Simple Phone Makers War for 60-Plus Market

BARCELONA—Are you over 60? A growing group of mobile phone makers here at Mobile World Congress are vying for your business with new lineups of clear, simple phones. Doro's next phones are coming to the US soon, and products from Emporia, Bea-fon and Telefunken may not be far behind.

Northern Europe is a hub for simple-phone makers, because the populations of those countries are aging quickly. The simple phones coming out of Europe almost all have loud speakers, big buttons, clear screens with large numbers, long battery life and "panic buttons" on the back which call an emergency number when pressed.

Swedish firm Doro already has two simple phones out in the US on Consumer Cellular. I liked their 410gsm, a white flip phone. This year, they're introducing two major new models. The PhoneEasy 615gsm looks and feels a lot like the previous model, but it's been improved all around. Now it has an external display for caller ID, Bluetooth 3.0 for wireless headsets, a 2.4-inch, 320x240 color main screen, and a 3.2-megapixel camera with multimedia messaging support. Support for 3G networks will improve voice quality, though at the expense of battery life.

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Doro rep Stu Campbell said grandparents were increasingly asking for cameraphones to snap shots of the grandkids or to trade messages with them, and Doro is delivering a more full-featured phone to reply to demand. The Doro 615gsm will appear around midyear.

Both Doro and Emporia, an Austrian simple-phone maker, have phones that work with safety systems that attach to your wrist. Emporia's looks like an actual watch; Doro's PhoneEasy 680gsm's attachmentis more of a safety pendant on a band. Both gadgets connect to phones via RF and give owners a one-touch emergency, "I've fallen and I can't get up!" calling capability, transmitting their GPS location to family or emergency services. I can see men going for Emporia's watch option, but the design is too clunky for women.

Bea-fon is small, but they're innovative – at least within their very limited feature set. The Dutch company's phones have color displays and a "magnifying glass" function for their VGA cameras, which lets you use the camera to magnify text for display on the screen. The phone also has GPS, and when you press its panic button, it sends out a text message to your emergency contacts with your location.

I liked Bea-fon's S700, which combines a GSM cell phone with a DECT home phone. When you're home, it's a home phone that fits into a cradle and works with your land line. When you're out, it becomes an AT&T or T-Mobile cell phone. It's a great device for seniors who are comfortable with the idea of home phones, but want to roam with them.

The company also has a chunky slider phone, the S50, with a very loud speaker, a flashlight on top and a panic button on the back. None of the other simple-phone makers showed me a slider.

Bea-fon's chief strategy officer Jan Hurkmans said the small company was just now starting to explore opportunities in the US, but that they'd be open to working with any US carrier – even to making a CDMA version of their phones for Sprint or Verizon.

Telefunken/Hagenuk's advantage, to English speakers, very well might be the name: doesn't everyone want a little more telefunk? (The word isn't funny in German – it means "radio-phone.") But we might see the German company's products in the US, as exec Ralf Braun said he saw AT&T reps nosing around his booth at the show.

The company's simple phones look a lot like others: they have both candy-bar and flip phone models, both with big buttons and big text. Braun said his company's strength was design, but Telefunken, Bea-fon and Emporia products look very similar. The fonts are subtly different and the front of Telefunken's simple phone is bowed out a bit more, but it's really going to be down to a matter of taste and call quality.

All of these phones may appear by the end of the year, if US carriers pick them up.