Even if you spend your days indoors, your phone should be ready for anything
An organization called Pepcom holds regular product-showcase events for the analyst and press community, and there was one in New York last week concurrent with Interop. I love these, primarily because it’s a great way to see what’s new in technology products in an easy-to-navigate environment well-staffed with vendor experts. This one came a bit late for Network World Gift Guide purposes, but there were a few tidbits worth noting regardless.
Among these were Casio’s new ruggedized handsets, which are clearly along the lines of Casio’s famous G-Shock watches and Panasonic’s ToughBook line of notebook PCs. There’s always a good market for outdoorsy, real-man products that can, as Timex noted all those years ago, “take a licking and keep on ticking“, but, WRT mobile consumer electronics, there’s less available than one might expect. Casio’s featured phone at Pepcom, the G’zOne Rock (that’s “jeez-wun”, BTW, which might mean something in Korean; I don’t know), also integrates a whole bunch of musts-for-the-field features, including (to quote the follow-up note I got from the PR staff) “Triple Sensor technology (tracks speed, location and temperature), [and] G’zGear operates in six modes: Earth Compass, Walking Counter (Pedometer), Thermometer, Astro Calendar, Sunrise Sunset, and Tides (tide graph for the day).” Wow! If only they could fit GPS in there…
My personal idea of roughing it, however, is the Red Roof Inn, so, at first glance, this might not be the phone for me, and it likely isn’t for assorted other reasons. But considering that almost all handsets are both expensive and fragile, Casio may be on to something here. There’s a term in product design known as “drop factor” – how many times a given product can be dropped, usually from two meters or so onto concrete, before its life-force is permanently drained. That number is usually zero or one, and, after one, you can expect all kinds of scuffs, scratches, or worse, even if the unit does not entirely shuffle off the mortal coil altogether. Note the huge market for all manner of handset enclosures, like this transparent model for the iPhone. These make the handset bigger, but are regardless necessary if for no reason other than basic cosmetic protection.
Casio’s target market might be relatively small, but there’s a lesson here regardless for all handset manufacturers. Two years is a long time to live with a dinged or damaged phone. Supplemental insurance policies, which the carriers love to sell you, are expensive. And product designers should regardless be doing a better job of engineering consumer products that are inherently subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (a little more Hamlet, and finis).
