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First Picture of new Motorola iTunes Phone?
swissfondue writes "macprime.ch. is reporting a link to a pdf presentation by Motorola's North Asia manager Michael Tatelman, VP and GM Mobile devices, made on 21 June 2005 to analysts of Morgan Stanley in Beijing.
Page 15 of the presentation shows a picture of a yet unknown Motorola phone playing iTunes visualizer, with the usual Apple logo.
The silhouette of the phone is not in RAZR style, but in PEBL. It seems to also be featuring a scroll wheel."
"I will never combine an iPod with a cell phone" - Steve Jobs.
"There will never be unions in my plants" - Henry Ford.
In the middle of the presentation there's a slide titled "Changing the Game in Candy Bars" with some cool phones in the background.
These are some really hot products. I wish I had these guys on-board last time I did a demo to a client! But I wonder if cell phones are the new candy bars for geeks?
Candy bars, I would guess, are a fairly stable commodity. A Mars bar last year is going to be the same as this year. Eye candy, sure, but not candy bars.
Will all that consumer production value, it makes you wonder how much these companies actually pay product designers to keep new stuff churning out. There's got to be a lot of money in that business. Everybody's getting into it.
Love Boat Meets Santa's Workshop?
Now they actually have to superimpose them on top of each other (note how the scroll pad intersects the number keys)- Don't these designers understand that this is a horrible design?
It's so obvious what to do: The scroll wheel is great for picking songs and numbers to call out of the address book- For numbers, just use voice recognition: Having a recognizer just for digits works fantastically already- Heck, they wouldn't even have to do the recognition in the handset, but use a central server to handle that part, if it requires too many computrons!
For crissakes, the whole point of the scroll pad is that it is a versatile input device- The scroll pad is all you need!
http://www.mobilemagazine.com/archives/2005/05/mo
However as every monthly offer normally throws in a free phone better than the basic models. So just don't use what you don't like on the free phone.
Actually, I agree with the grandparent poster. It is hard to find a simple phone and even if you don't use the functions of a complex phone, it is still harder to use than a basic phone. For example. My last (fairly basic) phone finally died so I bought the simplest and cheapest phone my provider offered. It is a piece of poorly designed crap, and the complexity of unneeded features makes it hard to use. I think this is at least partially intentional.
The one thing I do more than anything else in my phone is open the phonebook, select an entry, and dial it. On my old phone this was 3 key-presses, two of which were the same key. On my new phone it is nine key-presses, most of which are different keys. The easiest thing to do on my new phone is download new ringtones/color schemes/and pictures all of which cost money and none of which I'm interested in. In fact dropping something on my phone could download a random online item. Maybe this is unintentional, but I doubt it.
Not using the added features is not a good option if I still have to navigate through a dozen menus to get to the one or two basic features I do use. And anyone will tell you that pushing 9 keys while navigating through a bunch of menus is harder than pushing 3.
Remember this is the most basic phone still offered by my provider. They don't offer a simple phone not because there is no demand, but because they are hoping to sell you more crap. For the same reason they will not sell itunes phones when released. They already charge a dollar for a crappy midi songs that last 30 seconds. They sure don't want prices for high quality songs to be only a dollar and transferable from your computer because then they would not be able to gouge people who have foolishly become their customers. If only there was a phone provider that was not evil and greedy.
Snopes doesn't even have a 'true' or 'false' on it... perhaps that'd be a good project for them?
Actually, as much as I despise the Moto V710, I do have to admit that it has AMAZING voice recognition.
No training, completely speaker independant. It does exactly what you describe. You pick it up, tap a button, say "Call Bob", and it calls Bob.
In pretty much all other aspects it's a lousy product not deserving of the hype it recieved. Interesting that the one thing it does very well (voice rec) never got any hype at all.