Sony Ericsson: Maiko Ishida, simply fantastic

Rafe and I popped by the Sony Ericsson stand this afternoon to find out what they had to offer. Normally on the various stands you expect to find semi good looking women and model-like chaps who didn’t quite make the cut at Abercrombie & Fitch holding phones. Airheads, most of them. Nice, polite airheads.

And they know next to nothing about the handsets. That gets annoying. I usually end up having to ‘sell’ the devices to myself whilst the Abercrombie girl or guy is busy trying to describe the ‘goodness’ of the camera.

It’s a total nightmare. Especially if you want to try and capture that ‘pitch’ on camera.

Case in point: I was at a Samsung event the other day. One of the handsome chaps was standing with a girl, both wearing Samsung livery and bearing Samsung phones.

“GSM or CDMA?” I asked.

Blank looks.

“What network is it on?” I asked, hoping that would certainly help narrow it down.

“Errrr,” they both said in unison. Okay then. That clearly wasn’t on the 5-minute briefing they got.

“Do you like the phone?”

Nods.

“What phone do you use?”

Both of them bring out Blackberries. Oooh dear. Fail. I mean, be honest, but be on-message too?

Anyway back to Sony Ericsson. Rafe and I set our expectations to ‘Fucking Shite’ and began setting up the camera.

A chap came over and asked if we needed a demo. Good good. We said yes and explained we needed a demo of everything. I could see Rafe rolling his eyes with boredom. Yet more tedious, ‘and it’s got a megapixels too’ shit.

Turns out our expectations were entirely wrong.

Imagine the shock we got when one of the highly competent chaps showing us one phone said, “Hey, you know what, why don’t you talk to Maiko Ishida, she’s just in the back.”

As the chap strode off purposefully, Rafe and I both looked at each other.

“Who?”

Maiko arrived. A very well turned out young lady. Here she is:

“And what do you do?” asked Rafe.

“I’m responsible for that,” she said, pointing at the Sony Ericsson Vivaz in Rafe’s hand.

“And,” she continued, “I’m also responsible for this,” she said, holding up a Vivaz Pro.

Turns out she’s the Product Planner in charge of delivering both.

And goodness me she knew her stuff. She was excited, energetic, hugely knowledgeable and passionate about her handsets. It made such a refreshing break from the norm. Handset manufacturers really must do more of this. They must bring their backroom design teams out more often. Not only was it a pleasure to film, it was fantastic to get a level of insight into the handset that is generally never available. And we caught it all — authorised — on camera.

We’ll be bringing you Maiko’s videos very soon.