Many have tried, many have fallen. Count VeryKool amongst the eager new faces trying to break into the cell-phone market.
It's almost absurdly tough to break into the U.S. market, mostly because sales are pretty much controlled by five carriers – Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, Cingular and Alltel – and they're really conservative about who they buy phones from.
But this year's CTIA show seems to have more viable new guys than most previous years. There's French cell phone maker Alcatel, and Chinese firm ZTE. There's also VeryKool, a new line of phones from InfoSonics, including six midrange phones, a smart phone, and some "fixed wireless" phones for people who want to ditch their home phone service, but still use something that looks like a home phone.
InfoSonics is a wireless middleman; they negotiate between smaller carriers and phone manufacturers to buy phones, as well as selling phones independently on their own. They decided to break out into their own brand after a partner of theirs, the Korean phone maker VK Mobile, went bankrupt last year.
"VeryKool" was initially an ad slogan for Infosonics' VK phones in Latin America, said InfoSonics chief financial officer Jeff Klausner. "We converted the ad campaign into a brand," he said.
Of the seven VeryKool phones, only two are made by VK; the rest are made by other Asian manufacturers, he said.
VeryKool phones will be sold directly through InfoSonics' Web site at
http://www.verykool.net, but InfoSonics is also trying to sell to smaller carriers such as Centennial Wireless, i wireless and Cincinnatti Bell, Klausner said.
"These are rural service area carriers," he said. "Unless you live in a region they cover, you've never heard of them."
So how about the phones? They're all pretty nondescript, spec-wise, and they borrow a lot from the super-slim, etched-keypad look of the Motorola SLVR. They're all GSM, and all of them have memory card slots and MP3 players, which Klausner said is a key focus for his company.
The Windows Mobile smart phone, the iQ, is a slender black candy-bar-style phone running Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone, with a 1.9-inch screen, 64 Mbytes of internal memory and a 1.3-megapixel camera.
VeryKool's two most interesting products aren't in their initial lineup, but they're looking at selling variants in the U.S., Klausner said. The D100 kids' phone is covered in Disney characters, so it's un-sellable in the U.S. because Disney Mobile controls the rights to those characters here. But it's a unique kids phone which converts from four-button, restricted dialing to a full 12-key keypad, previously unknown in the industry.
"I can buy one phone for little Timmy, technically keep that phone for a couple of years, and then give him full functionality," Klausner said.
The fixed wireless phones look like ordinary home phones, but they're really GSM cell phones. Fixed wireless is popular in Latin America, where landline networks are often a mess. Here in the U.S., rural carriers are looking at installing fixed wireless to serve outlying areas where the cost of running physical lines is high, Klausner said.
Copyright 2007 by Ziff Davis Media, Distributed by United Press International
Related stories:
Review: A $130 phone headset helpfully talks back
(AP) -- Bluetooth wireless headsets for mobile phones are puzzling: We're supposed to control them with couple of unmarked buttons and get feedback from a single indicator light.
Analog TV shutdown kills free cell-phone TV
(AP) -- Picture whipping out your cell phone and catching up with "Lost" or "Jeopardy," or watching the local 11 o'clock news, all for free. You can do this with an imported Chinese phone, but you can't with any phone sold in the U.S. - at least not without monthly charges.
Beyond 3G -- ultra-fast mobile radio networks of the future
(PhysOrg.com) -- Today’s growing third generation (3G) of mobile data services are only a taste of what is to come. Now, European researchers are paving the way to a world where ultra-fast internet access is available from every mobile device.
Wake-up call: Draft security pub looks at cell phones, PDAs
In recent years cell phones and PDAs—"Personal Digital Assistants"—have exploded in power, performance and features. They now often boast expanded memory, cameras, Global Positioning System receivers and the ability to record and store multimedia files and transfer them over wireless networks—in addition to the cell phone system—using WiFi, infrared and Bluetooth communications. Oh, yes, and make phone calls.
Hurdles seen blocking potential of mobile phone TV
Television viewed on mobile phone handsets could be a huge revenue generator for the telecoms sector but significant hurdles stand in the way, industry players and analysts said Thursday.
Method uses 'Bluetooth' to track travel time for vehicles, pedestrians
Engineers have created a method that uses pervasive Bluetooth signals from cell phones and other wireless devices to constantly update how long it takes vehicles and pedestrians to travel from one point to another.
Vehicle communications system in your pocket
The device that will manage the telematics communications of next-generation vehicles may already be in our pockets. Multiple application ‘nomadic’ devices like the mobile phone are ideal for telematics solutions. Automotive manufacturers are now facing up to that reality. It hasn’t been easy.
Swiss researchers test high-speed WLAN network
According to the communication theory, only a limited amount of data can be transmitted within a given bandwidth for wireless communication. Ever since these limits were revealed 60 years ago, we have been trying to reach the boundaries determined by physics as efficiently as possible. In light of the growing significance of cellular phone networks and WLAN connections, scientists are seeking new ways to transfer more data than ever before – after all, transmission capacities are in short supply and, therefore, a valuable commodity.