Ugliness (was Re: 10 PACK UPDATE!!!)

[Stroller]

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.