Irony: Nokia N97's designer is Japanese
By Chris Ziegler 
posted Dec 2nd 2008 7:00PM
posted Dec 2nd 2008 7:00PM
Just days after announcing its full withdrawal (well, Vertu excepted) from the brutally competitive domestic Japanese phone market, what does Nokia do? It goes and announces a phone fully capable of hanging with the very best that the home field players like Sharp, Casio, and Toshiba have to offer on their own turf. That alone is kind of funny -- but the real irony here is that the N97's designer, Shunjiro Eguchi, is Japanese. We've heard of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em," but we're not familiar with the "if you can't beat 'em, quit 'em and steal their talent" tactic. Pretty sneaky, Nokia -- pretty sneaky indeed -- but we've got to wonder why you think this beast of a phone wouldn't fly in Tokyo.
Gotta love the Japanese. They know the way of the samurai.
seriously who writes this crap...
...why is this a surprise that a Japanese employee works for a euro corp??? fill me in.
...irony would be all the American Honda and Toyota employees.
It's ironic because Nokia just stop producing phones for the Japanese market, dumbass. actually read the article next time.
It is so obvious Mr Ziegler wants to be working for Gizmodo with all his Nokia bashing.
Damn your transformers reference
Looks like he's been working with Nokia's design team for quite some time (he even designed the N93 way back when), so it's not as if he was suddenly plucked out of the Japanese mobile phone industry last week. Either way, I'm really excited for this phone. :-)
Ha Ha! Funniest post I've read all day!
I meant to Matt.
Please write articles with substance, not this kind of tabloid stuff. Wake up! It's not the first time there are multinational teams in global companies.
Seriously, read the goddamn article!
Engadget isn't making a point about the team being multinational, they're making a point about the irony of the designed being Japanese when Nokia officially just stopped producing phones for the Japanese market.
READ!
Matt, I read it again.
Still the same comment: tabloid story.
Maybe it is ironic for some people, maybe not. Business as usual.
That's my point... But I guess it takes a bigoted point of view to understand the "Irony" of this article.
I work for Mercedes Benz and I live in the US, I guess all these cars we are selling to American's is an "Irony".
Some implications from the post
1. If you employ a Japanese designer, you should succeed in the Japanese market
2. If you fail in the Japanese market, and then steal Japanese talent, then you have extracted your pound of flesh (or sushi ?)
3. If you fail in the Japanese mainstream market (but not the truly high-end ...vertu still hangs in) and employ a Japanese designer to design a "beast of a phone", then this blog advises you to consider renaming this beast to vertu in Japan. Maybe pigs will fly ..oops, no disrespect meant to pigs or flies.
Eguchi studied in Scandinavia, and now working for Nokia.. how Japanese can he be? Don't expect him to create real Keitai for Nokia. For years the N-series has achieved nothing in Japan, there's no felica electronic money, there's no one-seg DMB tunar, there's no support for i-mode/Y! portals at all, emoji is crippled, no chaku-uta, and they're selling at premium prices when you can get everything not found on the N-series including a fWVGA screen, scaled fonts, much better text-predictive system, and an interface that is a lot fancier and more familiar to the locals. Why bother?
Eguchi has absolutely nothing to do with Nokia's failure in Japan, he has also done nothing to prevent that.
Guys, guys, guys. Guys.
First of all, this was truly intended as a lighthearded bit of irony -- the fact that a beautiful, powerful phone fully capable of succeeding in the Japanese market is being designed by a Japanese dude just days after Nokia pulls out of Japan. Am I the only one seeing it?
Secondly, this is not bashing Nokia in the least -- hell, I praise the N97 right in the post.
Third, settle down.
Why's it fully capable of flourishing in the Japanese market? It doesn't have any *killer* features like those Jap phones do. The N97 just consolidates a bunch of old phones into one clean package.
chris, here's the thing: this is a great phone, but it's targeted at people who speak/read/write languages written in a romanized script - and in those markets that big, charming keyboard is a major selling point. however, the same lovely qwerty means little to the japanese. a few thumb-typed characters are the equivalent of a whole word in english.
for example, in english you have "are you coming to the movie?" or "coming to the movie?" -that's 20 keystrokes minimum. in japanese you have "映画来る?" -only 10 keystrokes. the point is that, relative to romanized scripts, kanji conveys a lot more meaning in short bursts.
phones with full-qwerty keyboards, virtual or physical, don't sell very well in japan.
and also what that other dude said earlier about all the other super-high-tekk features included by domestic manufacturers...
can you dig where i am coming from?
"phones with full-qwerty keyboards, virtual or physical, don't sell very well in japan."
And the Sharp 922SH...?