Infinite Path

Next week will be an important one for Orange…and its competitors. Thursday the 27^th of August is the launch date for the swish gadget they hope will make a big splash in the ultra-competitive mobile market. The gadget in question is the LG watchphone, which combines all the features you’d want in a top model mobile phone, such as a touch-screen and videophone capability, with the portable element of a smart wristwatch.

Orange’s hope that their gadget will catch on during the months to come, and particularly in the run-up to the lucrative Christmas period, may come up against a nasty reality check in the form of the hefty price tag attached to the watchphone. It will retail at £500, making it a serious investment rather than a good option for your next mobile phone upgrade.

The company has attempted to counteract this price tag by a clever marketing campaign, which has branded the phone as an item to crave rather than a product that can be picked up off the shelf whenever and wherever. Exact numbers are yet to be revealed but Orange will tightly control supply in order to keep the buzz around the model high for as long as possible.

This is a ploy which worked extremely well for Nintendo, albeit inadvertently, in the case of the Wii. When the Wii was first released, it was almost impossible to get hold of a model. This may have been frustrating for parents keen to keep their kids happy at Christmas but it worked well for Nintendo.

A steady demand for the console remained for a long period of time. The company did not have to deal with the issue of seeing a sudden peak in sales followed by a gradual drop in figures. It also ensured that their latest product stayed in public consciousness for a significant amount of time, with the papers full of photos of empty shelves in some of Britain’s largest high street stores.

Whether the watchphone will experience the same success remains to be seen. Much depends upon how the model lives up to expectations. The unique nature of the Wii exceeded expectations for many users but will Orange be able to make an impression in a market that has previously been repellent to wrist-based technology? The theoretical demand for a motion-based console already existed before the Wii’s release. The same can’t really be said for the watchphone.

It will certainly be interesting to see how the market reacts to Orange’s latest attempt to compete with rivals including O2, which has become dominant since the dawn of the iPhone. The watchphone is part of Orange’s ‘Future Phones’ range, which the company hopes will give it the edge in a crowded market. The range also includes Toshiba’s TG01, the phone with the biggest screen and fastest speeds in the country.

It’ll take something special to steal the headlines away from the iPhone and the smartphone movement as a whole but, who knows, perhaps Orange have hit upon the model to do just that.