Kodak fires a Bullitt at oldsters with 3G mobe launch Kodak has launched its first mobile phone, the Kodak IM5 smartphone. It's aimed at the more mature users who are looking at moving to a smartphone but want a brand they find reassuring. The device is made by Bullitt Group, best known for its Caterpillar rugged phones. The IM5 is a fairly standard Android phone with a 13Mp …
Hmm, there is an appropriately long story about Saga and mobile,
It's very hard to find an international brand which works for the baby boomer generation. Roberts, Boots, Lionel Blair :-) might work in the UK, Grundig in Europe, OXO Good Grips in the US, but Kodak is about as good as it gets worldwide.
Simon
"...aimed at the more mature users who are looking at moving to a smartphone but want a brand they find reassuring."
But isn't it these "more mature" users who - thanks to often not being as tech-savvy as younger people - are thought of as more vulnerable to fraudsters?
And onto this smartphone, aimed at these more mature users, they load the least secure operating system?
I can see it now - an email arrives:
"From: Official-sounding company that's actually someone pretending to represent Kodak
Your phone is vulnerable! To fix this, go to security settings, allow app installation from any location, then tap this link to download and install the official Kodak phone protector app (that will actually start dialing premium rate numbers between the hours of midnight and 5:00am)!"
There are a lot of different Xperias and Lumias out there - care to specify which ones?
The camera spec, on paper anyway, actually looks a little better than my Xperia SP (the front camera on that is pants, and the rear camera is annoyingly worse that that on my girlfriend's iPhone 5s)
Has become more difficult with every generation, at least from Verizon. At first one could mount the phone as a USB drive and just copy them off. Next model required a not-so-functional "special" app. Next one disabled USB access entirely (to come back with the iPhone/iTunes, see "not-so-functional special app"), but forgot to hobble Bluetooth OBEX. Then they "fixed" that. There is no technical reason to make it that hard. Just making sure you pay for every pixel and the TLAs see every pic.
Funny, it has gotten easier with every Lumia update.
They even send your pictures and video to cloud storage if you want.
Add email, Bluetooth, NFC (which uses Bluetooth of course but without the need for pairing) and USB file system mounting, send to shared rooms, OneDrive, Facebook, WhatsApp etc. as well as OneNote/Evernote and print apps and it seems desperate to share.
If Verizon manage to block all of that, definitely time to import an EU model.
The generation that made electronics commonplace; along with space exploration, nuclear power etc.
The patronising arseholes won't get my fucking business.
Most of my friends who are my generation born in the '50 have all got smart phones and are reasonably tech savvy, one of them is at the forefront of CFD and another si the technical head of a large Casino company.
Who the hell made this stuff real after the 20th century pioneers that discovered or invented the foundations of the 21st century?
With the exception of a couple of the Retinas, which were just sub-par, all I remember Kodak for is crap cameras, overpriced Kodachrome, pro film that wasn't as colour accurate as Fuji, and printing paper that wasn't as good as Ilford.
And...over 55s?
Who are these people for whom Kodak is a trusted brand name? Are they all over 100 years old, from when the Box Brownie was the only affordable camera?
> The generation that made electronics commonplace; along with space exploration, nuclear
> power etc. ...
> Most of my friends who are my generation born in the '50 have all got smart phones and
> are reasonably tech savvy,
There's boomers and there's boomers. (Me? I was born at the tail end of the boom.)
I know some very tech savvy boomers and I know some who are dumber than a box of rocks. I also know some 30-somethings and some 40-somethings who struggle with updating their status in Facebook. Go figure.
I haven't trusted Kodak, and have viewed Motorola with caution, since I bought enough of the motozine ZN5s for each member of the family when they first came out.
Just needed phones that could text and thought the cameras would be handy.
It is hard to imagine poorer quality that they delivered.
One had 1/2 its features dead when unboxed, another went into a reboot loop after less than 2 weeks of gentle use. Between optical issues, and a list of other failed features, all 4 original were replaced in less than a year, two of them twice. When one of the kids fell in the stream with his, I didn't think he'd lost anything of value.
Moved onto Samsung and HTC smartphones after that.
A couple of Moto Gs I picked up last year have done well, but I recently passed on the 2nd gen X because of my motozine memories. Sad when I compare those to heavy use I gave a StarTAC years ago.
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