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Comment by siamese_puff | Hacker News Reader

Heineken seems to have created a concept phone that is a translucent flip-phone similar to what you would use circa 2007. Seems like it introduced typical t9 styled typing with a camera.

It’s unclear to me why a beer company paired up with a fashion company to make a smartphone, but the site doesn’t really explain much. I didn’t see a price, release date or specs. The site is behind an age wall and additionally an e-mail wall to receive any useful info. Overall, terrible execution on the marketing front IMO

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Drinking more Heineken and looking good while doing it are facilitated by a phone that encourages you to live in the moment.

Any businesses that succeed primarily because of direct social engagement would benefit from this, and given what seems like a growing sentiment among many overly-connected people that “I just wish I could go back to a feature phone”, it makes a lot of sense to me that we’d see investment in this space from the alcohol/fashion industries. If they’re thinking ahead, they’d be eager to address the growing desire for re-establishing IRL social structures and finding a way to unplug from this presently toxic iteration of social media.

The existing tech industry is not incentivized to actually create products like this. It’s intriguing to me that there’s big money interested in making this happen.

It's quite obvious Heineken is not a company that makes phones nor does it plan to become one.

The goal of this was accomplished the moment it was posted here and we are talking about it, as many other millions around the world are.

Great execution on the marketing front, they only had to put together a landing page and some prototype renders, they are even gathering a bunch of emails for free!

All other things aside, if a bunch of articles get written about the phone, a lot of people think of Heineken ;-). I'm far from a marketing expert, but I have definitely seen less effective marketing campaigns.

The age gate is because it's hosted on heineken.com. boringphone.com is a different project with a similar concept.

why in the everloving hell do age gates make you enter an exact birthdate rather than a simple yes/no button.

Because you store that as well for "data science".

if a data scientist thinks that data is even remotely accurate they should not be a data scientist.

I'd be curious to see how the distribution compares between birth records and agegates.

I expect an oversaturation of dates like 1/1/80. Hell, I guess we can use 9/9/99 now too.

I seem to recall Steam publishing something like that a while back. A huge fraction of their user base was born on January 1st ;)

That may at least partially be because the year is the only part of the birth date you enter that's saved for the next time Steam shows you an age gate. I've tried to change it back to the correct month and day a few times over the years, but next time it will default back to year-01-01.

Do you remember the KFC game console.

That's what this feels like.

No, I don't remember that at all. Is it real? Seems like a small form factor PC with KFC branding: https://landing.coolermaster.com/kfconsole/

I don’t think they ever produced any

Why does Red Bull build race cars with Oracle?

Mostly beacuse someone at the company thought it would be fun and it's someone else's money they are spending.

The main question- does it have snake or not :)

One of the photos shows it does, woohoo

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