Friday, January 19, 2007

Italy Has More Smart Phones, Now Going Upscale

The ANNOTICO Report

I hear more and more of my younger friends who are abandoning their computers and almost completely replacing them with Smart Phones.

As a entry level immigrant engineering employee at our Condo complex exclaimed to me the other day. "With my smart Phone, why should I bother with a computer"????

Italy has a lack of availability of DSL access , and when DSL is available, it is very costly, driving Italians at a faster pace than the rest of Europe to the Smart Phone.

For instance European and US results so far with the Vodafone TREO:

Penetration of Smart phones in Europe and the U.S. Among Recent Phone Buyers:

== Italy 19.20 %

== Spain 9.50 %

== Western Europe 8.80 %
== UK 7.50 %

== Germany 4.90 %
== Sweden 3.60 %
== France 3.50 %
== USA 3.80 %

http://www.palminfocenter.com/comments/9192/

Also, Prada is introducing its “high end" version of Apple's iPhone

PRADA Phone Rivals Apple iPhone

Top Tech News

By Lindsay Martell

January 18, 2007

In the catwalk-crazed nooks of society, the fashionistas who gleefully fork over nearly $3,000 for a PRADA bag, can now have a new, matching accessory -- a PRADA phone. South Korea's LG Electronics has teamed up with Italy's infamous high-end apparel and accessories manufacturer to produce an equally high-end phone.

The companies are touting the PRADA Phone by LG as a real breakthrough in the industry, describing it as the first completely touch-screen mobile phone, apparently sidestepping the fact that Apple introduced its own touch-screen iPhone just last week.

Indeed, there are numerous similarities. The PRADA Phone by LG plays music and videos on a wide, LCD screen. It has a 2-megapixel camera, eight megabytes of internal memory, and yes, it looks a lot like Apple's iPhone. The slick, button-free, touch-screen interface is particularly similar.

 "A lot of people will say it's an iPhone rival," he tells us, because there are no other buttonless phones out there yet.

"It's a PRADA phone," he says, and therefore people expect to pay a lot for it. "It's done for prestige," he adds, pointing out that the intent of high-end products like this is to build brand equity, as opposed to driving a large volume of sales.

Prestige marketing has been slowly gaining momentum in this arena over a number of years, Guisto says. "Affinity marketing has been pretty popular and we've seen it in mobile devices before."

He cites Acer's Ferrari 3000, a candy-apple-red mobile PC, as well as HP's James Bond-inspired Jornada 430se -- a handheld device which appeared in the 1999 flick, "The World Is Not Enough."

When it hits European stores in late February, the 12-mm thick PRADA phone (model KE850) will cost about 600 Euros (equivalent to US$780) in France, Britain, Germany and Italy.

Guisto tells us the price might deter some people, but so will the iPhone's $599 price tag. ..

Rather than adding the PRADA brand name to an existing product, Bertelli explained that the two companies worked together to give their new phone a "very strong character and unique style, both in its contents and in its design." ...

There's no word yet though on when and if it will launch in the U.S.

http://www.toptechnews.com/story.xhtml?story_id=10200BKQUZ3U

The ANNOTICO Reports

Can be Viewed, and are Archived at:

Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com (Formerly Italy at St Louis)

Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com

Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net