It might only add up to 5 over 12 months. To a customer that's not really very much difference, but to a network which might have 10m subscribers, if each one spends 5 more, that's 50m a year. If a phone earned an extra 50 a year, the network would probably be prepared to subsidise the phone more - making it cheaper in the shop. So, for the huge teen market, the more ringtones and coloured fascias, the better. But it goes deeper than that.
People like to have cool phones.
And for that, says Steve Hughes, of industrial design company PSD Associates, who worked on the design of the Mitsubishi Trium phone, design is the key. Simon Rockman puts it simpler that that. What a phone looks like really matters. It would be like me talking about a friend who used to have a 911 and now has a 360. The inference is there without having to say he's gone from a Porsche to a Ferrari.