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Futuristic Nokia Concepts Reviewed
nitinah writes "Nokia design concepts is an ongoing initiative from the Finnish communications giant that invites designers around the world to create breakthrough cellphone designs. Phonemag has coverage of this year's entries, which includes the
Aki,
a wrist wrap device for programmed self expression that tunes its behavior and outgoing/incoming communications based on the moods and gestures of the user,
and allows 'talking' without speaking, just by gesture.
Another design is the Acibo, which features a mini buddy device that has an entirely voice driven all-in-one personal communicator which
can be charged by bio-energy. More featured concepts include a wearable, shock proof and waterproof device, the SURV1, a necklace based communicator called
the Global Nomad
, and a complete communication device called the Colores, with virtual storage to access all your personal information on the go."
Phone functions have been removed from all of these devices due to space limitations.
The user interfaces for these things completely suck. Anyone remember that retarded "rotary dial" interface on the 3650? Yeah, well, here's more from the same people who brought you that piece of crap ...
that Nokia is out of ideas? Can't they go down the street to Ikea and get some more?
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Subject says it all.
Most companies are making their phones for the carriers. Which means out of the last 4 camera phones I've had, I've had to buy a service to get the pictures off. Yeah, I can buy some 3rd party hack to do the job, but these hacks would work so much better if the phone had been designed for my personal use. Instead, they're designed so the carriers can make more money.
So, they can make all the fancy phones they want, I've ceased buying them.
Now that I think about it, I'm probably the only one that cares...
My ZooLoo
In this case, I think Nokia need it. They have had the same lead designer for ten years or so; which might explain why their phones all look so similar too.
Anyhow - fresh blood and ideas are always welcome. Think Appple, they do have some wacko ideas coming out regularly. Who else would have suggested an iPod, or those ****ugly iMac? Nokia need som more weird things too, after a decade of mobile traditionalism.
this isn't even realistic. phones have been the same, weak, slow, useless crap for the last 10 years. even if these phones are plausibile, they are totally unergonomic and unrealistic. i mean what planet are these guys on?
even if any of these devices become plausible, the cell phone companies won't touch them because they don't involve ripping off the customer for $3 ringtones
furthermore, isn't it easier to just push buttons rather than to remember stupid gestures that you have to act out in public and look like a complete idiot?
Maybe you are no longer the target market for cell phone companies. At any rate, these things in the article are called prototypes, and they are absolutely necessary when you want compete in the market for gadgets that do more and more things every day. Nobody knows what kids will want tomorrow. But if you keep a fresh buffet of shiny new things for them to pick from, you are sure to keep their attention.
As for your complaints of the current phones on the market, "Phones that work. Phones that sound good. Phones that have decent battery life." From what I understand and have seen, nearly every phone in the store has those attributes. I myself have a brand new phone that I picked up about a month ago. It is a phone that you would not want. Two high resolution color displays, mp3 player with stereo speakers, 1 megapixel video / still camera.
"It works. " Check.
"It sounds good." Well, I have had no problem hearing people. I have taken it to a bowling alley, and people I talked to did not hear the ambient noise in the background. The speakerphone is also very clear and loud, and surprisingly lacks the echo that seems to be prevalent on most landline phones. I was impressed.
"It has a decent battery life." I use about 500 minutes a month. I have gone as long as 36 hours without plugging it in and making average amounts of calls throughout my two days. Also, I was testing the phone when I first got it. I watched a little over an hour's worth of video, listened to music for about an hour, and of course made some phone calls (didn't take note of how many) but in the end the battery was showing half full. Not exactly scientific, but batteries and power management are getting good across the board.
So, my recommendation is to buy the phone that you hate the least, and in a week you will be used to it. There you go.
I'm a minister!
concepts are like fashion crap you seen on catwalks, experiments. if I wanted a phone that didn't do anything else than make calls and get sms's, I'd still use my old 3110 - which works perfectly for making calls. the 3110 doesn't double as a mp3 player though, it doesn't take pictures(I don't carry my 'real' digital camera everywhere), it doesn't let me get into irc, it doesn't let me ssh, it doesn't let me read news for practically free(sms ordering news is just damn expensive). hell, the 3110 doesn't let me read slashdot while in a train.
anyways, even nokia makes still low-end phones that have intentionally cut features, like 1110, if you want to pay practically the same you would for a j2me phone with a color screen..
put it this way: why would you as a _geek_ want to pay the same for a device that only does one thing as you would for a device that has flexibility to do a lot of things - if you wish - and it still does the phone calls good. call quality in a well built network has been excellent since gsm came(first gsm network was launched in 1991), if your network is shit then it doesn't really help what the phone is. also if your operator ties it's plans to phones you don't like then it's your operators fault, not the phone manufacturers who just manufacture what is bought from them..
switch operators if your mobile doesn't work as it should and you know it's not borked.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The best part is that they're continuing to add functionality to these phones when the existing functionality already doesn't work very well at all. My boss has one of those PDA-cell phone combos, and the thing spontaneously reboots itself for no particular reason at least twice a day.
He recently discovered that he can make it crash at will simply by checking his email on his desktop machine at the same time the phone is attempting to check his email. I mean honestly, what the fuck is up with that?
I understand the desire to push the technological envelope, but you can't continue to add new features by sacrificing reliability. Oh wait, I guess Microsoft proved that that kind of business model could make you billions of dollars, so maybe you can.
I've been in the software development industry for 10 years, and this continues to be a huge problem. Management pushes for more and more functionality without ever allowing adequate time to make sure the functionality you're adding actually works worth a damn. The result is that you get 500 features in one device, and if you're lucky 2 of those features actually work as advertised on any kind of a consistent basis.
You pretty much said everything I was thinking. These are by far some of the worst ideas I've seen in mobile technology. Fortunately they are just designs and will never make it to the market. In fact Im left wondering how some of these things even relate to mobile phones and devices. Its like they got together and had some weird conversation.
Nokia Exec : Hey you designers over there, you go design us some futurist concepts for mobile devices.
Designer 1: Sure thing, ok so what are we going to do???
Designer 2: Hey lets make things like electronic necklaces and talking robot heads.
Designer 1: Are you sure thats what Nokia wants? I thought they were into mobile phones
Designer 2: Ya ok, so we will throw in some ridiculous fragile looking thing, cause all futuristic crap must look fragile, and then we design my talking head.
Designer 1: Whats up with you and this talking head???
Designer 2: Just think, phone sex will never be the same again hehehe.
Designer 1: OHHH DAMN, thats good. Every nerd will buy one. Your brilliant.
Designer 2: Ya, we will even have it so that it will recharge while the user does a stroking motion. And with most nerds I would imagine that would be a lot.
Designer 1: HOLY CRAP, Im sold.
Nokia Exec: Me too.
I tried that. I found after a week, I just hated it more than I had hated the other options.
Here's a better idea, and one that's quite buildable - the two piece jewelry phone. One piece is an earring; that's the speaker end. The other is a necklace or choker; that has the microphone. Voice controlled, using something like Wildfire's semi-intelligent interface. No ring tones; a subtle whisper tells the user who's calling, and a head-toss quietly diverts the call to voicemail. Finally, an elegant phone.
Basic things like not randomly dropping calls are not solved problems. Most people blame the network. I live in Manhattan, though, which judging by both the carrier's maps an my own personal experience, has essentially perfect cellular coverage. If you are outside, you will have a strong signal. So, around here, when a call drops, it's not the network's fault.
Once that variable gets eliminated, it becomes very, very obvious that some phones do much better than others for reliability and reception. In particular, although there are differences between models, in general Nokia seems to do quite a lot better than Motorola and Sony Ericsson. That's the major reason I keep buying their phones even though they're ugly.
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I live in Finland - the country that Nokia is based in and a country that has been at the forefront of mobile phone development for at least the past 10 years. I have to say I don't understand at all the "I want a phone that is just a phone" or "I want a phone that works" type of comments.
I can't even remember when I've had a phone that didn't work. In the past 10+ years, the battery life on every phone I've had has been good enough that I have charged them about twice a week; that's 3+ days of real-life battery life that includes plenty of calls, text messages, etc. Reception has always been good and the only time I remember having dropped calls is when I've been in an elevator going down to an underground parking hall or something as extreme. Hell, even on my recent hiking trip in the mountains in Norway, there was reception half of the time. And that was far from any civilization! On the roads on the way to the mountains, there was good reception 100% of the time. Either way, reception is more about the deployment of base stations than about the phone. The last phone I had with an external antenna was 5 years ago anyway.
As far as functionality is concerned, I also don't get the complaint at all. There are plenty of models for all tastes. Let's look at Nokia, which this article is about:
Nokia 1100, 1110, 2650, 2600, 3100, 3120, 3220. None of them have a camera. You are free to pick one. Or if your carrier doesn't offer one, it's probably because nobody wants them!
Having said that, I wish people would get over the "phone" label. It's a device. Who gives a damn about what the name of it is? Not wanting a "phone" to have a camera or mp3 player is similar to saying that your don't want your computer to have the ability to play mp3's or view photos from your digital camera. It's a COMPUTER. It should only COMPUTE.
Seriously, it's a device and it has a bunch of features that makes sense to people in their daily lives. And you get whichever device (or none) that makes sense to you.
I have a Nokia 6630 right now and it's perfect for my use. It has 3G, EDGE and GPRS. It has tri-band GSM and it has Bluetooth. That means I can use it pretty much anywhere in the world! And with 3G/EDGE and Bluetooth, I can get Internet access to my laptop anywhere in the world too. I can sit in Starbucks in Shanghai and surf the net and read emails on the laptop while the phone is in my backpack, without ever touching a button on it. That's important to me, because I travel a lot and because I like to work in cafes, restaurants etc.
The phone has a 1.3 megapixel camera and a lens with less crappy quality than on most other mobile phone cameras. That allows me to snap pics of booths on tradeshows and MMS or email them to colleagues back in Finland. "Check out what company X is showing!". Or I can send my wife pictures of the beautiful lake by the sauna at the company off-site. "Wish you were here!". Obviously, it's not a replacement for my actual camera, which takes 100x better quality pictures. But the useage is different and I don't want to carry around my camera everywhere!
The phone has an email app. It lets me check my email when I'm somewhere where I don't want to take the laptop along. For example, I could be hiking in Lapland but I still want to check if we got that major deal that I was hoping would have been done before my vacation began. I don't use it much, but there are times when it's been a real life saver.
The phone has an XHTML web/wap browser. I use it to check the news, weather, TV-program listings, view webcams from Finland when I'm traveling, check what movies are in what theater and at what time, and even to order movie tickets once in a while. It's also good to do the occasional Wikipedia or Google lookup.
It has Symbian OS and Java, so I can play some fun games on it to pass the time on the subway or while waiting for a connecting flight. Or I can run some other useful apps, like IRC, AOL IM, MSN IM, SSH, BusWatch, WorldMate, Opera, etc. There's tons,
Ever since Nokia won the best design team award back in 2003 they have been cranking out crap. I was developing software for cell phones and everytime a new Nokia model would come in we would laugh at it. Not only was the UI usually braindead (3650 rotary dial comes to mind - or how about the stupid NGage "sidetalker"), but the electronics kept perpetuating the same flaws. Our company was were putting music on cell phones (over the air delivery of full tracks), and for some reason Nokia insisted on mono 16KHz audio on their high end Symbian phones. They kept coming out with new plastic, but the same old pathetic innards, model after model. Our customers were begging us to get decent sound on the Nokias and we were constantly explaining to them how Nokia was the problem, not our software (which played wonderful stereo 44KHz sound on MS Smartphone devices). Anyhow, if Nokia had put half the effort into improving the inside as they spent on "improving" the outside, they would have been much better off.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
It has tri-band GSM and it has Bluetooth. That means I can use it pretty much anywhere in the world!
(Bluetooth of course has nothing to do with where you can use it.)
If only that were true. The world uses four bands. Nokia for some reason likes to market 850/1800/1900 MHz phones (sorry, "devices") in the U.S.A. and 900/1800/1900 in Europe. I wish someone there would wake up and realize that if you have to build two versions with different frequencies for different markets, then it's not a "world phone"! I guess that's where the "pretty much" in your comment comes into play.
This is more than just a theoretical problem. There are countries which have little or no GSM infrastructure other than 900 MHz (much of the Middle East, for example) so U.S. Nokia "world" phones don't work there at all. I bet European "world" phones get pretty bad coverage in parts of the U.S. that are served by 850 MHz. AFAICT, Motorola is the only vendor [*]
who realizes that "world" means quad-band, and unfortunately Motorola has never learned that the UI matters. (Of course Nokia seems to be forgetting that lesson as fast as they can so maybe a window is opening for Moto).
[*] Other than vendors of PDA-type phone devices, who mostly seem to have a clue.
"There is nothing as deceptive as an obvious fact" --Arthur Conan Doyle.
That may be true, but I don't think it's the only possible conclusion. It seems just as likely to me that the problem manufacturers such as Nokia are attempting to solve is that "just-a-phone" phones have become a commodity, and nobody likes to sell into a commodity market... or at least not high-overhead companies that are used to high profit margins. So they're expending their war chests trying to create (and capture) a value-added, high-fashion, high-margin market. Quite possibly they are willing to take a loss for quite some time in the effort to do this, because the other alternative (embracing the commodity market) looks like death for them.
In this scenario, current consumer demand has little to do with the introduction of the combination phone, camera and turnip twaddler. The vendor throws together whatever random bunch of features they can fit on a chip (and get approved by a marketing executive), puts it out there with a glitzy advertising campaign and a lot of Flash on their web site, and crosses their fingers. Note that the marketing executive has every motivation to take risks and none to conserve resources -- if the product catches on big time, the exec is a hero. If it flops, the exec might get spanked, or not. If the exec does nothing and the company manufactures commodities, well, they can lay off their entire marketing staff, can't they?
Supply and demand, you know.
...works over the long term, not the short term.
This article seems to me to be at least tangentially related, insofar as it says something about the guys calling the shots in Helsinki.
Good grief. These are concept designs. They aren't trying to sell *you* these things: particularly not the 'that sux, won't work' contingent at Slashdot. They didn't spend your money designing them.
These are concepts, meaning ideas, thoughts. You're lucky they shared them with you, since Nokia knows (as well as you do) that they're half-baked.
Linus Pauling: "If you want a good idea, first get a lot of ideas"
Key concept:lighten up, dude. They're supposed to be fun.
I happen to believe the guesture element of the first concept is pretty cool - the stance you hold the camera in determines it's behaviour. No buttons.
'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore