So over the Christmas period I've been at my parents house and they read the Mirror. I was flicking through the Sunday Mirror's pull out magazine called life and came across six pages of anime about new technology from the Far East. Its a reasonable piece and the illustrations are done by Anime artist Kanako Damerum.
One of the pages talked about the smartphone and showed off the Sharp W-Zero3. Which can scan business cards, includes a 3inch VGA touchscreen and Qwerty keypad. Wifi, 256meg of on board storage and MicroSD expansion. I was a little puzzled, my current phone does all that (I discovered Worldcard Mobile only yesterday). Yes I'm not rocking with a VGA screen (I had planned to get the glofish x850 which does have a vga screen) and the HTC Kaiser is 19mm instead of 17mm but its not far off.
So what I never quite got around to before was the fact that Smartphones are still quite novel in a lot of circles. I pulled out my Kaiser in the pub with some friend during a night out and they were like “what the heck is that? is that a computer or something?” I wasn't do it for effect but I did have it with the keyboard and tilt on (i was answering a couple of texts). I guess add the bluetooth headset blinking in my shirt pocket and they thought I'd gone all futuristic or something. But whats fun about the Windows mobile phones is that HTC make them pretty cheap. So you can get a windows mobile phone for the same price as a LG, Nokia or Motorola. So its not about the phone prices.
Maybe people don't like the complexity of the phone? But I would say the Windows Smartphone platform is no more complex that any other phone. Maybe its the style? Could be on something there, but Ted Baker now have an edition of the HTC Touch, LG Prada anyone and what about the most loved gadget of 2007? The Apple iPhone?
2008 is going to be the year of the Smartphone for sure. There is very little reason not to get one and I'm sure the phone shops will be pushing them harder that ever.
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