Have you noticed how craftily mobile phone manufacturers hide the single but probably most controversial piece of information – SAR?

(SAR stands for Specific Absorption Rate – a measure of radio wave energy exposure upon a cellular phone user. It varies greatly between phone models even by the same maker)

So far only Siemens has been found to clearly state this parameter on the product pages in its website. Samsung-Europe publishes it on their website quite prominently, but not in the product manuals.

All the others producers checked (Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, Motorola) guard it pretty heavily.

For e.g. Nokia makes these data available in seemingly convenient form but keeps them on an isolated domain. Why not on the same pages with the rest of the technical data? That’s easy – to exclude them from the product selection process.

Sony-Ericsson buried this 2-significant-digit value into a 2.5 MB (!) PDF file – a dedicated monster for each single cell phone model – probably to deter the inquisitiveness of the potential customers.
FYI: it’ll take an average dial-up user (these users still comprise some 40-60% of all home users or more, depending on the market) half an hour to download this “document” of the WHOLE TWO decimal digits for only one phone model.

So why’s that?
Do they just keep customers for brainless cattle?
Do they fear that customers are going to make “wrong” purchasing decisions based on “unimportant”, but highly vexed data which SAR definitely is?

The marketer’s logic in Sony-Ericsson’s case is fairly clear: dial-up users are overly conservative folks who don’t understand the benefits of broadband which is very cool and it is very wrong not to choose new technology. These marketers aren’t willing to realize that dial-up users are just being reasonable in not going for crazy speeds (or any other new “cool” stuff for that matter) – they can’t read text at 2 Megabits per second anyway, so why pay for it?

Therefore, mobile makers probably think, it’s better to liberate these unfortunate from any distractions. Or otherwise these consumers will risk conservatively sticking to their old handsets thus spoiling sales prospects.