Panasonic's GD90 dual band GSM phone launched last year was extremely
popular in Hong Kong and reportedly made Panasonic the second best
seller brand after Nokia in the city. NEC's DB2000 (developed in Europe)
was pretty popular last year as was the Kyocera Skywalker - both GSM.
Sony and Mitsubishi also have products on the market. Sony's GSM phones
are peculiar. They are distinctly Sony, but to in my mind, the design is
far less eye-catching than its Vaio notebooks or the PS2. Mitsubishi
flogged on the market.
Other Asian vendors doing well here are Samsung, with their GSM phones.
Despite throwing heavy handset subsidies and having the city's first
packet-based mobile network, Hutchison's CDMA network remains a low-end
network, attracting customers mostly cut-throat pricing. Yet it still
has less than a quarter of the number of customers on Hutchison's GSM
network. CDMA phones, mostly from the Korean vendors and some from
Motorola, are quite advanced, but they don't sell well because of the
general aversion to the network and the fact that they don't have a SIM
card (an important consideration because HK has mobile number portability).
Like most Asian markets, upgrade cycles are quite short, usually around
a year, although that seems to be getting longer because phones have
gotten so small that people see now reason to upgrade to a new model.
Color and good sound and other add-ons like J-Phone's camera are not
here yet.
Benjamin Kowarsch wrote:
>
> >I really wish we had some decent Japanese phones over here. After
> >a trip to Hong Kong and seeing all these tiny clamshell phones worn
> >around the neck like pendants, I'm sure they would sell very well indeed.
>
> What you will have seen in Hong Kong would have been GSM phones - not
> Japanese phones as they don't work in Hong Kong.
>
> Having said that, there are a very few Japanese GSM phones for export, but
> not particularly successful, and there is one multi-standard Japanese CDMA
> phone (from Sanyo) that also works with Hong Kong's CDMA and is therefore
> available there. Still, the phones you will have seen in Hong Kong would
> have been GSM phones, mostly of European make.
>
> rgds
> benjamin
>
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Received on Thu Aug 9 05:50:38 2001