Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Cool Phones: None Will EVER Cost Less Than $50

This from Silicon Valley News:

What will your mobile look like in 2015? Like a necklace, some specs, or a ring? See the photos here.

Those are just some of the ideas dreamt up by 26 design students from London's Central St Martins College of Art and Design, tasked by phone maker Nokia with coming up with the next must-have device for 2015's users.

As part of the union, Nokia set the designers a brief of creating a mass market mobile - with the winner seeing their design made up by the Finnish firm and receiving an internship with the company this summer.

(the gallery is here)

I think some of these innovations are like food pills. Possible, handy and cool: we may never see them. People sometimes weigh value by the pound. Look at laptops vs. desktop computers. You can put a huge amount of computing power into the space of an LCD monitor. Desktops still rule.
Cellphones will (continue to) be huge. Why? The answer: cellphone dealers. The profit margin has to yield enough dollars for the phones to be worth selling. Too cheap and they're in the realm of disposable cameras. Too much and a predator will come in with a cheap product. By packing features, you can keep the price point stable and keep the dollar flow stable to resellers. Discreet devices will carry little value because of their size.

No comments: