The Grandmother in the Siheyuan

Chapter 361 Sale
Liu Hua spread his hands: "But we urgently need a mobile communication tool. People are always forced to do things. If you think about it, you will always find a way. So we came up with this product."

A reporter asked, "What advantages does your product have compared to the old-fashioned mobile phones?"

"The advantages are too obvious. Our products are small and thin, have long standby time, and relatively high call quality. Most importantly, they are quite cheap." Liu Hua said with a smile: "I have already talked to the Beijing post office and I have already reduced the phone bill for my family to the lowest price. It's 20 yuan a month, which includes 300 minutes of talk time. If you exceed 300 minutes, it's 10 cents per minute."

The price alone is already very exciting. You know, a call on a mobile phone used to cost one yuan per minute. For many people, it was something they could afford to buy, but not something they could afford to use.

"Don't your products have any flaws?"

Liu Hua nodded: "Nothing in this world is without flaws. That doesn't conform to dialectics. Of course, things have flaws."

"What shortcomings?"

Liu Hua shrugged: "At this stage, the biggest drawback is that our product is limited by the communication protocol, so it cannot make long-distance calls yet and can only be used for communication within a city."

Some people find this drawback fatal, such as business people who frequently need to make phone calls to partners in other cities. The inability to make long-distance calls makes this feature somewhat useless.

However, for most ordinary people, their contacts are mostly relatives, friends, and colleagues in the same city, and 300 minutes is enough for them to use for a month.

Liu Hua said with a smile, "Of course, please rest assured, our postal department is actively researching new communication protocols, and I believe that in less than a year or two, we will be able to make long-distance calls."

Next, Liu Hua explained in detail how to operate this mobile phone. Don't underestimate the system he designed; it was a giant leap forward for the times.

Although it doesn't have many features, Liu Hua added a phone book that allows users to input Chinese characters, use a notepad, set a clock and alarm, and play mini-games.

This is already quite remarkable. Although the memory is not large, it can add fifty numbers, and the notepad can hold up to one hundred words. This kind of function is simply revolutionary.

There are three types of mini-games: Tetris, Snake, and Sokoban. Even dogs won't play these games 30 years from now, but right now, they represent cutting-edge technology.

One hundred mobile phones were prepared on site, allowing reporters to freely dial any number in Beijing. There were even several cars that took them around the city, letting them go wherever they wanted and make calls to each other from any location.

To be fair, Liu Hua's design for the PHS phone was indeed quite powerful, and the call quality was significantly better than that of the older mobile phones.

So the next day, many newspapers featured news about Xiaolingtong on their front pages, praising it to the extreme and covering up its few minor flaws.

What also garnered praise from the media was the format of the press conference. Traditionally, a press conference consisted of a spokesperson reading a few sentences from a prepared statement and then answering questions from reporters; that was all there was to it.

Liu Hua's press conference took a unique approach, and this interactive style was refreshing. As a result, this press release method was inherited by people in the semiconductor and internet industries, and was eventually carried forward and popularized by his grand-disciple.

The Xiaolingtong (a type of mobile phone service) is scheduled to be released on May 1st, and there are still more than half a month to go. Factories are fully stocking up, but Beijing Post Office is still not bold enough.

With a current resident population of around ten million, Beijing Post Office believes that if even one in a hundred people can buy one, that would be quite remarkable, and they plan to stock 100,000 units. Liu Hua thinks that even if they stock 500,000 units, they might all be snapped up. After all, this is Beijing, and a significant portion of the residents here are either wealthy or influential.

Despite his repeated attempts to dissuade them, Beijing Post Office stubbornly insisted that the unit price of over two thousand yuan, plus one cent per minute, was still a bit expensive and unaffordable for ordinary people.

Moreover, this little smart phone is a new thing and has not been tested by the market, so most people will be skeptical. Therefore, it is best to be cautious in terms of its release.

Unexpectedly, once the news was published in the newspaper, people started going to the nearby post office every day to ask if they had any PHS phones for sale.

Perhaps because there was no such pre-sale model before, the postal service was caught off guard, and it also lacks the service awareness to do so, so the postal staff are complaining.

The leader also felt that this time the mobile phone might become popular, so he called Liu Hua to talk about it.

Liu Hua laughed and said, "No, the service industry will be the pillar industry of society in the future. Your employees need to have a service-oriented mindset. These people who come to ask questions are our bread and butter. How can we not have a good attitude towards them? It would be best to write down all the people who come to ask questions. That way, you can do a count and know roughly how many people will be able to buy a PHS phone."

The postal department readily agreed and began conducting incomplete statistics. The results were astonishing: the incomplete data showed that they had already produced 200,000 units.

Therefore, the 100,000 units that the postal service had prepared were far from enough, and they had to place an emergency order.

On May 1st, the day the product was officially released, nearly 500 post offices in Beijing were bustling with activity. Most of them were decorated with red flags, crowded with people, and filled with the sounds of gongs, drums, and firecrackers.

Of course, not everyone buys a PHS phone. Some people are just there to watch the spectacle. They can't afford one themselves, but it's good to see how others use it.

The Liu family had long been equipped with mobile phones; the four family members had three mobile phones, and even the numbers were auspicious digits.

Most people who buy PHS phones look the same: they clutch a bag tightly, after all, it costs several thousand yuan, and losing it would be a heartache for years.

On this day, the Beijing police were on high alert, with a large number of officers stationed outside every post office to maintain order.

As people gradually became wealthier, pickpocketing activities became increasingly rampant. In this year's variety show, Niu Qun and Feng Gong even created a crosstalk-style pickpocket company to satirize the chaos at the time.

With so many people carrying large sums of money to buy PHS phones these days, there's bound to be a lot of swindlers among them.

It is said that the police arrested hundreds of thieves that day, which was a great achievement for at least half a year. The gangs of thieves were dealt a heavy blow and will be unable to recover for at least half a year. The natural conditions in the market have improved a lot.

At eight o'clock, the post office opened, and the atmosphere immediately reached a climax.

(End of this chapter)