Day: 11 September 2015

The Sony Xperia Z5 compact is for women who blog about fashion and the Sony Xperia M5 is for baristas who dream of owning a sports car but can’t quite pay for it yet. These adverts will never hook me in to wanting their products. I’m the type of person who lives in the countryside and spends his weekends in the mountains on adventures.

I want the Sony Xperia Z5 because of it’s fast autofocus, it’s new technology and it’s 4k recording technology and new image sensor. The geek press gave me information about the device and that’s what woke up my interest. Marketing to geeks is all about the specs and the technology. Marketing to normal people is about “This is the lifestyle you have and this device will survive it”. In the land of Sony people live in cities. Now to contrast with crosscall.

 

Crosscall make rugged strong mobile phones and their advertising is more in line with my own lifestyle.In the space of one month I shattered three screens on two phones. Two of those screen shatters were as a result of playing Ingress. In one case I stood up and the phone slipped from my lap on to the floor, bounced and then fell down again. It fell about two metres and the screen became unresponsive. In the second case I tripped on a step and fell with my hand rotated so that the screen took the impact rather than my wrist. I was so disgusted with myself for the incident that I was tempted by the Crosscall Odyssey+. The phone is rugged and would probably survive such a fall. It has excellent battery life but it’s data connection leaves to be desired especially when playing location based games like Ingress.

Crosscall advertise their devices as rugged, for the adventurous among us. They use runners, surfers, climbers and snowboarders as brand ambassadors. It’s through one of Xavier De La Rue’s posts on Facebook that I learned of the brand and that my curiousity was peaked. The Crosscall Odyssey+ is a niche device. The Trekker X1 has a better chance of appealing to a broader audience.

 

I love that devices by Sony and Crosscall are being advertised as weatherproof now. As an iphone user I liked that Lifeproof provided me with weatherproofing. I appreciate that brands are making their devices weatherproof by default. Soon it will be possible to throw people in to pools without warning once again… once autumn and winter have left place for next summer, of course.