Following Vodafone’s rather rambunctious roll-out of its Christmas range of handsets, which includes the top-end Nokia N95 8GB and Samsung SGH-F700, Orange has announced its festive line-up. Aside from the presence of Sony Ericsson’s highly promising W910i, it seems Orange is mainly relying on gimmicky special edition colours to boost sales — even the W910i is in ‘exclusive’ red (actually one of the phone’s two standard colours).
The rest of the range is squarely aimed at the Christmas gift market, with pink versions of Samsung’s Shine, U600 and F210, and the Sony Ericsson W580 and W200. Also announced is the first from Orange’s new own-label range, called ‘Berlin’, which is aimed at the ‘younger market’ and comes with a 2MP camera, 3G and MP3 player.
It’s hardly an inspiring line-up — although all those pink phones will probably sell bucketloads, in the short-term. But when Pocket Picks contacted Orange about its rumoured boycott of Nokia’s N81, the company refused to comment. Orange, like it or not, you need to offer cool phones in order to attract customers. Kids with pink phones don’t care which operator they’re with; they’re not market leaders. By restricting your handset range in this battle over music sales, you’ll simply drive the trend-setters to other operators.
