World’s Highest Mobile Phone Call - Relevant?

Category Mobile | Permalink | 24. May 2007

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I normally don’t tend to skew off topic of Symbian/S60-related news, but this I think has some sort of relevance. So on the 21st of May, a climber scaled Mt. Everest with a Motorola Z8 and made 2 phone calls and sent a text message. Why? Not sure. Does it matter? Not really. This is a pretty pathetic publicity stunt, in the opinion of many. However, I think it further hammers in the recent realization of many that Motorola is a dying company.

Dying? Yes. And by dying, I mean they’ve stopped innovating. They had the RAZR, what, 5 years ago? 6? It was an incredibly innovative device. The thinnest handset ever manufactured, and it was a resounding success. It initially retailed for $600 (with contract, sound familiar?) and within MONTHS had dropped to $200. Which means it was just a pretty tin can, without alot of meat. In fact, it’s fatter cousin, the V551, had been out and was easily available for ~$50 with contract. Same EXACT feature set, other than the dimensions.

Fast forward 6 years. What’s new with Motorola? Well, there’s 15 different colored RAZRs, a few different form factors, but have the features been improved? Slightly, but not beyond what every other manufacturer has had for a long time. I think the most recent edition of the RAZR has a 2mp cam (no autofocus), memory card slot, 3G, and stereo bluetooth. How many other phones on the market have the same features? At least 2 from every manufacturer. How many manufacturers have a thin model? All.

Oh but wait, a few weeks ago, Motorola announced that they had a Multimedia Monster ready to be announced. Oh man, the internet went NUTS. What could it be? Would it be something groundbreaking? Nope. Just a re-announcement of the MotoRizr Z8 that was announced several months ago.

And now the Mt. Everest thing. The towers that it connected to were temporarily put in place. And how many people actually climb Mt. Everest? Few. How many do it to make a phone call? One. Did this stunt help drive innovation in the mobile industry? Nope. Did it enable us to do something we’d never done before (talk on our phones really really high)? Nope. It added ZERO value to anything currently in existence.

Now let’s be fair, is anyone else innovating in the mobile arena? YES! Apple has the iPhone. Bomb though I think it will be, it’s innovative in several ways. UI, form factor, integration, etc. Nokia has the N95. 5MP cam, WiFi, GPS, TV-Out. That’s ALOT to cram into as small a device as the N95. SE has their new P1 UIQ device that everyone is RAVING about. And they have killer cameras on their phones. Samsung/LG? MediaFLO in the US. Innovation.

No doubt the RAZR has been successful. Does America *want* innovation? Are we perfectly content in blissful ignorance of the better featured phones out there? Is Motorola trying the same thing that Nintendo did with the Wii and forgoing the feature cockfight and keeping it simple, hoping to appeal to the mass market? Are we better of like this, or are we suffering because of “dumbed-down” phones?

Source : http://mobile.newspartner.net

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