WIRED ON FRIDAY: "High-end handsets - a potential threat," announces Mako Analysis, an English mobile telephony research consultancy based out of the splendidly named parish of Speen, Berks.
It's a catchy headline, but I have to say, Mako's story echoed into my inbox with a chorus of "doh!", "anti-news!" and "how long did it take them?". For those involved in the PC industry, Mako's points seemed so obvious as to be hardly worth repeating.
That may not be true in the higher echelons of the phone business. But then, for the mobile phone firms for whom Mako is the first bearer of bad news, it may already be too late.
For those of you not forking over for the larger, confidential report, here's the €1.45 summary: the new smartphones aren't just handsets. They're general purpose computers, just like a home PC. And that spells potential trouble for the telecoms firms.
They're right. It's hardly a prediction, given that it has happened in so many industries before now. One might call it the Sony point: that precise and precipitous moment when an industry that traditionally pounces on technological process realises that process is about to pounce on them.
General purpose PCs derive much of their power from being open. Your desktop machine runs Microsoft software, but can also download and run programs from anyone else who has the skill and time to pore over the very public descriptions of a PC works. That's good. General purpose computers really are generalists and are able to do far more than the imagination of even a research-crazy company like Microsoft could envisage.
Our old mobile phones were computers, but not general purpose ones. Mako quaintly refers to them as "terminals", which is exactly how the telco industry is accustomed to see them. Terminals are completely under the control of the phone company, and despite the glittery covers and ringtones, are just the dumb endings of the company's large, smart network.
A smarter "terminal" stops being a terminal at all. You can plug far more into it than just your mobile company's phone connection. Like a modern PC, you can transfer third-party software, for instance. You can also pick and choose from a much wider group of software producers.
Heck, you could even write some software yourself. Nokia has already produced languages and code that will allow bedroom coders to write their own mini-applications for their smarter phones.
Such openness is a very attractive feature, both for customers and, one would think, mobile phone providers. More applications on phones mean more phones get sold - and more people spending more time using them.
But such power in the hands of a consumer can easily be cast as a worrying loss of power away from the phone companies.
With a dumb, old-fashioned phone, you could only get your features from your phone provider or a restricted priesthood of companies granted access by your phone provider. Want a ringtone? Pay for it.
Want a game? Then sign up with our games service.
For every potential feature on your phone, the phone company has a monopoly.
Not so with general purpose smartphones. Want a ringtone? Download an MP3 off the Net (or copy it from a CD you've bought) and copy it across onto your phone for free.
Want a game? Download the best games, and run them on your phone. Maybe you'll pick one that you need to pay for.
Maybe you'll just play one which some generous fellow wrote for free.
Either way, there's no telecommunications company monopoly here.
Even the most basic monopoly that the mobile companies possess may vanish once smartphones become prevalent. A smart enough phone can run a Voice-over-IP program - which means that when those long-distance calls are too expensive, you will be able to sneak your phone calls over your phone's 2.5 or 3G internet connection instead.
Now phone companies have some tricks up their sleeves to stop this kind of activity.
The ones who haven't waited for Mako to tell them the obvious are already considering them. Hiking up the price of that internet connection is one obvious trick.
Except that means hiking up the price of everyone's data connectivity. Do that, and the price of data connectivity will suddenly become a point of competition between providers. Or you could engineer ways that filter or expressly ban uses of your mobile phone with which your phone company is unhappy.
Such steps are common when open systems enter a closed market. While they provide opportunities, but threaten existing business models.
History is on the side of those who exploit the opportunities, if only because gripping onto old business models can only work for so long.
Just ask Sony, which stalwartly insisted that all its portable music players refuse to play MP3s, lest that music format's popularity threatened its entertainment section's music revenues.
The result was, of course, that the previous Walkman king of handheld sound systems found its share of that market decimated by more liberal MP3 players like the iPod and Rio machines. And people still downloaded MP3s. All of the decimation for none of the future revenue streams.
The mobile phone companies face the same troubles now. On the one hand, technological advance has always benefited them and their own customers. On the other, making money in an open world is tougher, and strange, and different. It requires a great deal of change in business practices. And it may mean that some companies go to the wall.
But as walls go, this one has had writing on it for quite some time, and the best mobile companies don't need a consultancy to tell them what it says. The writing says: give the customer what they want.
Give them something else when they have alternatives is the road to ruin in a market economy. When you deny your customers choice, they exercise the only choice they have left. They choose to be ex-customers.
