Again: Advertising thoughts

Marco Barreno barreno at cs.berkeley.edu
Tue Jul 17 01:45:51 CEST 2007


On Tue, Jul 17, 2007 at 12:16:56AM +0100, thus spake Giles Jones:
> 
> On 17 Jul 2007, at 00:06, Clare Johnstone wrote:
> >
> >Hi Jonathon, How would you manage when there are a lot of names? My
> >phone is also
> >my phone book, and has pages of names in small print. This is why I
> >choose a phone with
> >a good screen and a stylus.
> 
> I can't answer for jonathon, but there are many ways to deal with it.  
> Groups, timeline (recently contacted people), searches (enter partial  
> name), visual search (photo contacts), male/female, region/city, hell  
> you could even plot them on a map and touch a city (I've been using  
> my Nintendo Wii too much lol).

Another idea is to be able to switch modes.  In "finger mode" there
are 3-4 contacts shown at a time with a nice icon, or whatever fits
will and is finger-sized for pressing.  In "stylus-mode" there are
10-15 contacts shown in small text, for easy viewing.

Perhaps this idea could be used more generally in other applications
too.

> >  I don't altogether understand the
> >rationale of insisting on
> >fingers when there are so many pixels which can present easily read
> >detail.
> 
> Styluses get dropped, fall apart etc. Have you ever bought an mp3  
> player that used a stylus? nope, yet you manage to navigate through  
> music with one.

Furthermore, since there isn't a slot in the phone itself for carrying
the stylus, most people won't have the stylus with them all the time.
Personally, I'd prefer to be able to use everything on the phone
without needing the stylus at all, since I don't want to carry one
around and I prefer not having another piece to hold in my hand
anyway.  I bet most users will feel the same way.

I really like the idea of providing a stylus option to fit more data
on the screen or enable condensed dialogue boxes, but also providing a
mode for full functionality with fingers (even if the screen space is
less well utilized in that mode).

> >Also I don't understand why there is so much emphasis on a
> >mass market which is already well catered
> >for; possibly to the detriment of the niche market which wants a lot
> >of functionality fom the
> >device. This little phone should be able to replace the laptop a lot
> >of the time, taking notes
> >in meetings for example (which i already do on my phone, small and
> >above all quiet.)
> >The improvement with the neo will be the easy transfer of such files
> >to the PC(linux).
> 
> It's called being ambitious and making a difference. The same could  
> be said about Linux but there's a lot of people who want to see it  
> have greater marketshare. The greater marketshare the easier it is to  
> convince hardware vendors to provide Linux support.

There's a lot of effort being put into these phones and developing
them undoubtedly costs a lot of money.  I'm not intimately familiar
with the economics of cell phones, but it should be clear that a niche
device will never be able to have the profitability and continuing
support that a mass-market device will.  I don't know how the pricing
was decided on, but a certain number of people will have to buy the
phone before it starts being profitable at all, and then its status as
niche device or mass-market device will surely drive future pricing
and development.

Marco




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