Much like AOL subscriptions, the reverse phone seems to be an anachronism, a leftover fragment from another age. And yet, like AOL subscriptions, the flip phone persists, with LG this week introducing its Wine Smart handset. Plus it has a physical number pad along with a lot of shortcut buttons which old Nokia might have been proud of. It would be easy to poke fun at something we don’t know, but it’s much more interesting to find out why this LG Wine Smart handset (and a number of similar ones from Samsung) still exist. So I asked. Here’s exactly what LG explained flip phones remain popular with four, somewhat related classes of consumers. These are individuals who: 1) Use their phone primarily for speaking, not gaming or surfing. 2) Want their young kids to be connected but not diverted by games. 3) Are generally old and are not comfortable pressing buttons on a screen or have trouble seeing the small keys onto a glass display. 4) Need smart functions sometimes for looking things up and messaging All of this creates a surprising amount of sense.
These are the customers that LG is catering to. The Wine Smart is LG’s way of demonstrating it “has always been about offering alternatives and choice. ” Plus, the business tells me, the Wine Smart is a device inspired more by its own findings about local usage in Korea rather than wider smartphone need. And yet, LG is releasing the Wine Smart worldwide, so there has to be more of these unconventional forms amongst the planet ‘s 6 billion cellphone users than we may believe
