This article about smartphones is actually pretty stupid.

So basically, I didn't know what to write about. I linked CNN business to my blog for this purpose, because there is usually something kind of interesting going on for me to write about. I saw a link to this article Cell Phone Makers Target Teens. I thought the title was a bit peculiar, since this isn't exactly big news. Every company wants to target teenagers. They advertise the products themselves by just carrying them around. Teenagers are very impressionable, so if they saw one of their friends with some product, they'd be inclined to buy it as well. For the sake of writing the required amount of blog posts so I can get a good grade, and some day hope to go to college and not live in a box, I decided to read the article. The opening paragraph was fine with me. It spit out believable facts like "In just two years, the number of teenage cellular subscribers has grown by nearly 26 percent (that's a full 10 percentage points above the growth rate of 45- to 54-year-old customers for the same time period)" so at first I was buying this article. A voice in the back of my mind kept telling me that something wasn't right, because like I said, this is pretty old news. And then the line "So why not make a smartphone geared toward teens and tweens? After all, they're the ones who are driving some of the most advanced mobile trends." appeared, and the article was all down hill from there.

Actually, the death of this article came when the reader sees this picture. I honestly will cut straight to it, that is a laughably awful phone. Good lord, do you see that? Egg shaped and with awkward buttons, Helio's Ocean could be confused with Jitterbug phones. Jitterbug is a cell phone manufacturer with an elderly targeted market. Its phones are purposely created to be easy to use, with large buttons and a dollar bill sized screen. The Ocean is "being marketed towards teenagers". I don't think phone companies need to go out of their way to create phones teenagers would buy these days, especially with iPhones, Droids, and Blackberries dominating the Smartphone market. Teenagers are the most knowledgeable when it comes to how "gadgets" work. I'm asked very frequently by my college educated parents how to do what I consider simple tasks on their cell phones. Trying to make a less high tech phone and then marketing it to teenagers isn't going to be very successful. Actually, this kind of article would trick my Grandma into buying this phone. All grandparents are naive to things like this. I've received many "trendy" presents from them only to feign my excitement and then figure out how I can return it.


Want to know something funny? I realized this article was written in 2007 and was probably incredibly relevant back then. What I don't understand is why was a four year old article linked to the main page of CNN business?
#woops