AS THE world’s flashiest mobile phone-makers meet in Cannes to show off their latest models, the most sophisticated market for gadgets in the world has fallen in love with a handset that has all the sex appeal of a brick.

The 3GSM World Congress in the South of France is being used to unveil state-of-the-art handsets capable of showing full-length feature films or doubling as an iPod music system.

By contrast, the “S-Phone”, which has attracted thousands of Japanese subscribers since its introduction by the Tu-Ka network last November, has no function except that of a basic telephone. It does not even have a screen.

The S-Phone has been designed to appeal to Japan’s rapidly growing — and largely technophobe — elderly population. Its buttons are large and perform only one function each. The volume is set high. There are no text messages and definitely just the one ring tone.

The battery is designed so that if the owner forgets to charge it for days on end and fails to use the phone during the intervening time, it will still happily receive a call a month later.

A spokesman for Tu-Ka said that perhaps the most attractive feature of the S-Phone was that, unlike its complicated rivals, it does not come with an instruction manual of intimidating thickness.

The introduction of its dumbed-down phone has reversed a miserable three years for Tu-Ka, and, to universal surprise, propelled the network ahead of Vodafone in the Japanese rankings of subscriber growth. The British company has slipped to last place.

According to figures compiled by Merrill Lynch, Tu-Ka gained 15,500 new users in the month after the S-Phone went on sale while Vodafone gained just 900 in the same month in spite of a pre-Christmas marketing drive on its high-tech 3G services.

Fumie Ochiai, a 68-year-old shopper in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, said: “My daughter worries about me because I live on my own now. She tried buying me a normal mobile phone but it made so many noises during the night that I turned it off and hid it in a drawer. I find the microwave a bit complicated, but my daughter said that this phone could even be used by idiots.”

A huge advertising campaign for the S-Phone makes a virtue of its total lack of sophistication. In one television advert, a haggard-looking grandfather complains to his young relatives that every time he is handed a machine purporting to be simple, it never is. He is passed an S-Phone and is forced to admit that it is absolutely foolproof.

Vodafone has quickly learnt the S-Phone lesson and is planning to introduce its own version in Britain later this year. Vodafone officials said that the Japanese example had clearly demonstrated the market for a handset aimed at the elderly.

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