Stroller wrote:
Hi there,
I fixed your top-posting problem for you. You can see the correct
posting order at the bottom of this message.
On 26 Apr 2008, at 12:44, Schmidt András wrote:
Stroller wrote:
On 25 Apr 2008, at 16:25, Lowell Higley wrote:
Nine out of ten "typical consumers" I show it to think it's ugly
and wouldn't buy it because of looks alone. If I show it to a
techie type, I get the "what are the specs?" question. Lesson? To
the consumer, beauty is only skin deep.
...
At the end of the day, there are a hundred mobile phone designs on
the market - and for probably this reason. Substantially all mobile
phones do the same thing - make & receive calls - and I guess
appearance is a primary differentiation. If your one consumer in ten
finds the Freerunner acceptable (or even, shudder!, attractive)
enough to that they'll buy it, then Freerunner surely has a far
greater market interest than most mobiles! It's all a matter of
taste and I'll bet there are very few phones on the market which
would be _universally_ considered non-ugly.
I myself and all people I talked to think that that the black one has
no style. Also the orange-white looks cool.
It is not a blocker for me but would be for an average user who is
not Open fan.
Fancy color case is a must in the future.
Perhaps I didn't make my point very clearly. You are an individual,
and there are about 6,500,000,000 other individuals just like you,
except with slightly differing tastes.
If you take all the other phones on the market then "yourself and all
people you talk to" will also think that almost all of them "have no
style". This is the nature of individual taste. For each & every
person there's a mobile phone (painter, musician, design of rug) that
is just perfect, and I doubt if "yourself and all people you talk to"
will universally agree on all these things.
I, personally, think the stealth Freerunner looks GREAT, but I don't
think that's the most important factor. Yes, the majority of
mainstream consumers care only about the appearance, but even if 5% of
consumers buy according to features then that is a MASSIVE worldwide
market.
I am pretty sure that FIC didn't get an amateur to design the
Freerunner's case. They didn't get a twelve year-old to design it, and
they didn't buy an electronics enclosure off-the-shelf from Radio
Shack <http://www.polycase.com/images/cache/qs-group-category-0-0.jpg>.
So please don't be offended but saying "I don't like it and neither do
my friends" is totally irrelevant - come back when you've interviewed
a hundred different people and they've scored the Freerunner
(alongside several other phones) in a range of 1 - 10 on size, colour,
design attractiveness, comfort-to-hold and so on. You need to
establish with each respondent why they chose their last phone - was
price a factor? features? You can probably rule out everyone who got
their phone "free" from their mobile supplier, because the
Freerunner's market is those who are prepared to pay a premium for the
features they want in a phone. Now interview another 100 people, those
who are prepared to pay a premium for the features they want in a
smart- or business-phone - do they find the Freerunner attractive or
ugly? Do they care?
Not wanting to uncover a mound of sleeping proverbial here, but the
Freerunner's lack of a camera is probably far more important to the
Freerunner's buyers. And since we can't change the colour of the first
1,000 or 10,000 Freerunners, bitching about the colour might as well
go the same place as the "I want a camera" thread - dead & buried.
Stroller.
Please don't feel offended. I have tried to emphasise that it is just
(some friends' and) my opinion.
I did not state that Openmoko is wrong. I like the business model that
individual companies can provide different color and shaped cases. What
I stated is that to sell a mass of phones some fancy cases will have to
be on the market. Buying a replacement case will not be a problem for
users that was the business model for many phones and it worked.
I myself prefer hacking software so I will not create any but may buy
one if I find the one I like for sale.
Regards
Schmidt András
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