Are Helio execs good at playing “Follow the Leader.” During a keynote at the CTIA Wireless I.T. Show, Helio CEO Sky Dayton made a couple of pointed jabs at his fellow panelists representing fellow MVNO Virgin Mobile (old-man socks were mentioned, for example.) At last week’s Mobile Marketing Forum 2006, witness this cute exchange between John Styers, General Manager of Mobile Advertising for Sprint Nextel Corp., and Craig Shapiro, Head of Content Strategy and Acquisition for Helio. We should stress that this was done with smiles, jokingly, but still a nasty jab:
Shapiro: I think Sprint’s lack of support for advertising is evidenced by them sending John here.
Styers: All right. But I have more than four subs.
If you were one of the thousands of people mobbing Chicago’s Michigan Ave. to go shopping on Black Friday and happened to swing into the Motorola Inc. store there to check out phones, you might have been a bit disappointed in the selection. The store was only selling two phones: the super-shiny Moto Krzr and the red Razr. Huh?! In a high-rent, high-traffic shopping district, during the busiest sales quarter of the year, Moto only wants to show off two handsets? And not even any other colors of its blockbuster Razr?
Granted, the displays were artsy and dozens of Krzrs pressed closely together formed an impressive mirrored wall. But Moto has done better with its trade show booths.
You could call the strategy minimalist, or targeted. Or you could just call it krzy-especially with a Nokia store a couple of doors down, Verizon Wireless in the next block and Cingular Wireless around the corner, all eager to ply customers with a variety of phones to choose from.
Just how painful is it for Nokia to pay royalty fees to Qualcomm? Look no further than Reporter Phil Carson’s story, where Nokia’s CTO seems to look forward to the day when Nokia offers handhelds “that no longer require CDMA-based radios.”
Move over Chocolate. The new “coolest” handset ads on TV revolve around Samsung, Cingular and a certain little slight-of-hand, deck-of-cards visual art trick with the BlackJack.
