Reviews and tests / Samsung and Armani announce the Night Effect fashion music-handset

SMAPE  Reviews and tests  Samsung  Samsung and Armani announce the Night Effect fashion music-handset

The new handset’s foremost selling point is the two LED stripes running along the sides of the casing, flashing in a variety of colors during the phone talk. The rest of the features combined will get you a picture of a typical candy bar phone running an updated Samsung hardware platform. As far as the software part goes, it easily copes with multitasking (including support for Java applications) and no longer runs into problems with Java applet installation. Now you can easily send Java installation packages over Bluetooth and install applications right from a memory card. Earlier this posed a serious problem with numerous Samsung products. The handset is equipped with a QVGA AMOLED screen (a same matrix is used in Nokia N85, save for a smaller diagonal of 2.2’’) The feature list is crowned with a standard microUSB slot, which is something previously unseen in Samsung phones (save for a limited number of smartphone models like the G810), a 3.5 mm standard audio jack and a block of dedicated player controls.

A team of Giorgio Armani designers were responsible for developing the design of the handset sized 114,9x47,4x11,95. Samsung are positioning this handset as a piece targeted at a younger audience which make fashion and music an important part of their lives. A slim music phone branded Emporio Armani Samsung also sports a very affordable price of 200 euros. As for the materials, steel and glass are what they use. The new product is going to be powered by a high-capacity 1000 mAh battery. The phone carries a 2 Mp cam supporting video recording, has a 3.5 mm audio jack and supports microSD storage expansion cards. The onboard memory amounts to 120 Mb. NightEffect enjoys a developed multimedia support and can work in HSDPA networks. Content downloading, streaming videos and vide calls work well at speeds up to 3,6 Mbit/s, accompanied by Bluetooth 2.0 and USB 2.0 for short-range wireless and cable communication.

The two luminescent ‘waterlines’ along the sides of the casing are speculated to have been inspired by the looks of the recently opened ten-storey Emporio Armani store located in Tokio, featuring bamboo-leaf-shaped facade elements decorated with an extensive backlighting. ‘Paris is nicknamed the city of lights, let Tokio become the city of neon lights… you absolutely must have a feel of that fantastic energy pulsating in the air, bearing in a perfect harmony with the spirit of Emporio Armani’ – says Giorgio Armani himself.

‘Many loyal fans of the Emporio Armani brand are fond of the nightlife, when a host of lights paint the city up with a fancy palette once the dusk has struck in, making every street into a night club. Night Effect is something these people must have been missing for a long time. It looks incredibly stylish and keeps you in touch with the rest of the world at the same time, and, of course, it’s great for listening to the music – the easy controls and perfect sound quality doing their best. In other words, here we have an elegant accessory for elegant communication’ – continues Armani.

‘The Night Effect handset made a logical continuation of our collaboration with Giorgio Armani. Our debut effort, the Giorgio Armani Samsung phone, saw the daylight a year ago and proved to be a worthy market player. We are absolutely sure Night Effect will go even further, setting up totally new standards. It will manifest our vision of the next-gen fashion phones, being a marriage of high fashion and technological perfection’ – states the head of Samsung’s telecom department Ji-Sung Choy.

The phone is going to hit the shelf in November, priced around 200 euros. Let us remind that the Nigh Effect edition was preceded by a P520 model which was meant to oppose LG KE850 PRADA. Back in the earlier days, it was a common practice to issue fashion-branded versions of previously existing models (good examples being Motorola and Dolce & Gabbana), but nowadays it seems a better move to start joint projects right from scratch, the phone and fashion experts collaborating as equal parties. The model in question is a vivid example, as well as the PRADA II handset expected to appear near the end of the year.

Normally, a small task force of a House’s designers is set out on the dedicated task of developing the product exterior while the phone manufacturer develops the interface and actually launches the handset into production. The most remarkable projects of the recent times are LG & PRADA (KE850) and Samsung & Giorgio Armani (P520) phones. The former emerged earlier and was commonly seen as an opponent to iPhone. The latter shares a very similar concept, but it gained much less notoriety as far as the ‘versus iPhone’ comparisons went. In either case the comparisons were simply out of place, invoked mainly because of certain psychological reasons.

There’s little use in arguing over LG and Samsung’s positions on the world market – the latter sells a few times more handsets than the former. Currently Samsung in only second to Nokia in the total number of sold handsets, having seized this position from Motorola in the last year. Samsung is probably the most quickly developing company on the telecom market, winning more and more brand loyalty from the audiences worldwide. Over the few recent years, the Koreans managed to overthrow the previously established image of the company in the mind of a mass market consumer. Slowly but steadily the company is penetrating into the highest ranks of the A league of telecom market players. At that, LG is still has a lot of work ahead to reinforce their positions in Europe where it enjoys a very limited popularity.

The things aren’t as simple as far as Giorgio Armani and PRADA brands are concerned, the two being players of equal strength on the world fashion arena. The covered price brackets, product quality and country of origin are all the same, the assortment mainly depending on a particular collection. Miuccia Prada and Giorgio Armani run the two Houses, occupying the positions of the lead designers respectively. Each of the two stood behind their House’s ascension to the current level of development and public recognition. Both companies entered a stage of active growth and expansion in the 70-s. PRADA holds the Sports and Kids brands, always offering expensive pieces. Giorgio Armani sticks with a slightly different business model, splitting their product lines into Giorgio Armani which stands for expensive clothing and Emporio Armani, a mid-end retail network (which has actually nothing to do with the mass market, though!)

Giorgio Armani pursues a policy similar to that of Dolce & Gabbana – the latter also keeps a D&G sub-brand embracing the less expensive clothing (but still a couple of notches above on the price meter than Emporio Armani) If we take into account the ages of Miuccia Prada and Giorgio Armani themselves, and have a second look at the gap between the telecom and fashion clothing markets, it becomes apparent why the famed designers themselves couldn’t take an actual part in the development of LG KE850 or Samsung P520, having passed the task onto a specialized team of the House’s employees. This looks pretty intriguing given that it were they in the first place, - and no one in particular from their teams, - who stood responsible for their Houses entry into the pantheon of the world fashion. Another important point worth mentioning is that Samsung themselves officially never took any part in developing the design of P520, but this claim looks a bit doubtful when you start making comparisons with P300/310 and P720 in particular – there seems to be just too much in common for a mere coincidence.

The PRADA label is known to enjoy a larger popularity among women, while men tend to take preference of Giorgio Armani (this brand, by the way, is also remarkable for numerous collections of top quality business suits). At that, the two brands share equal measures of influence on the market. Giorgio Armani never produced a product to develop a cult following , the lines being very balanced with equal attention paid to every entry. Hermes tends to focus on the kerchiefs, Louis Vuitton is largely associated with handbags, PRADA finds some priority in shoes and, to a lesser extent, concentrates on handbags. Things like the P520 and KE850 mobile phones play much lesser parts in this game, even design itself being less important than the mere presence of the PRADA and Armani labels on the casing.

Many of you must have some notion about the ‘Devil Wears PRADA’ novel, imbuing the brand with that sort of an atmosphere that now everybody’s chasing after to feel oneself part of the high fashion world. Giorgio Armani so far seems not to have succeeded in recreating the mass effect.

For the time being, we are looking forward to a Gucci phone. The Gucci label seems to be a very weighty argument for the fashion conscious people, so the manufacturing company isn’t going to lose no matter how good such a phone may turn out to be, - it will quickly establish a cult following anyway. We have interviewed a few influential editors of the major Russian fashion magazines to make up a statistics sheet illustrating the market weight of the most widely recognized brands:

• Hermes
• Gucci
• Louis Vuitton
• Chanel
• PRADA
• Dolce & Gabbana
• Giorgio Armani
• Roberto Cavalli

It’s easy to see that the majority of the most respectable brands exhibit a European lineage; the American counterparts (e.g. Mark Jacobs) seem to have much less weight in a female mind. The popularity of Hermes might appear unnatural at the first glance. Indeed, this brand doesn’t rank among the most talked about ones, but that’s just because in real life the competent opinions often diverge from what our stereotypes would be prompting for, inevitably looking for D&G in the least expected places. As for Hermes, this brand mainly specializes in handkerchiefs; also it usually takes five years or so standing in the queue in order to get on of their Birkin handbags.

Currently more than 4600 workers are employed at the thirteen Armani Group facilities profiled to produce an assortment of clothes, accessories, glasses, watches, jewelry, perfumery and cosmetics. The brands engaged are Giorgio Armani, Armani Collezioni, Emporio Armani, Armani Jeans, Armani Exchange, Armani Junior, Armani Casa. The retail store network embraces a total of 37 countries hosting 59 Giorgio Armani boutiques, 11 Armani Collezioni stores, 122 Emporio Armani shops, 71 Armani Exchange shops, 13 Armani Jeans shops, 6 Armani Junior stores, 1 Giorgio Armani Accessori shops and 17 Armani Casa stores. The company was founded on 24 July 1975 in Milan as a joint venture by Sergio Galeotti and Giorgio Armani. The latter is still the incumbent president of the company, its executive director and the only shareholder controlling 100% of shares. The new phone was planned as just another step of the massive-scale profile expansion campaign, coming along with other such initiatives as the opening a network of five-star Armani hotels and spas.

A more detailed coverage of the Armani and PRADA brand handsets is available in our article: smape.com/en/reviews/9/samsung_p520_armani-rev.html. The full review of Emporio Armani Samsung Night Effect  will become available at smape.com shortly.

Author: Dmitry Ryabinin

SMAPE.com

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