By Jo Best, 7 August 2006 15:45
COMMENT
Sleek, svelte mobiles are all the rage. So is it goodbye to the clunkers that ran enterprise apps and 3G? Jo Best looks at the evolution of the mobile phone from brainiac to bombshell.
Mobile phones for the business set remain curiously mired in ancient form factors, pumping up clunky handsets with PC-borrowed functionality while consumer-focused devices are racing to the bottom to see who can be shiniest and tiniest, seemingly disregarding features in pursuit of the perfect body.
Which way will the market go - are we heading for an era where looks are everything and the smart phone loses out to the bimbo?
Take a look backwards for a moment to the heady days of 2004. Remember the first wafer-thin, any-colour-as-long-as-it's-black Razr? Didn't even have the one megapixel plus camera that its rivals did but the public spooned it up anyway. And with the Razr still shifting, other manufacturers are racing to make devices shinier, tinier and all the more saliva-inducing. But does that mean they'll continue to forego more up-to-date functionality?
The popularity of the LG Chocolate phone - a glossy 2G candy bar model with a chessboard keypad and heat sensitive buttons - speaks volumes on this point. Nearly two million have been served outside LG's home market of South Korea, showing consumers can do without certain functionality if they're sufficiently seduced by a technological flash of ankle.
Making utile things beautiful is a trend that's has been dominating the entire consumer electronics industry, as monitor makers, MP3 manufacturers and assorted gadget designers seek to differentiate their products by making them appeal to the eye as well as the tech brain - a trend no doubt inspired by the brisk sales of Apple's ubiquitous iPod.
So where did this apparent function famine come from in the mobile phone space? Is it consumers or manufacturers that have lost interest in all the applications 3G and smart operating systems were meant to enable?
According to John Barton, director of sales at LG Mobile, phone buyers don't expect - and don't necessarily demand - beautiful phones that are full of functionality too. "You can't have everything - consumers don't believe [their phone] can be master of all things, they think it's a jack of all things," he said.
Andrew Brown, IDC's European mobile devices programme manager, said the operators and manufacturers have played their part in the dumbing down. "Everyone gets very excited about aesthetics. It's easier to sell design than it is to sell feature functionality - it's laziness." Good looks are immediately apparent to the average buyer - the benefits of having 3G connectivity or a smart operating system are not.
But our glazed love of form over function won't last forever. Design is always likely to be prominent in consumers' minds, say the analysts, but there is a limit to how many features consumers will trade just to attract admiring glances when they leave their phone on the pub table.
Carolina Milanesi, principal analyst at Gartner, said: "It's about finding the right balance between the two. Fashion is becoming more and more important... but still people want the bare minimum: a camera, MMS support, possibly a bit of browsing."
Step forward the inexplicable Nokia lipstick phone to see what happens when functionality is seconded to form: in fighting to create a phone that fit in the smallest of pockets, the Finns shrunk the 7280's screen to thumbnail size and ditched a keypad in favour of a scroll wheel which made texting an arduous task.
In the business market, functionality has long trampled all over form - but will this always be so? Will mobile email and sales force automation always be wrapped up in a gormless 'piece of toast' form factor?
IDC's Brown says: "Broadly speaking, there's a wide range of 'pieces of toast'. Perhaps it isn't as sexy [as consumer designs] but it will survive a fall. Aesthetics only take you so far."
Ignatio Germode, Motorola's director of design, told silicon.com there is hope for better looks from business phones. "There are sometimes these preconceptions - people think businesspeople like boring stuff, young people like lots of different colours... [Business devices] are still a status symbol and people still want to have a beautiful device. It's more a case of what they're willing to compromise [for functionality]," he said.
Motorola has given its business device, the Q, a spit and polish and applied a little Razr-style slimline gloss to the corporate phone cum PDA. Others are also getting the idea that useful doesn't have to mean dumpy - the Treo's aerial has been whipped off and RIM has clearly had a bit of a word with its own design department that may or may not have included the words 'less', 'bloody', 'ugly' and 'please'.
About time too, says Gartner's Milanesi. "The BlackBerry a fantastic product for what you need it to do but the looks aren't keeping up with what the traditional manufacturers are doing."
We've come a long way then, both for consumers and business buyers, but the coin is up in the air over whether design is enough of a selling point alone to convince customers to buy, regardless of what else the phone promises in terms of features.
However, as phone makers fight harder and harder to differentiate themselves, the first devices to promise both looks and advanced features will really be special - even the most hard-to-impress business buyer can't fail to have their head turned by such an elusive combination. Manufacturers, take note.
Comments
There are 6 comments. Join the discussion
1. Michael Fischer
I agree that much of what counts as 'design' is trivial, and often consists of adding dye to the plastic or making something so small that you lose it. But I would argue this is simply bad design. Good design saves time, money and effort.
Business folk like to imagine themselves as being 'hard headed and practical' but what this often translates into is acceptance of inferior products that underperform and waste time over new generations of apparently simpler technology that does just as much with much less time and effort.
Early adopters aside, what most people (including some 'designers') fail to realise is that design, successful design that is, is all about function. Indeed design is the technology that enables other technology to be useful. Good design incorporates the contextual knowledge that is necessary to make best use of 'features' and capabilities without having to learn this contextual knowledge as earlier users did. This is a fundamental part of being more attractive - pretty is as pretty does.
This, of course, leads to disjunction between generations of users. People who adopted the earlier, hard to use, versions of technologies that lacked benefit of good design (and how!) become clumsy when confronted with product with incorporated design. They are so used to drawing on deep knowledge to do the simplest things, that they stand as if naked wondering "how do I do X?" (where X may be 'turn it on').
An excellent example of this occured in my life in the past Christmas, when my 2.5 year old grandson had to instruct my wife, a long time early adopter, in how to use an iPod. It was just too simple for her. She was looking for the trees and they were not there to get lost in.
The iPod was selected out as an example of flashy design over function. But if you look at Apple's approach to design over the past 8 years, it has moved towards being as plain and simple as possible mechanically while accomplishing a range of tasks that most people use in an effortless manner.
The 'features' are incorporated into the basic design. They just happen. Others, such as Ericsson and Sony have done this with phones. There is no doubt that over my four generations of Ericsson/Sony phones that they have become better, more powerful, simpler and smaller, as well as 'prettier'. Perhaps this is the transition from the 'dumb blond' to the smart yellow haired woman.
2. Phil Blackburn
The flaw in all this is that, for a *mobile* phone, to a large extent form is function. The phone needs to be easy to carry, and either inconspicuous or attractive while being carried, whilst efficiently performing its core functions.
Non-core functions, though, are only useful if they do not mess up the basics. For a business user maybe email and 3G are core; for the rest of us they are at best nice to have, but not at the expense of portability and battery life.
3. Tris Orendorff
This article would have been better with pictures of the phones mentioned.
4. anonymous too
I have to laugh at the phones that have "everything": I was "given" my 800i (part of the Vodaphone upgrade) and so with dreams of internet surfing and hi-speed picture transfers I set off to explore new possibilities- the world was now my oyster!
Alas, everytime I try the send via GPRS all I get is "error". The man at the phone shop configured the phone; Nokia update site has configured the phone- still no joy :-(
I can't surf squat and my David Baileys are not getting transfered anywhere, anytime soon. As it stands my 800i can phone & text people very well - gee, didn't my last phone do that? - and the music playback is very good, despite the random crackle during track changes (still no fix). Alas, I'm still stuck with Fish & Chips, plus the new dollop of Tartare sauce that is the MP3 player- No Lobster for this individual.
As time as passed I find that I no longer want to send anyone my photo, or look stuff up on Google, so maybe a sexy slim phone that just makes calls\ text is EXACTLY what I need, at least she won't be so challenging when I slip her into my pocket ^_-
5. ccl
Well said "anonymous too"!...
6. still anonymous after all these years
Back in the day, before most bling-loving cell phone buyers where born, we software types who worked on NeXTs (remember those?) had a saying:
Written documentation is an admission of failure.
That meant if someone had to read the manual to figure out how to use the program, your design was not intuitive and therefore was a failure. CUSTOMERS DON'T READ MANUALS!
Same with phones. If the design isn't something anyone can figure out in 3 seconds (the limit of most people's patience with opacque technology), your product or feature is a market failure.
Maybe the "dumb blonde" approach to phone design isn't so dumb after all...