The Deal Killer — When One Missing Feature Kills A Sale
When people say companies “just don’t get it” it’s not often clear what it is the companies are missing — and sometimes the companies do “get it”, they just disagree. However, in this little write-up on Wired it’s very clear what the company is missing — a standard earphone jack on a music handset. The device in question is the Samsung Blackjack, which has a proprietary port (for which the earphones have to be bought seperately, apparently) or Bluetooth. I’m not sure what Samsung’s game is here, but any handset that is targeted towards a particular content niche (music, video, games, whatever) should be as simple and as standard as possible, otherwise the potential market size is cut dramatically.
I never really got the impression that the Blackjack is a "music handset". I would not have been shocked in the least bit to discover that I had to buy a special adapter or set of headphones to listen to music. I think the more valid question would be the one 99% of consumers ask when they try to plug their iPod headphones into their mass-market phone only to discover they don't fit. That question is WTF?
Thanks to a recent story about RIM suing Samsung over this, and some e-mails, I realise that the Blackjack is not a music-oriented phone but a business-like Blackberry phone. I still think all phones should come with a standard earphone jack, but it's far less important on this phone than on — say — a Walkman phone.