Are Gadgets Shipped in the USA Inferior to Those Shipped Elsewhere?

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Fazal Majid asked an important question on Saturday in an entry on his weblog entitled Are Americans becoming second-class consumers? He cites several situations where manufacturers shipped products with the same name in two different markets, but the U.S. version had fewer features or lower quality components than the equivalent product destined for other markets. He cites:

Majid also cites laptops and portable electronics imported by vendors like Dynamism that U.S. subsidiaries of international electronics companies consider poor fits for the largest single electronics market in the world.

These are all good points. But, when we discuss products that make it to the U.S. market late or not at all, how about GSM phones like the Nokia 6600 that’s been out in Europe and Asia for months, but has only been made available in the USA by T-Mobile within the last week? This phone is hot and it’s hard to understand why Nokia would not want to ship as many of these in this country as it could. I’d think this would be particularly important, considering Nokia’s recent problems achieving predicted handset sales volumes.


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