adminTonderai Rutsito : Tech Spot
In my past years of hands-on experience reviewing various tech gadgets, there are words we seldom use as we get carried away with the technical specifications and cogs that drive the gadgets that make the world go round. One such word I rarely use is beautiful smartphones, yet subconsciously, it has forced all consumers, myself included, to make a decision based on it.At times looks are everything. Yes we need those specs and enjoy tweaking what’s really under the hood. But once all is said and done, everyone needs to see those specs at work engulfed in a neatly carved and curved housing before parting with money.
The major obvious difference between smartphones and feature phones is their capacity to run apps against the pre-installed java, standard. Today the outward physical looks really say a lot about smartphones and easily separate them from feature, or dumb phones, as they are now called.
“I don’t really care about all those technicalities. So long as the phone looks nice and runs Whatsapp, I’m good with it. I need a smartphone that I can pull out when I am around my friends and proudly show it off when it looks good,” responded one consumer during a TechnoMag survey.
More than 70 percent of smartphone consumers in Zimbabwe are easily moved by the looks of a smartphone and only care to ask more about the specs just before they buy. It’s all in the looks that asks a consumer to make an prompt decision and every smartphone has its own outward selling point that sells out better than the other.
This is the simple technique which most smartphone makers today have embraced. They know you want it smart and fast, but the real finish is in the hardware casing that packages the engines to push the sales.
Millions of dollars today have been invested in cellphone casings and more and more smartphone manufactures have moved away from the plastic casings to metal and glass casings which really make the cellphone look and feel expensive for the right price.
Smartphone manufactures have shifted their focus from the details of the processors, memory and storage. The game has really been upped to convince buyers with beauty because all cool smartphones should be beautiful and powerful to serve the market.
Samsung lost millions of dollars of potential revenue when they delayed to shift from their plastic covered smartphones in the early Samsung S series.
iPhone last used plastics in the 3Gs series and introduced metal fine coatings from the iPhone 4. Huawei kicked off beauty from their early and popular P6 ranges while mixing plastics and metal coating.
Today almost every smartphone manufacturer is coating their cellphone in metal and the major reason, however, is not just beauty, it’s also efficiency, safety and speed enhancements that you can get from the metal covers .
The latest technology that come with cellphone covering includes types of antenna that have high speed bandwidth access like the latest Gtel SL8, a housing based technology that we will delve into later on as we explain every tiny bit of features in smartphone.
Speaking of beauty intertwined in high-tech body specifications is the recently launched Gtel SL7 smartphone.
The smartphone is one that will simply get your colleagues asking you what model of a phone you are using as it screams out for attention with every little feature around its body muscle.
My personal pick of the week is the golden Gtel SL7 variation which is amazingly stunning and a real attention seeker. I bet you will not last an hour with it before someone goes curious because the smartphone is just slim perfect, well curved and practically sexy.
Neatly packed in 7mm casing, the smartphone has sharp curves, close to the iPhone series looks but has a bigger screen that you may have mistaken it for the Samsung series while the front line spacing perfectly fits the high quality display screen that sends the final finish to the beautiful beast.
All other physical built features like standard audio jack, antenna band and camera position come back on the same positions fixed and including the super fast type C USB port I recently talked about.
My major disappointment on this is lack of a finger print scanner; this is the only feature that would really complete the smartphone and make it a killer gadget.
TechnoMag is Zimbabwe’s leading Technology magazine; more in depth on www.technomag.co.zw; or join our Facebook on www.facebook.com/technomagzw or Twitter@TechnoMagZw
Online Reporter