Krisse puts in - Nokia and their licensees need to think about greater colour variety if they want to expand smartphone sales further into the mainstream.
Read on in the full article.
S60, Colours and Mass Appeal
Snap on covers are the only way to do this. It is too expensive to stock on e phone in red, blue, matte black and purple. Especially when the customer at the counter wants it in white to match her iPod.
Problem with plastic snap-on covers is that they feel cheap and - I think - out of place on an expensive smartphone.
"Snap on covers are the only way to do this. It is too expensive to stock on e phone in red, blue, matte black and purple. Especially when the customer at the counter wants it in white to match her iPod."
The point I was trying to make was that feature phones are available in bright colours, so why can't the new cheaper smartphones aimed at the feature phone market also be available in such colours? I'm not talking about expensive Nseries or Eseries phones, they can stay grey if they want to, but the ever-cheaper S60 models such as the 6290 or 5500 that aren't even marketed as smartphones but as normal phones, so why can't they receive colour schemes like normal phones?
Covers would be a good option too, but Nokia don't make S60 model covers in interesting colours. They used to with the 3650 and its relatives, but now you'd be lucky if they offer more than just the standard silver and black as official spare parts.
The only way to get a range of brightly coloured covers for the latest S60 phones is from various Hong Kong-based vendors on ebay, but my experience of them is that they often don't fit properly and are made of very cheap plastic which frequently snaps when you first try to fit the cover to the phone. Whilst they look similar to official covers, they're nowhere near the quality and I wouldn't recommend them to anyone.
"Problem with plastic snap-on covers is that they feel cheap and - I think - out of place on an expensive smartphone."
Most smartphones do have plastic covers, they're not all obviously snap on the way they used to be on older phones like the 3310, and sometimes require a special tool to remove them, but they are replaceable and come off if you need them to.
But as I said in my article, the phones I'm most concerned about aren't the expensive smartphones, they're the mainstream smartphones such as the 6290 which are being launched at relatively low prices. These don't need to feel expensive or technical, because they're not aimed at a luxury or technophile audience.
If you use an official replacement cover, made by the manufacturer or an approved third party, it can feel exactly like the original did because it's built to the same standards.
The trouble is there's now usually no official covers to replace them with, except the official spare parts covers which are identical to the standard colours. All official interest from manufacturers in bright colours seems to have ceased, hence this article.