When you look at the current lineup of top-tier Android phones on Verizon today, each has some kind of distinctive feature that differentiates it from the pack. The X is the big one, the Pro is the Blackberry one, the 2 is the slider, the Pro and the 2 Global are the world phones, the Incredible is... not those things and has an optical track button (maybe it could be said to be the most like the iPhone?). The only real overlap might be between the Samsung Fascinate and I guess the Incredible, though again there are different screen sizes there. Oh, and the iPhone and Palms and Blackberries are differentiated enough by OS. And I'm not considering the other Android phones they offer that are previous generation or feature phones or otherwise outliers or surpassed. But the point is they're offering different kinds of phones for different kinds of users, with something different for everyone.
But when you look at the Bionic and the Thunderbolt, you've got two phones that are the same size, same form factor, both 4G, will presumably be priced equivalently, and most other things are equivalent. They're basically head to head competition between two rival handset makers. If you were Verizon, how would you pitch these things differently? You can certainly tout dual core and a better screen and video output resolution and I assume more battery juice for the Bionic. When selling the Thunderbolt next to that, what do you tell the average non-phone-nerd prospective customer? Why should they buy it instead of the Bionic? What crowd does it please in the same way that the Verizon Android phones out today each please a slightly different crowd? Do you just say it has a kickstand and better front-facing camera resolution? Is its baked-in Skype enough of an advantage over whatever the Bionic uses that it appeals to a large enough video-calling demographic to matter? If some average customer asks the rep which one to get, what criteria do they use to recommend one or the other?
You and I care about Blur vs. Sense and many of us consider Blur a no-no and Sense a bonus (relatively speaking amongst non-vanilla phones). And many of us care about locked bootloader vs not locked. And we definitely care about one of these being out much sooner than the other (fingers crossed). But those don't sound like the kinds of things Verizon would use as bullet points to differentiate the two phones to average users once they're both out and sitting side by side on the website or store display counter. I'm thinking most of them don't know what Sense or Blur is and have never heard of rooting or ROMs.
I imagine this issue has been around in prior product cycles with other phones (and even within a single maker, like all the Blackberries), but I've only just now started paying attention. How do you see this going down?
But when you look at the Bionic and the Thunderbolt, you've got two phones that are the same size, same form factor, both 4G, will presumably be priced equivalently, and most other things are equivalent. They're basically head to head competition between two rival handset makers. If you were Verizon, how would you pitch these things differently? You can certainly tout dual core and a better screen and video output resolution and I assume more battery juice for the Bionic. When selling the Thunderbolt next to that, what do you tell the average non-phone-nerd prospective customer? Why should they buy it instead of the Bionic? What crowd does it please in the same way that the Verizon Android phones out today each please a slightly different crowd? Do you just say it has a kickstand and better front-facing camera resolution? Is its baked-in Skype enough of an advantage over whatever the Bionic uses that it appeals to a large enough video-calling demographic to matter? If some average customer asks the rep which one to get, what criteria do they use to recommend one or the other?
You and I care about Blur vs. Sense and many of us consider Blur a no-no and Sense a bonus (relatively speaking amongst non-vanilla phones). And many of us care about locked bootloader vs not locked. And we definitely care about one of these being out much sooner than the other (fingers crossed). But those don't sound like the kinds of things Verizon would use as bullet points to differentiate the two phones to average users once they're both out and sitting side by side on the website or store display counter. I'm thinking most of them don't know what Sense or Blur is and have never heard of rooting or ROMs.
I imagine this issue has been around in prior product cycles with other phones (and even within a single maker, like all the Blackberries), but I've only just now started paying attention. How do you see this going down?
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