On Tue, 7 Aug 2001, Benjamin Kowarsch wrote:
> >Well, there's another major difference: you've always got your phone with
> >you....If you buy a portable TV, that's yet another thing to carry around,
>
> Ok. So you got a trade-in: bulky extra at no usage charge versus non-bulky
> built-in with a usage charge.
No, not at all. What I am saying is that the trade-off is an inferior
system (for reasons of cost, quality, whatever) that you have with you
all the time versus NOT HAVING IT AT ALL.
When I put my keitai appointment book up against my Palm, it loses
badly. But the Palm can't compete because the Palm isn't there. In the
same way, portable TVs and portable DVD players are not competing with
keitai video because only the phone is in the person's pocket.
> I still can't see how this will turn a majority of phone users to start
> watching payable video on a tiny screen. It costs 300 yen at Tsutaya to
> rent a full length movie, watchable on a large size screen with Dolby
> surround etc etc.
Um, yeah. That large size screen and 5 way speaker system plus subwoofer
are also not in the person's pocket. :-)
I agree with you that when the average bloke is sitting in his living
room, he will probably be watching his TV rather than his keitai. In fact,
when I'm sitting in front of my computer, I use it for web browsing and
e-mail, not my keitai. Does this mean that i-mode will never take off?
> As I said it will have to be very reasonably priced.
Indeed. I expect that this technology is not going to buck the trend of
coming down in price as time passes.
> Then again, the bulkiness of an extra device to carry around has not
> stopped the walkman to become and to continue to be very successful.
If you mean to compare that to my comments above, well, keitais don't do
audio yet (at least not in anywhere near as convenient a form). However,
I would say it's likely that one day Sony memory sticks or something
similar in size will be able to hold a couple of hours of near-CD quality
audio and cost 300 yen each, and recorders for them will be common in
home stereo systems. At that point, slots will appear in many keitais
and the walkman will be effectively subsumed.
If you mean that stand-alone video devices never took off the way the
walkman did, well, it may be that the convenience factor was never good
enough when it was a stand-alone device. There are also applications that
never really had a chance with the current crop of stand-alone devices, as
others have pointed out. And there are no doubt new applications that will
become worthwhile once enough screens are in the hands of enough people.
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net> +81 3 5778 0123 de gustibus, aut bene aut nihil
"The chain which can be yanked is not the eternal chain."
-- G. Fitch
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Received on Wed Aug 8 08:40:08 2001