waffle

On the back of the latest edition of the most reputable mobile phone magazine in Sweden was an ad from Samsung. The headline said “Pointing isn’t rude”, and listed below were twelve or so of their current, or upcoming, touch screen mobile phones.

This is the kind of thinking that’s going to sink them, along with most of their competitors. Say I’m a customer and I’m looking for a touch screen mobile phone, and I’m thinking of checking out what Samsung has to offer. If I see a dozen phones to choose from, I can either give up, pick one blindly or try to do research on which model to pick. The signals I’m getting is that Samsung doesn’t know which one’s the best. I might pick up from advertising that the Ultra Touch or the upcoming Omnia II is their best effort, but if I don’t want the best one, which one’s the next lower model?

I can see the justification in having a few similar phones. Say you have one with a keypad, one with a keyboard and one that’s just a screen. Or say you have one that’s got an awesome camera that takes better photos or movies at the expense of being a bit bulkier. But I can’t honestly pick them out of this line-up. And if you’re constantly working on the next ten models, either you’re more productive and share the advancements and they all turn out more or less fungible unless you attach one small hardware feature to each of them (which you can’t then get in the one phone), or you have ten teams branching out in many directions and you get higher prices (on account of some of them reinventing the same wheel) and a harder-to-navigate product catalog.

Choice is fundamentally good, but at this level, it’s mostly arbitrary because you don’t “get” exactly what’s different. If you expect for Samsung to tell you, bring a lifejacket for all those marketing superlatives, and expect to spend time and energy grinding that down into something that puts the relative strengths of each product into focus.