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. True to form, Motorola unveiled its 2002 handset product line last week in Milan, the heart of Europe's fashion industry. During a three-day launch event, there was far more talk about how good the phones looked than about how they performed. One new phone Motorola has high hopes for is the C330. The phone's working parts are housed in a small package about the size of a chocolate bar, and can be put into custom cases that allow users to change completely the look, colour and even shape of the phone depending on what kind of fashion statement they want to make. 'I think people are bored. It's not enough for people to see a little bit of chrome anymore. They want something more innovative and for design to get to the next level,' Mr Parsey said. Another high-end fashion phone is the V70, which was launched in Hong Kong this month. Designed in Europe with an eye to the growing Asian market, the sleek phone features a round display and a swing-out arm. The handset was created with attention given to how people would look when they used it and the ease with which it can be opened with one hand. 'It wasn't based on a technology. It was based on people interacting with a product in a certain way,' said Iulius Lucaci, head of Motorola's Milan design team. Yankee Group analyst Shiv Putcha said consumers are less and less able to differentiate between the capabilities of different handsets, so there has been a shift in momentum from selling handsets based on what they do to selling them on how they look. 'You get a lot of the same basic features so what it boils down to for consumers is price and style,' he said. Mr Parsey said the importance of design started to gain on technology a few years ago when Motorola's arch rival Nokia blind-sided its competitors by putting out handsets that were not only functional, but also looked good and were fun to use. He said the shock to Motorola as Nokia's market share shot up, and its own fell, prompted the decision to overhaul the personal communication division. Nokia is now the leading handset maker with about 35 per cent of the market while Motorola is second with about 17 per cent. 'Nokia led the way and shocked Motorola into changing the way it was operating,' Mr Parsey said. Those changes included Motorola closing its design centres in Florida and New Jersey, and opening new facilities in the more up-market locales of Milan, San Francisco and Boston. The design centres in Beijing and Seoul were restructured to better integrate into the global strategy. 'We had to create the appearance of change as well as talking about it. You walk into our studios now and say, 'Hmmm, this company is serious about design',' Mr Parsey said. Motorola has better integrated its design and engineering teams, putting an engineer into each design centre to make sure form and function are dealt with right from the start. The design centres work together to share ideas. One drawback of the focus on good looks has been that some products that may have appealed to tech-hungry geeks have not seen the light of day. Mr Garriques said Motorola was exploring a combination PDA-phone with handheld computer maker Palm but decided to drop the idea because the unit did not have an attractive design. Of course, technology is still important, even if it is losing ground to style. With high-speed Internet access and 3G (third generation) features on the way in the coming months, technology still drives a large part of the industry and consumes the lion's share of the development budget. Motorola has about 105 people in its handset design team, a small group compared to the 1,000 engineers working on the company's 3G phones. But in a time when Motorola is cutting thousands of jobs, the design team is growing - up by more than one-third since Mr Parsey was hired. Indications are that design will continue to become more important. Over at Nokia, chief designer Frank Nuovo last month unveiled what may be the ultimate in phone fashion accessories, the Vertu line. Detailed in gold, platinum and a sapphire crystal face, the phones will sell for about HK$150,000 when they become available in mid-2002. In an interview posted on the Nokia Web site, Mr Nuovo said: 'Although fashion influences our work, we at Nokia do not follow trends. We try to set them. Being at the forefront means that you really have to be in tune with what's happening in fashion, architecture, etc.' Back at Motorola, Mr Parsey was not overly impressed with the Vertu, saying the high price and consumer desire to change handsets frequently and stay trendy will limit the luxury phone's appeal. But, perhaps having learned from past mistakes in the industry, he will not ignore what Nokia is up to.
