To paraphrase Alfred Sloan at GM 70 years ago: "a phone for every
purpose and for every purse."
Erik H - likes the small candybars that don't destroy my suits
On 15 May 2004 at 20:43, Nik Frengle wrote:
> 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
>
> This mail was sent to address erik@hornfeldt.se
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>
>
"Love me, love my dog"
----------------------------------------------------------
Erik Hörnfeldt <all the usual disclaimers apply>
video-mobil +46 735 33 7404
Received on Sun May 16 17:29:00 2004