I used to think that Motorola had a lock on "most likely to introduce a soviet-era mobile device" on the market. They haven't created an innovative new look or feel in what seems like decades, and when they do try to innovate, they usually screw it up immensely. This goes for all of their products, frankly, and I envision their engineering headquarters as a series of dimly lit, grey, underground caverns in which engineers respond to the question "who are our most formidable competitors?" with shouts of "Quasar!, Zenith!, RCA!" I have this feeling that people in Motorola marketing still refer to their mobile devices as "car phones".
All this was until last year, when somebody very very high on crack gained power of new device design at Nokia. First, there was the Nokia 3650, whose motto "remember when you used to have to dial a phone number? no? you don't remember that? oh, well, let us show you what that looked like even though it's going to make this device bigger and everybody will hate it, and you won't dial the numbers, you'll punch them, it will just LOOK like an old dial!" didn't really catch on with the kids. Why in the name of all that is good and chocolatey you would decide that your hip new device should reinvent the positioning of 0-9 instead of focusing on other more worthy advancements is anybody's guess. But the real design loser of the year has to be the Nokia N-gage gaming phone. First of all, let me say that "N-gage" better not start to be the 21st century version of X-treme. If people start launching N-joy, N-tertainment, and N-gage X-treme D-light devices, i'm out of here....seriously, i quit capitalism if that happens. But back to the device itself. What loser in high school wants to be seen holding what is essentially a joystick up to his ear to talk to his friends, or worse, a girl. I don't think so. Did they bother to watch people trying to talk on this thing? it's hilarious. you look like instant candidate for most likely to get beat up by freshmen (ok, so that's two "most likely" references in one post. time to stop that).
Sure enough, word is that the N-gage sold something like 5000 total handsets across some massive number of stores in europe in the first week it was launched....a pathetically low number. Nokia of course piped in that they had actually sold something upward of 400k, but people quickly saw through that for what it was, channel stuffing. they didn't really move those devices out of the stores, that's just what they were able to shove into their channels as part of the device intro.
It does make you think it would be fun to see the designs that actually get rejected. Roman numeral keypad? Naked lady phone that "strips" when it rings? Somebody in Helsinki needs to do some firin'.
Posted by Dick at November 8, 2003 02:11 PM | TrackBack