Goodbye. And hello.

8th April 2015

Mobile Gazette started in 2003 as one of only a small handful of European sites covering mobile phone releases. Since then there have been nearly two thousand articles on the site, covering new products, retro devices and industry developments, plus hundreds of videos on our YouTube channel.

It is with some sadness that I have to announce the end of Mobile Gazette in its current form, and since I know that we have some loyal followers who have stuck with us through the years, then I thought that I should explain why.

A decade ago the mobile phone market was in a golden age, with a variety of features and designs that made every new product different. Colour screens and cameras were still a novelty, smartphones were incredibly rare and there was an incredibly wide choice in the market. Not every phone had every feature, so you had to choose carefully, and that is where publications such as this came in useful. At our peak, we attracted over a million unique visitors a month to come and find information.

Today, the market is very different. Almost all new product releases are very similar, some sort of smartphone with a bigger or smaller screen, a different camera or processor, a mildly upgraded OS or perhaps a differently coloured or textured back. Many of the old manufacturers have gone, replaced by a myriad of makers with a vast array of fundamentally similar devices.

And as the market has changed, the coverage of the market has expanded beyond all recognition. Some of these news sites offer terrific coverage, better than we could ever do.

Reporting "here is the new product, almost the same as the old product" becomes futile. In the past year we have maybe seen a dozen devices that were actually notable. All the rest is just repetition.

We want to go back to the old days. So we are going back to the old days.

Mobile Gazette is becoming Retromobe (at retromobe.com), which (as the name suggests) will be looking at retro mobiles along with other gadgets and bits of history. There will still be a place for new and interesting devices in our "Future Retro" strand. Our social media channels will transition across to the new name more slowly.

We appreciate that some of you may still be interested in news, and our favourite news site (which has been around even longer than Mobile Gazette) is GSMArena which we highly recommend.

So, in a way this is both a "Goodbye" and a "Hello". We hope you will join us over at Retromobe.

Conrad Longmore
Editor
Mobile Gazette