The Hindu : National : Technology now goes market-specific

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Sunday, Jan 28, 2007
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National

National

Technology now goes market-specific

Anand Parthasarathy

PC makers make gadgets keeping in mind Asian preferences

— Photo: Anand Parthasarathy

FOCUS ON ASIA: The iPAQ rw6800 series multimedia messenger was specially styled in Asia.

Seoul (South Korea): Nothing illustrates better the dominant place occupied by giants like India and China in the global consumer electronics and telecom `mandi' or market place: leading American PC and printer makers have realised, albeit belatedly, that the young and wallet-happy consumers of the region cannot always be fobbed off with products created in the West for North American and European markets. If you want to appeal to Asian customers, you must design gadgets that keep in mind their preferences and purses.

At the regional exhibition here where it showcased its personal systems consumer product line-up for 2007, Hewlett Packard unveiled a new "multimedia messenger" — the iPAQ rw6800 series — which converged the twin technologies of computing and communicating into a handy device, weighing just 150 gm. It had full Windows Mobile (version 5.0) PC-type functionality, while also working as a 2 mega-pixel still and video camera, a voice recorder, FM radio, MP4 music and video player and a GSM type phone which can switch to a WiFI hotspot or a BlueTooth wireless network.

The product was designed to appeal to Asian aesthetics, even while eliminating a built-in keyboard (this is now an optional extra) since the youth in this region have shown that unlike Americans they hate to type messages, preferring to speak them.

"The 6800 was designed in Asia — for Asia, alone," Chin Hon Cheng, HP's Singapore-based Vice President, Consumer Products and Mobile Business, Asia Pacific and Japan, told The Hindu on the sidelines of the launch event. He added that HP's three Asian development centres in China, Taiwan and India collaborated on such Asia-specific products. The India centre was strong in software and further strengthened by the presence of a unit of HP Labs in Bangalore, which worked on innovative access solutions for the rural and educational markets.

P. Krishnakumar, HP's Gurgaon-based Country Manager for Consumer Desktops, said that another HP product — the Champion series of its Compaq Presario desktop PC range — was completely designed in India, keeping in mind local requirements and was selling well in China, where the purchasing power of the home user was about the same.

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