Gadgetory

I am Bridget Carey and welcome to cnet's future of series where we talk about the big companies and trends to look out for in 2013 and i'm here with executive editor roger cheng who follows the mobile industry very closely so let's talk about what we can expect in cell phones and mobile next year we have two companies that are hoping for a success story you have microsoft with the windows phone 8 and research in motion with blackberry 10 do you think any of those two can really make traction next year have some good news well both of them are putting a lot of energy a lot of resources behind try to create this breakout hit but to be honest I think for next year none of them are going to really make a real impact I think they're both going to do well enough to keep going to survive but you're not going to see any kind of breakout hit either from blackberry 10 or Windows Phone 8 hmm well one that could maybe spice things up is t-mobile they're going to get not only the iphone but they're also going to be offering a new way to think about paying for your phone instead of a subsidy you might pay up front all at once and have a lower data plan or pay a little now and have these monthly installments kind of like layaway how do you think people are going to respond to that whether it's a higher price tag upfront fur phone than they're used to seeing or this layaway kind of monthly installment plan how are we going to react a lot of it depends on how well t-mobile actually communicates this new plan to its customers this is actually a better overall plan for customers in the long term right now under the current model you pay your two hundred dollars for an iphone you give a subsidy but in return you pay a much higher monthly fee every month to the life of your contract under this plan it's sort of it's a bit more transparent you either pay complete the full price for the phone which admittedly is high or you sort of paying monthly installments but sort of the benefit of this is you you pay a lower monthly fee for data voice service text messages and you do save money in the long run again the whole point is the whole challenge is whether our table will can get this message across to customers right now it's working a little bit but they really need to get aggressive with their messaging alright here's another question for you how about mobile payments that's a topic that seems to go nowhere even Google is backing it and I don't see any traction of this picking up it's what I'm referring to is the ability to just kind of wave your phone over a cash register instead of using your wallet to pay you use your phone is this gonna take off is it going to go anywhere next year right like as you said Google other cell phone carriers the banks there are a lot of big players that have been pushing mobile payments is this sort of new solution for the future unfortunately that hasn't only happened the problem has been Apple the iphone 5 did not include NFC technology which is sort of the key technology you need to do that magical waving of the phone to pay at the register because the iphone 5 doesn't have that it's really sort of a big hurdle for mobile payments to kind of get adopted because customers aren't really going to see this in a kind of mass way other phones have adopted it but just magic customers just don't see the real use in it right now so the only way for people to get used to the ideas for Apple to do it I guess unfortunately yeah i mean iphone has there's so many iphone users that that's what that's what it's going to take for mobile payments to really take off well thanks Roger for joining us and thank you for watching our future of series for cnet I'm Bridget Carey