THEY have spent billions on the latest technology, cramming our mobile phones with everything from e-mail and cameras to videos and music.

Now it turns out that all their customers really want is a mobile that looks good.

Yesterday the world’s biggest mobile phone manufacturers disclosed that the main selling point of the hottest mobile devices is their aesthetic appeal.

Never mind Bluetooth, the must-have phones are often no more than ordinary handsets painted in pretty colours, or covered with materials such as denim, wood veneer, suede or leather.

Last year Sarah Jessica Parker flashed her rose-pink Swarovski rhinestone-encrusted mobile on the streets of New York in Sex and the City. Now trendsetters are more likely to be pounding the pavements of Russia, China and Brazil after Nokia’s prediction that 80 per cent of the next billion handsets will be sold in emerging markets.

The success of the customised phone is summed up in the story of one model: the Motorola Razr. The phone had been on the market in plain black for more than a year when the company had the brainwave of painting it in a shocking pink.

Carphone Warehouse, which took the phone exclusively for Christmas, shifted more than 600,000 units and the phone has spawned several imitations.

Technology experts pointed yesterday to a similarly gaudily coloured batch of Japanese phones from DoCoMo as examples of what Britons can expect to see this year.

Ben Wood, an analyst at Gartner, the IT research and advisory company, said: “There are essentially only four designs of phone — the candybar, clamshell, swivel and slider — and besides, in countries like the UK everyone has one. So where do the manufacturers go next? Repackage them.”

At the 3GSM World Congress, the biggest mobile industry gathering of the year, in Barcelona yesterday, instead of boasting about ultra-advanced applications, manufacturers including Samsung and Sony Ericsson, were pushing phones whose main asset was their thinness — the Samsung Z150 is a mere 9.8mm thick.

The change has in part been prompted by the huge success of the iPod, a design so desirable that customers keep going back for the latest model.

Scott Ochander, global brand manager at Inclosia, which “finishes” phones with materials such as leather or toughened glass, said: “One operator brings out some hot new integrated camera and they all follow, until essentially you cannot tell them apart. Understandably it is what is on the outside, and what the device says about a person, that is much more important in selling it.”

However, 3G is not redundant, the experts say. “If the beauty of the phone helps to put it into people’s hands, then the operators can then light it up for them with all the 3G applications,” Mr Wood said.

Nokia predicted sales of 3G handsets to reach 100 million units worldwide this year while Vodafone unveiled the first batch of 3.5G phones, the next generation of next-generation mobiles, with speeds theoretically up to 25 times faster than existing 3G handsets.

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