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In my opinion, the announcement of a product that doesn't follow an immediate release on the market is something already seen from BIG brands, to gain some "mind space" about their capacity of making something "very innovative". It doesn't matter when you ship it: it matters when you announce it because users - and press - will benchmark the other products against the announced specs and product. When it is finally released it will still be compared with the products at the time of the announcement, not the current ones just because it has already gone through the "comparison process".
People also dreams easily with these "early announcements" and feed on every news about their dream development. It is easy to describe a "dream device" if you don't have to ship it immediately. But again, when it finally comes out it will be less "dream" and more leveled with the others; however the ones that fell in love won't notice it too much.
Phone industry is full of "concept phones" and many times some "concept phone" is introduced as "soon to be available"!
It is plain marketing strategy.
I do remember when Nokia announced (with pictures and specs) some sort of Internet connected device, similar to a Communicator without keyboard. After almost one year from the announcement (and pictures and so on), they just said "Whops! Sorry! No product.. we have something else that will replace it, after a while". By the way, they finally made something like that... and because it was a "later model", they had a significant advantage for the image as innovators.
Someone remembers the Motorola thingie with the PocketPC OS and the keyboard in the clamshell format? Announced, got resonance for Motorola as the "innovators" and then it was dumped (16 moths later) as it never worked as it was supposed to do.
Again, my opinion gathered in years of activity in this industry and I already know that many will disagree.
However, Meizu is behaving quite well to be a fully chinese company: they are understanding well the dynamics of the market and of the industry, avoiding the classical errors that too many times make chinese companies to ship things incomplete and not good enough to be really successful products.
Too often we see something chinese that looks great on paper and then - when it arrives - we find out that it was just rushed to the market skipping the last couplte of months of cleaning and polishing.
Too many times we get good hardware with unfinished software... interfaces deigned by engineers and not made for the "average dumb user"...
As a last comment, I think that it is correct and "common practice" to start early in the "mind space" fight on the market. Big companies do it, why Meizu shouldn't? By the time the product is available, a LOT of people will know about it and the sales will - hopefully - skyrocket as they should deserve. Without this "early seeding", it would take too much time to get known and sold in reasonable quantities.
P.S.: for people that doesn't know, in advertisement terms "mind space" is the fame/knowlege/heard of about a specific brand or product in the market. Example: Think about a dark soft drink and give me the first name you recall... Ok, CocaCola has gained a big "mind space"
Ciao!
SimonePMP
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