Reshaping Americans’ View of the Cellphone

“This is all about new frontiers,” Frank Nuovo said, handing me a rectangular object about the size of two lipstick cases laid end to end, with a mirrored surface and a circular unmarked dial on one side.

It’s the Nokia 7380, a cellphone with an integrated video-capable camera and a voice recorder but, interestingly, no keypad. Users can dial by voice command or by using the dial to select digits on a screen that materializes from the mirrored surface, like the reflection in a pond. The old way of tapping out a phone number with your thumb? Forget it.

“We’re breaking all the rules about what a traditional mobile phone should be,” Nuovo says. “We’re arguing that many of our devices are computers or music devices, or cameras first, and phones second. And these other functions are making us reconsider the device’s primary shape and form.”

Nuovo, 44, hasn’t spent his entire career out on the cutting edge. If you have ever owned a Nokia cellphone, it’s probably one he had a hand in designing. Now the Finnish company’s chief of design, the California native started his relationship with Nokia in 1989. The company, looking for design help in its early foray into the mobile phone market, called the office of DesignWorksUSA, the firm started by design guru Chuck Pelly, then in Agoura. (The firm is now owned by BMW.) Nuovo, a junior employee staffing the office in the pre-Christmas doldrums, took the call.

Within a year he was making monthly visits to Finland, helping design the products such as the 5100 that soon made Nokia the leading mobile phone manufacturer in the world.

At the time, he recalls, the guiding principle of cellphone design was “performance -- talk time and robustness. We really wanted to build our reputation as a company that made products that last and are dependable.”

The 5100’s multicolored, switchable covers -- which Nuovo helped conceive -- were a marketing revelation. “That was everything about making the phone personalized, individual,” he says. The 5100 is often cited as one of the best-selling consumer gadgets in history.

In 1995, Nokia offered Nuovo the chance to set up a full-time dedicated design center. “They said, ‘Where do you want it? London, Helsinki, Copenhagen?’ I said, ‘Los Angeles, of course.’ ”

The choice wasn’t surprising. Nuovo had graduated in 1986 from the Art Center College of Design, the Bauhaus-styled institute of industrial design in the hills above Pasadena. He was wired in to networks of creative people in the film and multimedia communities, as well as to the thriving automotive design community on the West Coast.

And there was the lifestyle -- “so conducive to taking a tablet outside and sitting by the beach or a tree and sketching away.” Today Nuovo’s office, in the western reaches of the San Fernando Valley in a location that Nokia is paranoid about giving away, serves as the headquarters for a network of design teams as far off as Japan, China, Germany, Britain, Finland and Denmark.

A compact, voluble man with dark hair who has been said to resemble, at various times, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman and Jerry Seinfeld, Nuovo met me one day recently at the Art Center College. Student projects were hung about the corridors for an end-of-term exhibition, many of them showing the potent influence of Hollywood and the automobile industry, especially in its stylized “concept car” vein. When we sat down to talk, Nuovo illustrated his points by pulling a succession of phones out of a big black bag, until the desk between us was cluttered with no fewer than 26 different models.

Most bore at least a passing resemblance to the form that has made Nokia phones distinctive -- rectangular and slightly ovoid, with rounded edges. Indeed, that form became something of an issue for Nuovo and Nokia about two years ago, after Nokia’s archrival Motorola scored a big hit with its RAZR, a sleek stainless-steel flip-open phone that filled a design niche that Nokia wasn’t serving. The RAZR and other such “clamshell” phones are partially blamed for Nokia’s loss of five points in worldwide market share, to 32%. (It’s still far ahead of second-place Motorola, which has 18%.)

Nuovo looks a bit irked at the suggestion that Nokia had something against clamshells. He points out that the company marketed flip-open phones for years. Its assault on the RAZR, however, will be spearheaded by a new phone, the 8801, a gleaming metal model with a pop-up mechanism that reveals the keypad with a satisfying tactile click.

For all that, Nuovo’s real goal is to acclimate American buyers to something he says European and Asian customers have long accepted -- that the cellphone can be a fashion accessory, not merely a utilitarian appendage. In 2002 he persuaded Nokia to launch a luxury subsidiary named Vertu, which markets high-quality phones in gold and platinum, starting at $4,900 and reaching $32,000 for the top-line model, through high-end retailers such as Neiman Marcus. He’s also stepping up the production of phones in all sorts of outre shapes and with functions such as music and game playing and Internet connectivity.

Nuovo understands that introducing Americans to extreme stylishness in cellphones means establishing a retail system radically different from today’s, in which most people obtain their phones from their mobile carriers, choosing among a handful of deeply discounted or free models. It’s a rare user who even contemplates replacing a working cellphone unless switching carriers or starting a new contract, and even rarer for customers to maintain a quiver of different phones for different occasions, as one might keep a drawerful of cufflinks or watches.

Nuovo’s voice takes on a frustrated edge as he ponders the sheer indifference that American consumers show toward phone style. “You invest in something you design as a premium product -- expensive materials, smaller components -- and within six months it’s going out the door for free. With these subsidies, how do you build an understanding of value by the consumer?”

Not that he’s against subsidies, he hastens to add; after all, they’re what made the cellphone a mass product in this country in the first place. But is mass marketing enough?

“We could forever make phones we knew people like and would sell by the millions,” he says. “But without pushing the boundaries, how would we know where to go?”