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Nokia Shows Off Phone with Printable Faceplate
jonknee writes "Nokia is prepping a new phone that one-ups all the other attempts at face plates... you can print your own! Just place one of the template pages it comes with (you can buy more) into your ink jet, and make a nifty design that isn't mass marketed at every mall this side of the Mississippi. The template is perforated so you can get a nice fit around the keys. The phone looks pretty nifty as well: camera, flashlight, FM radio and about everything else." It might be fun to rename someone's keys as a practical joke, not that I've ever done it to anyone's computer keyboard.
If I had heard about this any place except Slashdot, I would have assumed that the intended market for this product was 12-year-old girls. I had to re-read the article twice to confirm that there really wasn't anything at all interesting about this phone. News for Nerds? What the hell?
i dunno how often you get water INSIDE your phone.. but that's not usually a problem for me.
it looks like the plates go under the plastic covers rather than staying on the the top(heck, if you just want that then you can print your own covers now and glue them on the phone).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
WhoTF needs a phone with a camera, flashlight, radio and other bullshit, if what a true geek needs is gprs, bluetooth and maybe 802.11?
Great story, but I have to call shennanigans.
I don't believe any touch typist is going to miss the fact that keys are transposed when doing hunt-and-peck. To touch-type you have to know where the keys are pretty well, and if you move keys around it's going to feel strange. Even if a first person gets fooled, I doubt a second person will.
Still, it's a great story, and if it isn't true, it ought to be.
The Straight Dope took a crack at the question: http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mphonedial.htm l.
To quote the conclusion: "Basically, calculator keypad design evolved from cash registers, while telephone keypad design evolved from the rotary dial. Tradition has kept them that way ever since."
Strangely enough, I've just posted to a diabetes newsgroup on this...
Having a mobile phone with a built-in blood glucose meter would be a real useful thing, especially since the number of people with the disease is growing at an alarming rate.
Imagine what could also be done--you could IR, bluetooth, USB or phone in your results to your computer or an online data store or your docs. If your BG indicated a possible hypo or hyper attack you could press OK to dial one or more numbers for assistance, or the phone could be pre-programmed to automatically dial for help if you did not hit NO/Cancel within, say 10 seconds. With calendaring and alarms, the phone could also remind when it's time to take medication.
As a type 2 diabetic, I have to carry a meter around with me that's about the same size as a mobile phone, so having the two integrated would be great.
AT&ROFLMAO
This "innovation" reminds me of the Mattel Intellivision game console from the 1980s. Take a look at the front page of IntellivisionLives.com - you can see the plastic faceplate on one of the controllers.
;-)
Now that I think about it - the controllers have a very phone-like interface. I wonder where the Nokia engineers got the idea..
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