dumbed-down phone 22Feb05

Source: heise.de

Thats what a lot of people looking for: a mobile phone which has been designed for people who want to phone only. No needless functions, no games, large buttons, only one function per button, no screen, just one ringtone, no large instruction manual and its easy to use.

"The battery is designed so that if the owner forgets to charge it for days on end and fails to use the phone during the intervening time, it will still happily receive a call a month later."

"This dumbed-down phone from another era has been a sales success with baffled Japanese. (...) According to figures compiled by Merrill Lynch, Tu-Ka gained 15,500 new users in the month after the S-Phone went on sale while Vodafone gained just 900 in the same month in spite of a pre-Christmas marketing drive on its high-tech 3G services."

related links:
article @ times online
article @ heise (german)