I saw this phone at a business show last week. If you
haven't been to one, business shows in Japan are
basically a way for salarymen to get out of the office
and eyeball very nice looking campaign girls, get free
little gifts, and play with new toys.
I and my colleagues, after oggling our own company's
campaign girls to the extent we were told to leave,
wandered over to the DoCoMo booth. After trying to
pump the booth staff for trade secrets, release dates
of various products, and free gifts, noticed a very
large crowd around this phone.
Very sexy! (Better than the DoCoMo girls this year!)
It is exactly the kind of phone that all of those
people with their tiny GSM Nokia's would really like.
That is not, by the way, just a European thing: People
in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Phillipines, and
Thailand also really like small, non-clamshell phones.
On the way back to the office, we had a lively
discussion about this very sexy piece of engineering.
My conclusion:
Phones in Japan prior to 1999 were going solidly in
the direction of very small and light sizes. Sure,
they were not all candybar, but most were under 80
grams, and they were shrinking quite quickly.
Then along came i-mode, J-Sky, and ezWeb, and, as
predicted, the phones began to gain in size again, in
order to accomodate larger color screens, more
comfortable keyboards, and thanks to J-Phone, cameras.
So, I am actually a salaryman, albeit one who is
prevented from openly using anything produced by
DoCoMo, and I was quite enthralled with the Premini.
But, and this is where I think you need to draw the
line, and where the debate over European design versus
Japanese design on this list has missed the point: I
own an SH-53, which has a megapixel camera, an MP3
player, both of which I use pretty regularly, a nice
big screen for viewing Vodafone Live! content,
decent-sized keys for writing e-mails, an SD card slot
for smuggling classified information (and MP3s and
digital photos), and a host of other features too long
to list. If none of those features were important to
me, I would buy this phone in a minute, damn the fact
that I work for Vodafone! However, many of those
features *are* important to me.
I think when you talk about European design, John, you
ought to keep in mind that to some extent any design
is constrained by function. Japanese phones have the
designs that they do at least partially to accomodate
the functions that they have. The fact that some of
these functions may be less important to many European
users than Japanese users will of course mean
differences in the preference of design: The Premini
is a great piece of design, and looks great, but when
I start to use it, it doesn't do some of the things
that I expect of it, suddenly the design does not seem
quite as attractive, like style has won out over
functions that I want or need.
My colleagues and I are guessing that this model will
be popular with 45-60 year-old salarymen who don't use
their phones for much besides telephony, and who place
a premium on style. For the rest of us, going to
Akihabara and getting the (non-functioning) display
model of this phone will probably fulfill the lust we
feel when we first see it.
Best,
Nik Frengle
--- Ken Chang <carigate@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > However styling is great: European styling and
> Asian Technology is
> > the only route forward for handsets
>
> John,
>
> candybar used to be the dominating form in Japan
> many years ago
> (last century). I think Europeans will move on,
> too.
>
> there are a lot of efforts now to avoid the
> clamshell, not because
> it's bad but because there are too many clamshell
> phones and people
> need fresh air.
>
>
>
>
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=====
Nik Frengle
Mobile: +81-80-3416-3090
Received on Sun May 16 06:43:20 2004