THE MOST DESIRED piece of personal technology that we carried around the thousands of students who roamed the floor of the 2007 BT Young Scientist Exhibition was our SonyEricsson Walkman phones. It helped that our Walkman phones (one of the white ones shown at right) contained tracks we recorded for podcasts with students we interviewed. Those played effortlessly and with fidelty as good or better than through our iPods. Most of the students who handled the phone thought it was cool--and beyond their budgets. Then we explained how you could get the phone for less than EUR 80 through several Irish networks. We should have earned a commission on some of the follow-up sales. With the kind of enthusiasm that we saw from teenagers, it's no wonder that SonyEricsson more than tripled its fourth quarter profit from 2005. The Walkman phones are popular, but certainly not cheap.
See our Walkman phone in action.
