Luxury Phones Rival Handmade Watches

Luxury mobile phones are seeking to rival handmade watches for many jet-set consumers, especially business travelers who rely on digital gadgets to tell the time abroad.

At Baselworld, the watch and jewelery industry's largest annual trade fair, telephones draped in diamonds and sapphires were displayed alongside traditional wrist accessories. Some included tools to instantly track flights, convert currencies and check the weather.

The luxury unit of the world's top mobile handset maker Nokia, Vertu, displayed sleek telephones ranging from $4,350 to $310,000 at its booth in Basel, a few steps from hotel heiress Paris Hilton's new watch collection, in one of six huge exhibition halls heaving with people.

Vertu President Alberto Torres said many of the company's younger customers were more interested in their mobile phones than their watches, unlike older clientele who show deep loyalty to luxury watchmakers such as Patek Philippe, Rolex or Cartier.

"The phone has a strong association for a lot of young people," he said in an interview on Friday in "The Hall of Inspirations", one of the show's six giant exhibition areas.

Some of Vertu's designs are marketed at busy people whose days may feature "breakfast in London, shopping in Paris and a late dinner in New York," offering a virtual concierge service for help with restaurant bookings and gift ordering.

Others are wrapped in diamond-perforated leather that resists "almost everything from lipstick to suntan lotion," according to promotional material.

Because they are constantly holding their phones, laying them on dinner tables and otherwise flashing them about, Torres said many wealthy people had become increasingly conscious of the image their handsets projected.

"A phone has become an important element of lifestyle. The phone says something about yourself," he said.

Vertu's sales increased by 140 percent last year and should rise another 100 percent in 2007, Torres said, declining to specify a dollar figure.

One of Nokia's smallest but most profitable segments, Vertu is approaching the 100,000 per year mark in numbers of handsets sold, Torres said, noting that overall turnover was in line with many medium- to large-sized luxury watch companies.

"We would be a significant brand in the watch industry (in terms of sales)," he said, while stressing that Vertu did not believe the shift to pricier mobiles would prompt the rich to stop buying high-end watches.

"Our customers tend to have several luxury items," he said.

Like most luxury goods segments, high-end mobile phones have benefited from a surge in the number of millionaires worldwide alongside fast economic growth in countries such as China, India and Russia. Rich people in the oil-producing Middle East have also flocked to status symbols with the recent commodities boom.

Other companies have also entered the luxury mobile field to greet the new clientele. Motorola and designers Dolce & Gabbana have launched a gold-colored version of the best-selling RAZR model, and South Korea's LG Electronics Inc. has helped develop a Prada phone to complement Prada accessories

LATEST TECHNOLOGY: SOFTWARE:DeskActive Team plus Health Assist

Price:
$49 for one user
System requirements:
Windows XP SP2/Vista/Professional 2000 SP4, Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, IE6.0 or laterScreen resolution 800x600 or betterCD/DVD player, 500MB hard drive space Internet connection
Pros:
Stretching muscles you never knew existed is, believe it or not, a great feeling; great to find software that is promoting healthy living
Cons:
Easy for the user to ignore the program when it activates
The final word:
Employers genuinely interested in the health and comfort of their desk-based employees should take note of products, such as this one, that promote wellbeing.
DESKACTIVE is designed to be a proactive solution to help prevent office workers from suffering back or neck pain, or RSI.
Once you're shown how to do them, stretches and exercises – apart from a little initial pain – are really easy to do. Having the discipline to continue doing them on a daily basis is another thing altogether. This lack of motivation, or laziness – call it what you will – typically keeps your affected body part stiff or sore and your physio in a job.
With a fair chunk of today's working population confined to desks and not particularly physically active during their working day, the incidence of musculoskeletal disorders.
In its simplest form, the software is a series of stretches and exercises designed to get you moving body parts and muscles that normally remain strained or dormant while at work. It targets organisations that are looking for occupational health and safety solutions and that seek to promote a corporate culture of wellness. Presently, the software is only being sold to organisations.
DeskActive's exercise programs are organised in groups, and users can chose (and change at any time once the software is installed) from a range of options such as “Seated, Easy (Stretches Only)” or “Seated and Standing, Hard (Stretches and Exercises)”. You can also specify which areas of the body you want targeted in Special Focus Sessions. For example, Back; Fingers and Wrists; Neck; Lower Limb Circulation; or Shoulders. All up, DeskActive comprises about 300 stretches and exercises.
One of the key features of the corporate edition is connectivity to DeskActive's servers. Although the client is installed on a user's PC, the exercises undertaken are reported back to the servers, which then collate that information into charts. There is also an email interface that allows users to request changes to their exercise regime. That input is registered by DeskActive and as a result it can modify what stretches it serves you. If you find one stretch particularly taxing, you can have it removed from your exercise program.
You can set the frequency of your exercise sessions by time and days of the week. Alternatively you can set it up by regular intervals, with the default being every three hours. The Options tab also has related features such as the Micro Pause: brief rest breaks that comprise an exercise or two and last for 30 seconds. Bullet Breaks are seconds-long, text-based health reminders. For example, tips on how to sit properly in your chair or information about 'The Feng Shui Method of Injury Prevention: keep an uncluttered desk'. The software can also be set to activate after a certain number of keys have been struck on the keyboard or after a certain amount of mouse movement has been reached. You set the numbers.
With all the prompts set, DeskActive pops out of your system tray into a full-fledged app. The exercises are displayed in both a text and visual (animated) form, and you can chose to have either Sam or Sarah instruct you. The visual exercises also have a preview mode so you can see what you are supposed to be doing before you begin. A voice tells you when to start and stop. This is helpful but you need to have your speakers on – neck exercises with headphones on just wont work – which means you may disturb others around you. In the animations, DeskActive also highlights which part of the body you should feel stretching. The software also offers text-based tips as you go conduct your stretch/exercises. But this is pointless if said stretch/exercise requires you to look away from the screen.
We installed DeskActive on a Pentium 4 2.8GHZ with 528 megabytes of RAM. Admittedly the system is several years old and cluttered with a variety of software, but we found that it struggled when DeskActive was prompted into action. About a minute before it kicked in the mouse started to jump around and the system slowed. When the application finally launched, the system returned to normal.
DeskActive's strength is that it is so easy to follow and it is in some ways like a whip, kicking you into action. This is essential if you want to improve your wellbeing. The negative is that you can always close down the application when it does launch.