like to release their new phones? Plot the histogram for new phone release month and date and observe whether any peaks exist. 4. Analysis and Results 4.1 How does the big brother Apple s iphone affect other smartphone companies? According to Figure 2 below, SAMSUNG is the top company which has the most new phones released with the total number of 760 since From rank 2 to 4 are NOKIA, LG and MOTOROLA respectively. By looking at the jitter plot, it is observed that there is a dramatic density reduction of new phone release since around year 2010 for almost all top 10 companies listed. Two of them including Kyocera and Alcatel almost stopped producing new phones for several years after Surprisingly, in the year 2010, Apple released its flagship product, iphone4, one of the most successful smartphones. It is difficult to deny that the great success of iphones since its first release in 2007 ruined the entire smartphone industry (by the way, APPLE only released 10 phones in the past decade). Though the number of new phones is dramatically reduced since around the year 2010, there might be another reason other than Apple s iphone which is the financial crisis in

3 Figure 2 Top 10 smartphone companies (with most new phones released since 1998) 4.2 Why iphone is successful? How about its future? According to Figure 3, in the year 2007, when Apple released its 1 st generation iphone, the revolutionary large touch screen with 52.35% screen-body ratio really shaked the market. Since then, all smartphones are following its path and achieved similar (if not better) spec than iphones in recent years. The two smooth fitted curves clearly indicated the loss of competitiveness of Apple especially in recent years. On the other hand, it s also clear evidence that Apple was playing a leading role in the revolution of large screen smartphones. 3

4 Figure 3 Comparison between iphones and other smartphones in screen-body ratio As shown in Figure 4, similar to the case of screen-body ratio, the same trend of leading the industry and then loss the competitiveness is observed for screen pixel density spec. In the year 2010, when Apple released iphone4 with retina display concept, its screen pixel density of 326 ppi was really leading the industry. This revolutionary product also changed customers behavior that we started to watch video on a phone. In addition, such trend between iphones and other smartphones can also be observed in other specs including camera megapixels and battery capacity. In current smartphone market, in terms of specs, iphones are not only losing its upper outlier advanced positions, but become even worse than the average of the entire market phones. For example, when almost all companies have decided to have a 10+ megapixels rear camera, Apple is still sticking to its 8 megapixels camera. This can be explained as being a little bit of arrogant, because of the customer dependency to its user experience and eco-system. The way of unreasonably keeping the specs low to drop the production cost and maximize the profit is not the way Apple obtained its industry leading position back to 2010s. 4

5 Figure 4 Comparison between iphones and other smartphones in screen pixel density 4.3 How much does the technology improved during the last decade in smartphone industry? Identify the technology innovation leading companies. From Figure 5, we observed that the physical size [inch] of the phones has been increased dramatically, from around 2 inches to almost 6 inches recently. As seen in Figure 6, the RAM memory of phones has also improved greatly, from 16MB to even 3GB. With these specs improvement, the phones have become not only communication devices, but entertainment and professional devices as well. Figure 5 Phone physical size revolution Figure 6 Phone RAM memory revolution 5

6 Figure 7 Industry leader identification for rear camera Figure 8 Industry leader identification for screen-body ratio By looking at the upper outliers of the boxplot, industry spec leaders during the revolution period have been identified. For the rear camera (shown in Figure 7), in the year 2008, several companies (e.g. Sony, Samsung and LG) started to release phones with 8 megapixels camera which revolutionized how people use the phone camera. Since then, using phone camera for daily photos has become a life-style. In recent market, Nokia released phones with high-end advanced cameras (e.g. Lumia 1020 and 808PureView), how well it will be accepted by customers is still a question. For screen-body ratio spec (shown in Figure 8), Apple s first generation iphone with large touch screen is indeed a revolutionary product in 2007 which changed the entire industry since then. Recently, HTC Zeta s frameless design is another upper outlier in the plot. However, its popularity still has to be proved by the time. 4.4 When do companies like to release their new phones? Figure 9 Bar chart for when do companies release new products (year/month/date) From the Figure 9, there is an increase of new products in the early 2000s, but the total number of new products released dropped dramatically around the year This might because of the economic crises or Apple (as discussed in section 4.1). The favorite month and date are February and 2 nd respectively. 6