> Sorry to repeat myself, but isn't the Nokia 9500 what you are looking
> for? Sure fits the bill for me:
> http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,8764,54108,00.html
>
> Javascript works fine (Opera), voice/SMS/email/camera etc are obvious,
> and BT+WiFi rocks along with an SSH client and GPS support for us geeks
> (Word/Powerpoint/Excel and wireless projector support for the
> non-geeks). Alas, I doubt that you can get the GSM stuff to work in Japan.
No doubt, Nokia 9500 is a powerful phone with impressive features. However,
it is aiming enterprise customers with fat wallets. The price factor (the
retail price
for Nokia 9500 is in range of $900-$1200) is a main barrier here for its
adoption
among consumers (mass market). Also, the combination of features on Nokia
9500
lacks the entertainment aspect, which is quite natural for a business phone
like this.
My point is that there are very few consumer focused communicators (big
screen/
QWERTY keyboard/HTML browser/IM/SMS/Email/Camera/J2ME Apps) on
the markets in Europe, US and Japan. The mentioned hiptop from Danger is one
of such devices with an attractive retail price of $200 (with xmas sale you
can buy
it for $99). The phone vendors and operators are missing a very lucrative
market
of consumer communicators, while trying to persuade business customers to
dump
their laptops and PDAs and opt for business communicators (Palm Treo
600/650,
Blackberry/Nokia 9500). So far, these attempts had a moderate success.
I believe the consumers would be happy to have personal communicators like
the hiptop device, which still has a room for improvement:
JavaScript/MP3/BT/
Extendable Memory, etc.
I was curious if Japan had something like the hiptop, but I can see that it
is not here
yet or maybe it is not a "right" device for Japanese consumers, overall.
Received on Fri Dec 3 10:48:32 2004