To hear people talk about Tim Parsey's creations you would think he works for a leading fashion house.
His work is said to stop traffic, turn heads and define lifestyles. One marketing executive let slip that when models use his products during fashion shows, they do not want to give them back.
But Mr Parsey is not likely to make the cover of Vogue: he designs mobile phones for Motorola.
It is no coincidence that Motorola, traditionally more concerned with semiconductors than being sexy, hired Mr Parsey as a vice-president in charge of design. Well-known in the business, British-born Mr Parsey, with his boyish good looks and a penchant for dressing in black, has worked on everything from staplers to bobsleds to Apple's Newton handheld computer.
The days are long gone when engineers shovelled a box of batteries and silicon over to the designers and told them to make it look pretty. Some would argue that as mobile phone technology matures, style has overtaken substance as the prime motivator for consumers, who are expected collectively to snap up in excess of 400 million handsets during 2002.
'People . . . look for, and then buy, an attractive product. There is no way, in my opinion, you can sell a phone that has great features, but looks ugly,' said Ron Garriques, Motorola's vice-president in charge of global product marketing.
