“If you go to a nightclub in any city in the world, the pretty girl has an iPhone or a BlackBerry, She doesn’t have an Android phone. She has no emotional attachment to an Android phone. It’s too complicated. It’s a geek device, it’s all wrong.”
These are the words of Frank Meehan, CEO of INQ, speaking to social media site Mashable during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Whether or not the “pretty girls” have an Android is irrelevant, but does what Meehan said hold truth? Does Android come off as an over-complicated techie device?
When speaking about Android manufacturers Meehan said:
“Android manufacturers are all just focused utterly on the tech, because they’re all hardware guys, They don’t get software. They’ve tried to outdo Apple with hardware, but the problem is the customer doesn’t care. The Samsung Galaxy has done pretty well, but it’s just price-driven. It’s not desire-driven. There are no lines out the door to get a Galaxy. They’ve done all this work on branding, but the name doesn’t mean anything to consumers. It’s like calling a phone Alpha Centauri or Uranus.”
In regards to Apple and the Android industry, Meehan was quoted as saying:
“Every time CES and MWC come around, they’re all sitting there slapping each other on the back, Then out comes the iPad, and people are like, Oh sh*t, we got to redo our product roadmap. Half the stuff disappears off the roadmap like that.”
On a positive Android note, Meehan did say “Android is fantastic, it’s a brilliant tool”, and his company has just announced a new Android OS device, the Cloud Touch, a Facebook-centric smartphone. If Meehan thinks Android seems to be catering to the geeks, it could be time for some new marketing strategies.
But what it all comes down to are basics, his main point being to keep it simple and user-friendly. Is that what we really want in our smartphones? Just the basics? I’m pretty sure we want those geeked-out specs too. Sure, half of us don’t fully understand all the techie mumbo jumbo, but that’s okay. As long as we can do what we want, how we want, when we want, it doesn’t really matter.
Source: Mashable, PocketLint