Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Cell phone may have girls' number

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 01:46:59 -0500

http://www2.ocregister.com/ocrweb/ocr/article.do?id=12407&section=NEWS&year=2002&month=11&day=20

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Wednesday, November 20, 2002

Cell phone may have girls' number

The Roxy is designed to appeal to a marketing niche that phone companies have largely untapped.

By JIM FINKLE

The Orange County Register

It's not waterproof, can't be used on a surfboard, and is only available in pearl white. But it supplies surf reports and can play "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun."

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

Meet the Roxy wireless phone. It's the brainchild of surf-fashion giant Quiksilver and the Boost Mobile cellular company, an Irvine start-up run by a 35-year-old surfer from Australia. They're targeting teenage girls - a fashion-conscious group of phone users who generally don't have the credit history to qualify for ordinary cell-phone service but can afford to buy prepaid minutes in $20 chunks.

With some 137 million Americans spending about $70 billion a year on mobile telecommunications services, cellular providers are increasingly looking to attract teenagers. That's because while more than half of all Americans have cell phones, the industry has reached only about 20 percent of the teenage and college-student markets, according to the tech-industry publication Business 2.0. Boost Mobile, which is majority-owned by Nextel, is the first to unveil a phone targeted at teenage girls. With some 15 million teenage girls in the United States, who wield around $75 billion a year in discretionary funds, Boost Mobile's bigger rivals such as Sprint/Virgin Mobile and Verizon will likely follow suit, analysts said.

"There seems to be a natural match between teenage girls and telephones. It's like peanut butter and jelly," said Gary Stein, a marketing analyst with Jupiter Research. Roxy and Boost Mobile are hoping the combination will be a recipe for profits. Their tactic is to describe the $199 phone as a device specially designed for girls who like to surf, skate or snowboard – and also for girls who like to "hang out with friends." The phone lets users browse the Web for surf reports, has ring tones with songs such as "California Dreamin'" and is durable enough to survive a skateboarding accident.

What a teenage girl wants?

The new Roxy cell phone is designed with teenage girls
in mind, packed with features the company hopes will make it a hot seller
this Christmas season:

Pop-music ring tones: "Girls Just Wanna Have
Fun," "Like a Virgin," "Funky Town," "California
Dreamin' ," "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go"

Info for surfers and snowboarders: Web browser
presets include surfline.com,
snowcountry.com,
espn.com.

Games for gamers: Tetris, Snood and Blazing Boards

Walkie-talkie: $1 a day for unlimited calls
among Boost Mobile and Nextel customers

Pricing: The Web-enabled phone costs $199.
Prepaid cellular usage costs 25 cents a minute.

"This isn't some cheesy Barbie phone. This is a major piece of technology," said Matt Jacobson, a Quiksilver vice president who helped develop the device. "Your mobile phone says as much about you as your car or wristwatch. You go into a restaurant now, sit down and everybody puts their phone on the table."

He has the attention of Katie Jameson, a 14-year-old from Irvine who's getting ready to buy her first mobile phone with money she's saved from a part-time job. The features she's most concerned with are price, ring tones, games and text-messaging capability. "It sounds nice. I'll check it out," Jameson said. The Roxy phone was created by marketing gurus at Quiksilver's Huntington Beach headquarters. Designers spent five months tweaking prototypes that their daughters tested in O.C., where cell phones are almost everywhere. "We're treating wireless devices as a fashion item for the new generation," said Boost Mobile CEO Peter Adderton. He moved to Orange County last year from Sydney, where he founded the company. He's the biggest individual shareholder in the U.S. venture, which is 66 percent owned by Nextel.

The phone, which operates on the Nextel network and is made by Motorola, comes preloaded with 100 minutes worth of service. Users can buy more airtime at 25 cents a minute through "boost" cards costing $20 to $50. They're available at 7-Elevens and, of course, at surf shops. The Roxy phone is one step beyond the $10-to-$20 clip-on "fashion covers" that allow consumers to personalize their cell phones with characters like Hello Kitty or patriotic red white and blue. Roxy's phone is more expensive, but its designers are betting it will have a wider appeal, because its surfer-girl style includes everything from ring tone to brand name and color.

They're hoping sales of their phones will grow with a surge in demand for surf fashions. Sales of products from Quiksilver, Billabong and other surfwear manufacturers have grown in the past decade as manufacturers have marketed to mainstream consumers, many of whom live far from the beach and have never touched a surfboard. "This phone sounds like something that might sell well," said Ann Anderson, a buyer with the Killer Dana surf shop in Dana Point. "It's all about an active, go-to-the-beach, healthy kind of lifestyle."

It's too soon to say how the Roxy phone will fare. The product hits surf-shop display cases the first week of December.

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