New Color Alcatel Mobile Phones - Beautiful!
I was reading up on my mobile-tech favorites (which I've added to my Favorites link above) and saw this article in MobileMag about the new Alcatel color phones. Aren't those beauties?
I've heard some complaints about Alcatels before when I posted about my One Touch 511, but I had a great experience and think they're great phones. Small, light, clean design, all the bells and whistles that you want from a basic non-smart GSM phone and great reception. Now that there are some color models, all I can say is Wow! Those are awesome. Once you have a color phone, you can't go back - it'd be like going back to monochrome on your computer screen.
The small/light thing is really the key and a big problem for smartphone adoption, actually. The Alcatels I bought for my wife and I are really tiny, only 75 grams and only cost around $100. That's a serious market sweet spot and I've seen them everywhere now. The American market still thinks huge flip phones are somehow cool, but here in Spain, the smaller the better. I love my 7650 (as you all know) but it really is such a brick!!! In my opinion the smartphones really missed a window of opportunity. A year ago all the phones were around 130g or heavier, especially the monster I had before - the Nokia 7110. All the light phones cost a bundle. But now the prices have dropped and I moved, along with everyone else, to a really small phone because it was cheap and LOVED it. It was with me all the time and I never noticed. The Alcatel fit in jeans, dress pants, etc. Moving back up to a 155g bulky phone - even one as cool as the 7650, is definitely a pain. There are some days when I want to swap out the sim card and leave it at home (perish the thought!).
So anyways, the final thought is this: See the clean designs of those phones? Why the hell can't the Symbian guys design something like those and stop dicking around with all these weird keypads and phone designs!?! Urgh.
Nokia said this week they're going to move the Symbian down their product line from the high-end to their midline. I wonder how long it'll be before my Symbian phone weighs 75g?
-Russ