Evidently, after a decade selling billions of cell phones to millions of customers, Motorola and the others in the mobile industry came to the realization that there is pent up demand for products that don’t suck. How did they come to this realization? Was it through knowing who their customers were or what their customers needed? No. They gained insight regarding customer wants by way of the iPhone. Pfft! Why bother leveraging customer knowledge when Apple does the legwork for all? But, now that the iPhone has made them realize what customers want, clearly they are the ones that can deliver iPhone killers, right? MSNBC covers this breathlessly:
Apple Inc.’s introduction of the mobile phone with the iPod interface sucked a lot of the air out of the mammoth halls at last year’s CES. After 12 months of scrambling, manufacturers and carriers appear to be well on their way to catching up to iPhone.
Motorola’s entry:
Motorola Inc., under new leadership as it tries to recover from plummeting profits, is betting on a radical redesign of its top-end phones to seamlessly integrate the oil and water of telephone and media player.
Motorola’s big play this week is the buttonless ROKR E8, which attacks the problem with what Motorola calls ModeShift morphing to switch from phone to camera to mp3 player.
ModeShift. That’s a nice techie name, you know, like time-shifting. Smart. Here’s the radical design:
Wow. That’s so radical.
Motorola plans to use the morphing virtual keypad in future phones, he said.
The Z10 video phone supports high-speed wireless Internet services and is expected to appeal to bloggers or young people who like to create, edit and share videos on the go.
“In the past we were just cameramen, now we are producers,” said Jeremy Dale, a marketing executive for Motorola. “The Moto Z10 is about filmmaking on the fly.”
So, that’s what your consumers want? A videocam+phone? Good luck, Motorola.
