What's a mobile phone? Is it a telephone without wires? A portable PC? A repository of pictures, music, games and video?
The answer, of course, is all of the above. But there's one other important attribute we often over look because we tend to focus on mobiles as a technology, and that's the phone as a fashion statement. Male or female, we love to show off our phones, though both genders have slightly different approaches.
Men tend to want the newest, more powerful, status-according device available and it's been that way since the first ugly black and gray bricks arrived on the mobile landscape back in the 1990s — though the famed Motorola Star-tac flip phone broke new ground in the coolness factor. Then came the BlackBerry and dawn of the smart phone and suddenly function was king.
Women, on the other hand, generally take a different approach, gravitating to sleek, shiny and chic designs which slip easily into a purse, often dressing up their devices like dolls with cute jackets in bright colours and hanging little charms like jewelry on them.
So what kind of a phone attracts a woman? Here, according to Telus Mobility, are the Top Five hot sellers.
1. HTC Touch Diamond
The HTC Touch Diamond is compact and shiny. It has a bright screen for Web surfing to sites like FaceBook and YouTube and has a touch-screen interface, which many women love because pushing tiny buttons with long fingernails can be a pain. The onboard media player also lets them organize and listen to tunes by album, artist, song and playlist.
2. Pink BlackBerry Pearl 8130
What woman doesn't love pink? The pink BlackBerry Pearl 8130 includes special-edition pink chameleon wallpaper and a two megapixel camera with flash and video capture. It has the famous email capability of all BlackBerrys, although the compact keyboard is more clumsy than the standard QWERTY, making it fine for reading but more problematic for typing replies.
3. BlackBerry Curve 8330 Pink
The Curve, soon to be overshadowed by a new sexier device that RIM plans to launch by RIM this fall -- and in some ways already overshadowed by its stablemate, the Bold -- is made more appealing to women by being packaged in pink. With its full QWERTY keyboard, it is not only functional but an indispensable business mobile.
4. Samsung INSTINCT
Samsung's new Instinct seeks to bump the Apple iPhone down a notch or two with its touchscreen and on board GPS with turn-by-turn navigation. The QWERTY keyboard is also part of the touch screen and works in both landscape and portrait mode. It has GPS navigation and email and all the basics.
5. LG Venus
The LG Venus is a slider phone, which means the top slides up to reveal the keyboard. It actually comes with two screens, one a touch screen to control functions, and the other a regular screen for reading, surfing and navigating the device features. While the surface of the touch screen is hard, there's a vibration to confirm you've pushed a "button." This tactile feedback is likely to become common on more phones in the future. The Venus also has a 2 mega-pixel camera and video camera, stereo Bluetooth and can handle mobile music, radio and TV.
