Quote:
Originally posted by Foo Fighter
The "thin and light" category is no longer a luxury as it once was.
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It's not a matter of whether it's a luxury or not, but whether there's a demand for it or not, and also how think-and-light you have to be to satisfy that market.
For the first point, assuming there *is* a demand for devices smaller and lighter than the SJ30, it won't go away just because there's more lightweight devices available. It just means that someone else (can you say "HP"?) is going to get that part of the market instead.
For the second, well, the SJ30 is pretty compact already... and it's not as if someone looking for a thin-and-light device is going to reject everything but the absolutely smallest thing on the market. In other words, the market is quantized.
There's the subnotebook range that the newton and clamshells and the smallest notebooks fit into, things you can toss into a briefcase without making special arrangements for them, or that you can carry on your belt without difficulty.
There's the belt-and-big pocket range, that you can carry on your belt or in your Mobile Pants. The first generation of the Pocket PC (except the Jornada) fit in that range, as does the Sony N series.
There's the jeans-or-slacks-pocket range. Jornada, Palm III, Visor, some of the Toshibas.
There's the shirt-pocket-or-doesnt-ruin-the-lines-of-my-slacks
range. Most Clies, Treos, Visor Edge, and other small-but-not-ultrasmall models.
Finally, there's the ones you can stick in your shirt pocket without ruining the lines of the shirt. That's the ultrathin range. The question is, is there (or was there) enough demand for that size? There's obviously some demand, but I don't think it's nearly as critical as some people think. So long as you hit the shirt pocket target you're fine, and I suspect the existing Clies are close enough for the job (with the exception, of course, of the huge N series).
So I don't think there's any question of whether you can charge more for a smaller device (or not charge as much for a larger one). The question is just how small you need to be. The anser seems to be, there's a limit to it, until the next stage is reached.
Where's the next stage? Fossil thinks it's wristwatches. Royal thinks it's credit cards. I suspect they're both partly right... the target is going to be something that you can carry with your credit cards and cash in a case that doesn't ruin the lines of your slacks.
You know, the Zire's cheap enough now I could see Coach or Fossil or someone selling a wallet with a sewn-in Zire, to try and hit that market.
Sony Announces Mid-Range Handheld in Japan
