This afternoon my friend Raul excitedly told me about the new Pomegranate phone, which includes a ‘Swiss army knife’ of features, including a razor and a coffee filter. I was just a bit skeptical that you could really get a shave and coffee from a phone, but he was insistent that I check out their web site.
As one of the first people on the block to get an iPhone and a Kindle, and someone who has spent the last few months actively researching mobile devices, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard of the new Pomegranate Phone and immediately had to see for myself who figured out how to include a razor in a cell phone — if nothing else, I figured, it was a great publicity stunt.
Googling Pomegranate Phone took me quickly to http://pomegranatephone.com/ and after waiting a minute for the Flash file to load and then clicking on Enter, I was intrigued by the slick video demo.
Whoever designed this thing is brilliant, its sleek oval shape looks like it would fit easily in the palm of your hand and the elegant slide out keyboard and projector – wow, it looks cool in the demo…
I clicked on the link for the projector feature and I thought my dreams had come true — I know cell phones will all have projectors someday, but this one looked so good as the demo model placed the phone in a small cradle and displayed her PowerPoint presentation on the wall of a conference room.
As I made my way down the list of features to the shaver, I my doubts grew, but when I saw the demo of this little phone making a cup of coffee, it was clear that as much as I might want a phone that could brew a cup of coffee, it couldn’t be real…
A little research later, and I was able to discover that the delightful, but completely fake phone, was part of a publicity stunt for Nova Scotia (last year) – well, at least I had the publicity stunt part right.
Despite the fact that it’s not real, the video demo and the idea for the phone is so clever, the site is worth a visit. And really, someone should add a razor to a phone like this… if you could pull it off, you would get good press (although I’m guessing all those little hairs might not be too good for the device).
Here’s the write up on the device and the ad campaign.
The Pomegranate NS08, Nova Scotia’s fictional multi-tasking smart phone, has made several “best of” lists for marketing and advertising campaigns of 2008. Pomegranate NS08, viral campaign for the Province of Nova Scotia, was one of Marketing Magazine’s picks for the year’s best campaigns and hailed as “the best Internet spoof” and “most popular post” by several blog writers.
Other commentators have focused on the campaign itself. “The campaign is a brilliant use of social media,” says Luis Carranza, digital strategist and writer of the Adcentered blog.
The phone has been dubbed the “iPhone killer” by bloggers world-wide, Twittered by Digg founder Kevin Rose, and the pomegranate phone website has logged more than 560,000 visits from more than 190 countries.
Visit the Discoverers of Nova Scotia site to learn more.
You can read more about the campaign on the Mobile Syrup blog.
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the stats have been updated and there have been more than 2.5 million visits to the site, from more than 200 countries. Well over a year old, the campaign is still intriguing thousands of new viewers everyday.