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Future(?) Design of Mobile Phones
Sad Loser writes "The future of the mobile phone is here, or at least a bunch of Nokia-sponsored industrial design students' take on the problem.
The BBC also has more pictures." Most of these designs are quite silly (a necklace with squeezable beads for an address book?) but at least amusing.
If this is what the future holds, I think I need to get started with my curmudgeonly rantings about how great cell phones were in the past.
This guy's the limit!
As usual, most of these designs aren't even possible and won't be possible in the near future. What do they teach these design students anyway? Seems more like an art-college for the artistically challenged.
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In elementary school, I was in the "gifted" class where they'd ocasionally have us do creative projects liek this instead of normal schoolwork. Most of the results of those were at about the same level of insanity as these. Mine in particular tended to go in more of a rocket-pack/robot motorcyle direction.
When you're nine years old, your zany ideas earn you a spot on the fridge for your new drawing. When you're in college, I guess it earns you a gallery on BBC news.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
To me, this just seems like clever hype/marketing.
ilovegeorgebush
The winner of the competition is the Nokia 111 by Daniel Meyer, and this is where the New Age speak goes into overdrive. The phone looks - to our eye - like a candy bar with a hinge in the middle, but it is, apparently: "Inspired both by the advent of video calling and the traditional practice of carrying pictures of friends or family members with you. The handset is designed to sit as a picture frame wherever the user is, serving the dual purpose of communications device and a comforting familiar focal point; at home, at work or in a hotel while away on business."
It's also a great way to carry your porn more portably or annoy everyone in your office with a photo montage of baby pictures.
Forgive my neo-Ludditism, but why does a cell phone have to be more than a phone? I say this as the owner of a Motorola V360, an excellent phone that also happens to have an MP3 player built in, which is one of the more useful accessories a phone could conceivably have, and saved me the trouble of buying another thing to tote around. I have a camera for pictures, but I wouldn't feel the need to set the phone down and display those pictures. Let's not forget, battery life is not all that great and using your phone as a slideshow probably wouldn't help.
Look, either build the über device that does everything or stop trying to load mobile phones down with too much gadgetry.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
I'm reminded of a cartoon that came up on my New Yorker daily desk calendar last week (the cartoon now has a permanent spot on my fridge):
Man talking to a clerk in a cell phone store: "Do you have one of those phones you can talk to people on?"
This guy's the limit!
...I don't really want to smell my caller's environment. At least not for most of my callers.
I applaud their creativity. But I still want a cell phone that works > 99% of the time as a freakin' phone.
These are the same people that want to bring fashion to space suits right?
Fashion in Space
I mean a phone that picks up smells? What for? What could possibly be the use for that? I don't know about you but I would rather not have the person on the other end know I just let one go after too much chilli.
A phone that has beads to call people. Looking at my cellphone I have over a 100 contacts for business and personal. That's an awful lot of beads... might be the new 2015 style bling!
it's not as horrific as I thought I'd be! Granted most of them are technically infeasible at least for mass production, would be annoying to use or are just pointless, but I was expecting a lot worse.
Certainly some of them look less retarded than some of the things nokia come up with.
Strangely, none of the designs list telephone call capabilities as a feature. Instead of talking about clear and drop free calls, they talk about transmitting smells. Do you really want to smell the inside of a public mens room or would you rather be able to understand what the person at the other end is saying?
The aim was a user friendly product that gave an emotional relationship, like a friend
People shouldn't have emotional relationships with phones. A phone is just a tool, nothing more. There isn't enough love in the world to waste it on consumer electronics.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
reception in my area. Just give me a mobile phone that works in my area. I have a camera I have a pda. I have internet devices (with screens big enough to be useful). I don't need a device that when it breaks everything else goes too.
2015? As in, nearly ten years from now? Nobody seriously expects phones to be recognisably unique devices by then, do they? It's nigh-on impossible to buy a mobile phone these days that does not incorporate, to a significant degree, functions for which there are already devices available.
It's widely accepted in the industry that within 10 years', when cameras, mp3 players and all sorts of other gadgets are sufficiently advanced and shrunk, everyone will be toting Multi-Function-Devices such that calling it a "phone" would be like calling a laptop an "electronic typewriter".
Now, those of us who are of a practical or ludditish bent will say that we prefer our devices to be discrete (as in separate) so that we don't have to upgrade everything at once and can stick with what we like. Personally, I'd like to see a move towards modular technology with standard interfaces - you buy your basic model, and detach/reattach parts as they become more advance and cheaper, so you swap out your 2M camera module for a 10M SLR, or a gaming processor unit, or whatever. However, it's not likely to happen as it means phone manufacturers have a smaller turnover, smaller businesses can get a better foothold, and service providers can't tie you into replacement schemes with the contract.
Still, a guy can dream.
Meta will eat itself
I wish the future of cell phones was more like the past, just smaller. You know, a phone that's just a phone but fits in my pocket comfortably. Why do they make me feel like I'm asking for too much?
Developers: We can use your help.
and, that's great: you can even do phonecalls with that thing!
Things I would want from a mobile device:
1) Phone
2) PDA
3) MP3 player
4) Camera
Things I DON'T want in a mobile device:
1) Smells
2) Life philosophy
3) Being locked into one service provider
It's funny how how 5 years ago my want list would have made me a cuttng edge geek, and now it makes me a luddite.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
If you're so inclined (I'm not)...you could use the beads for.......all sorts of alternative uses?
Why is everybody so negative about the designs. Guess what, designers create based on form. Engineers create based on function. An end product is a meld of the two. If the designers only designed a cell phone that was the same shape and form as an old rotary phone, the engineers would design the electronics to go inside, and we'd all have phones bigger than the old bag phones of the 80s.
It is a designers job to create something that appeals to the market in terms of form. It is the engineers job to create something that works. And together with many others they create a product that has parts of both worlds.
Also, for everybody talking about "well, I just want a phone that gets good reception" that's a network design problem for the most part, not a device problem.
-dave
/., where "Apple and Google provide Iran with nukes" will be refuted with "But Microsoft is a convicted monopolist"
Phones need to be smaller, like the size of an earring or something that you have constantly available, and which is speech activated. Think the "call bob" features they have in some phones now. Camera features, displays, etc., belong more naturally in smart spectacles. More involved interaction like text input is a tougher cat to skin, but then hey IANAID (I Am Not An Industrial Designer).
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
My present mobile flips open, lets me talk speakerphone style holding it out in front of me, and I can contact whomever I want by saying their name or saying the phone number... very much like the communicators in the original Star Trek series. (I wish I could reprogram it to chirp like a 'communicator' instead of its "Say a command.")
We've seen those Bluetooth earphone-mic sets. What about a Bluetooth speakerphone badge? The main phone would be somewhere else on your person, but the little badge could be worn closer to your head and have a simple touch-to-activate/hangup interface like in the "Next Generation" Star Trek series.
Nokia has a good record on trying out new designs (think of the iconic 7100 series and the 8850) and some of these are rather good designs. But ion the long term, five or ten years down the line the bulk of phones are unlikely to be handsets. If the latest 'phone on a chip' designs follow Moore's guidelines (no it's not a law) then we'll be able to integrate phones into watches, earpieces and there's even a design for an earring. Difficult to leave those in the back of a taxi.
The beads are not silly; they are the marketer's dream! Imagine the recurring revenue the phone operators get from selling more of the beads for people who gave them all away. A phone company could also lock customers in, with using a proprietary format for these beads. It could also serve as a differentiator for companies. I wish I could come up with something like those beads, patent the idea and then develop it further for a large wireless company.
What I'd really like to see is flexible phones - something soft, flat and jelly like that you could put in your back pocket and sit on without breaking. (and I concur with others - I just want my phone to call people, not anything else...that is unless it does everything else) Most of the designs here look a little silly to me, though I do like the odd bracelet one.
Slashdot isn't what it used to be. Sigh
All this is fine, but do they run Linux?
Vulturo, Prince Of Darkness
Most people will say they only want a phone to call. However there are plenty of people out there that want more then just to call.
Imagine you are a system administrator. Won't it be nice to be able to ssh into your server the moment you get a warning? That way you could perhaps solve the problem faster, from where you are, without the need to actually go to your portable. Unless you a such a geek that you don't have any moment you walk around without a portable (and network access)
Some people like to have the camera. Some people like to send messages. So what you will get is a combination and variety of systems where you can select what you want.
Not everybody has the same Linux distro, or the same services running on his system, so why should this be any different with your cellphone. Buy what you need. Do not buy what others tell you what you need.
I use SUSE and I don't run KDE or Gnome. If you don't like the camera on your phone and yet you do like all the rest, then don't take pictures. Do you really want just to phone? Then just buy the cheapest (second hand) phone you can find. They are still available and can be bought.
Just as with Linux, it is all a matter of choice. Because YOU don't want it does not mean it is a bad choice.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
... and the odd SPV phone, have become increasingly bad at actually making a call.
My old Nokia 3330 was a lot faster to hang up a call and lock the keypad. I've waited 20 seconds with no apps running in the background on the 6680 for the thing to accept any input after ending a call.
There is Salling Clicker though which kinda makes up for it - one of the best phone advancements I've used in a while (no-one mention 3G please).
it's always the same, cram as much crap as possible into every phone
i want a phone with:
* good sound quality
* sms capability
* alarm
* contacts
* list of incoming and outgoing calls
* a nice, clean and simple interface
and yeah, good battery time as well
and as a clip-on, or the deluxe-version, one could add/buy something that allows one to connect to the laptop to the net
is that so hard to do?
it SHOULD be cheap as f'ck to develop nowadays, just double the price and sell it to me and i'll thank you for a loooong time mr big company!
Referring to future phone as if it reminds you of those 'paper clackers' you made as a kid when most of your audience probably doesn't have a clue what a 'paper clacker' is: -1 irrelevant.
/. that's gone in the handbasket.
Idea of smelling your caller's environment: -1 obnoxious.
Figuring out the difference between 'the winning design' and 'the winner of the competition when they are two different designs: priceless.
It's not just
rick
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Bullshit, the phone of the future will look pretty much like the phone of today, the PDA all-screen look will become more popular as better and more tactile touchscreens are developed, there will be no other major design change.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Nokia have been releasing these godawful concepts for at least the last 6 years - none of them have yet seen the light of day. Possibly the closest was a nasty blue clamshell that motorola released circa 2001 - they never repeated that mistake...
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People spend so much time trying to develop tech for phones they don't stop to see if they should do it and ask people what they want. Why the hell would anyone want to put a chess set on thier phone? I mean seriously! Any why do people have to keep cramming more and more crap into cell phones? When I upgraded my phone last time, they kept trying to cell(haha) me one with an MP3 player. Also, not one of those phones looked like something I would even want to use. Lets pack more and more shit into phones and up the already high price! One feature that I do like on phones is the web feature(actually a useful non-bloated feature.) Games, MP3 player, and the such is rediculace for a phone.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. ~Albert Einstein
I once saw an interview with Prince Charles (about 5 years ago). He was congratulating two students on an award they received for a new design for a mobile phone. The conversation when like this...
Prince Charles [While admiring the half brick sized phone in his hands] "Ahhem, it's really amazing how small you can make these things"..."but what's to stop you maing them even smaller?"
Designer [While thinking what a dumb ass question that was]: "Well sir, the distance between your mouth and your ear"
With hindsight, who's the smart one now...technnology moves ever forward, apparently there is nothing to stop things getting ever smaller except maybe cramming more and more functionaility into it, at which point, when does it stop being just a phone?
"If it's lost, it'll turn up. Things always do" "I love it when a plan comes together"
I suppose it's not good enough for the rest of the bus to be only be able to hear half the conversation.
And fire their teachers in the process. Not a one of those adds any functionality to the phone and most would a pain in the butt to use.
Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
Phones are being held back by the carriers from being the amazing convergence devices everybody wants. Carriers are so determined to make money via recurring monthly charges, that they're totally ignoring the traditional business model of selling people things they want. They could wipe out the PDA, music player, and GPS markets in an instant if they were weren't so short-sighted.
I have a Sprint phone, the Samsung A900 Blade (aka the RAZR knockoff for Sprint). After you hack it, the sheer breadth of its capabilities are astounding. If you go to the right places on the web, you can download software onto it so you don't have to pay recurring monthly charges for software loaded on your phone. The beauty of the software is that you have both data and GPS capabilities integrated into one tiny device, enabling features that sound totally next generation when in fact they should be common place by now.
With this software I can:
*GPS with directions and full graphic maps on a small, but high resolution (QVGA display). On all other modern Sprint phones, the GPS provides real-time tracking, but Sprint/Samsung half-assed the firmware on this one and there is something wrong with it.
*I can center on my current location, and bring up yellowpages of businesses nearby by name or category
*I can get weather information that automatically syncs with where I am
*I can lookup the web when I'm in a pinch on Opera Mini which scales the resolution with interpolation to somewhere in the neighborhood of half-VGA I'm guessing.
*I can stream podcasts from the Internet
*I can access any of the music, videos, and pictures on my computer, and stream live TV through my TV tuner at home onto my phone
*Via the web I can access a dictionary, Vindigo, Consumer Reports and Zagat all through custom apps which make navigation easy (no typing for the most part)
*I can play Gameboy Color quality games for when I'm really bored on the subway
All of this in a phone with the same form factor as a RAZR. What people hate about conversion devices is their bulkiness and compromise. Apparently, if you're willing to give up easy input on your mobile device (and that describes 90% of the market I think) the possibility exists for creating a convergence device that harnesses synergies that no existing product captures (for example, the app I can launch that automatically displays stores near me sorted by categories and can automatically dial my phone).
This device has several glaring faults however, that could easily be remedied if only the carriers were even trying to target this demographic:
*No syncing of calendar, todo lists, notes with my PC. The phone has Bluetooth and native copies of all of these apps, this is truely inexplicable other than blatant disregard for trying to attack the PDA market.
*Only 64 MB of RAM for storing MP3s. You could tape a nano to the back of this thing and it'd still be smaller than 90% of phones on the market. This literally totally storm the music player business, if you just sold phones with nano's taped to the back of them.
*Bad battery life. This is the only actual compromise I think they made on this phone. I have to charge it daily, especially if I stream lots of media or data that day.
*Crappy crappy crappy proprietary software and interface. This basically sums it all up. There are so many inexplicable oversights on this phone. It has a bright white LED on it, but there's no way to turn it on as a flashlight. It could have taken over the keychain light market, but there's another missed opportunity. This phone could take over the PDA, GPS, key chain light, mp3 player, and phone markets handily. The hardware on it is capable of being better than any of these individually (other than mp3 player, which it could be if they just added more memory chips and a scroll wheel). The carriers have simply chosen not to take over these markets, since if they can't charge a recurring monthly fee on value added services, they're simply not interested in making additional sales apparently.
Nokia just LOVES designing all kinds of concept phones.
Why don't they put their money where their fucking mouth is and release some ACTUAL good phones? Or at least bring some of their nice european phones to North America.
I'm a fan of Nokia, but what's been available here for the past few years has been absolutely shameful.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
I was pretty sad to see these too. Hooray for More Rectangles to Fall Out Of Pockets. Let me at a Cell Watch. I'm already collecting other ones.
I read a post dated a couple years ago that it's possible/exists in Asia because of better network technology, but "not yet possible in Western countries because we haven't yet figured out how to shrink it".
Anyone else notice that you get one phone, which you have to take everywhere, and if you lose it, you're torched? Put it on a watch, where you'll have to crash into a building to get rid of it.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Is that so freakin' hard?
It seems to me that all the other "features" being added daily are not for the benefit of the owner of the phone. They're yet more things to charge the owner for using.
Sell connectivity like a commodity.
I don't want to see "no network" when I'm looking directly at a freakin' cell tower.
I don't give a shit who owns the tower. Share your infrastructure.
The same companies that sell the mobile comms already do this with their hard lines, so don't say it's not feasible.
Somebody's already claiming to do this (verizon?). The rest of you idiots, take a lesson.
Build a durable phone with a decent battery.
It doesn't have to be so tiny or so cool I can wear it on my chest and slap it when I want to talk to the Enterprise.
It just has to make and receive calls. That's it.
Make it out of the stuff that Ma Bell used to make the rental phones out of. It'll never break.
Once you figure out the basic infrastructure and handhelds required for TALKING ON THE FREAKING PHONE, you can worry about selling me extraneous bullshit that I don't want.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
I think the designs are interesting. The idea behind a concept is to try to re-think things, or to improve things. Concept art and concept designs are all about stimulating ideas. Once in a while, a good idea comes along, and is actually implemented. Many things are assigned the round file of the past.
Getting people to think about cell phones and their future is the intent of the design work - the intent is not necessarily to produce viable phones, just ideas.
I think it is not easy to come up with refreshing and original ideas. It seems easy to criticize the ideas of others - but try to look at it from another angle: What would your design be?
A Passionate Independent Musician
Some ideas are sorta like vampires are described, for example, by Terry Pratchett. You may think you've beheaded one, stuffed full of garlick, and dragged out into the sun, but a few years later someone drops a drop of blood in the right place and there you have the old vampire back again. Some bad ideas can be like that.
And smell reproduction has been one of those bad ideas that just won't stay dead. It's been popping up again and again, as computer peripheral, phone peripheral, etc. Just when you think you've buried it at crossroads with a stake through its chest, and under a small tumulus of ridicule and "no, I _don't_ want to smell the environment in games, especially not with the mandatory sewers levels everyone has" posts... hardly a year goes by before it pops up somewhere else. Some dolt comes up with "I know! We'll make a smell plugin for IM and IRC!!!" Bury that too, watch a year or two go by, there it pops up again. "I know! Let's make a TV that can reproduce smell too!" Laugh that out of court too, bury it, watch some time go by... "I know! Let's make a mobile phone that transmits smells!!!"
I'm already curious where it'll pop up next. Probably in MP3 players. Surely everyone will want to walk down the street with tubes up their nose. Plus, you'll have so much to look forward to when the bogus MP3 files on the net aren't just some white noise or "piracy is theft" reminder, but also come with a recording of someone's fart.
At any rate, mark my words: we haven't heard the last of this stupidity.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You always see pictures of concept cars that look totally impractical. This is the same thing except that it is phones. Or like when Intel had a bunch of "concept computer cases" to show that PCs could look as nice as an iMac (this was right after the original iMac came out). The computers looked completely ridiculous and none of them were ever actually made.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
I have freinds who always go on like "Oh, my phone has games".
"When do you play them," asks I.
"Oh, I never do," says they, "But it's cool."
:-\
...are you calling from a fish market?
Now, noone would expect a Finn to have taste for design, but Nokia phones are getting uglier by the day.
Not only they're stuck with the suckiest OS in the whole world (Symbian) but the design and quality of the phone is that bad to not be even funny.
I miss when Nokia was the manufacturer producing simple, super reliable and kick-arse radio quality terminals.
Until Apple delivers the iPhone, with the elegance and simplicity of the iPod, I don't think we'll see much progress of mobile phone user interfaces (physical and virtual).
Can we agree to at least give these devices some body?
I keep seeing tiny or card-thin devices pop up, but can we agree that you need to be able to get a good grip on them, as opposed to that damn thing disappearing in you hand?
This or even thison one of the following phones can do that kind of thing. SSH over EDGE, GPRS, or 802.11(9300i/9500) - even with the cameraless models. Full keyboard on those three and not terribly large, and looks like an older phone when folded. If you can live with the camera, go with the 9500 and a large media card, otherwise the 9300i is the best bet.
The only real thing missing from these is the SIP client that Nokia has in testing for these phones that they cant seem to release. After that, you can have all the calls you want without a conventional endpoint as well as a remote client. Other than that they might not want the Series 80 to compete with the E series, there really doesnt seem to be much of a reason to hold it back. Even then, that reason doesnt hold terribly well.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
They had just such devices a few years ago. Simple interface - 12 buttons: 10 numbers, call and hang-up. An easy interface - dial, send, talk.
Oh sure, they could do other things (most had some form of redial, and rudumentary calendars and contact lists), but that's sort of like using your iPod as an organizer or PIM - it can be done, but it's really not made for it.
No, I'm afraid the days of a clean, simple interface are gone.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Just goes to show that
more important is Apple. there's the RAZR iTunes phone but what about Apple? MacRumors.com has a page 2 link about a patent that Apple may have issued on an iPod video/iChat AV/cell phone. how will it get battery life? the batteries will shape the device.
The real future of mobile phones can be found here and here.
v 905sh/index.html
I think this one actually has more features than my HTPC... http://www.vodafone.jp/english/products/model_3G/
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I'm all for abandoning convention and coming up with an original approach. But that's not what I see here.
I see a bunch of people in a hazy room taking hits off a joint and saying, "Dude...what if we made it with...beads?
These are solutions looking for problems. Mobile phones are real devices that people have real problems with. Bad reception, poor screen readability, slow response time, small buttons, poor durability. But I see nothing here that addresses those issues.
"...no, no, no, man...it really needs to take over your awareness, man. Like smell. Smell with your phone, man....just smell with your phone."
No piece of technology is so frustrating to me as my mobile phone. I agree, this is a product that needs to be entirely rethought. Perhaps then we would have a device that actually lives up to the promises it makes: Communicate clearly with anyone, from anywhere.
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
you mean like an actual cell phone that was large enough to have a viewable screen with older eyes and buttons that normal fingers fit, and the solid hefty weight came from internal/replaceable d-cell batteries that would last, instead of some tiny propietary battery that the replacement costs more than a new phone???
I'll take one...as for "convergence" if it had a pushbutton to turn on the *bright* LED flashlight part that would be about it for add-on doo dads I would prefer.
It's bad ass AND it runs Linux.
Great quote! It's an interesting viewpoint that is going to really come to the fore when robotics is able to create a convincing human facsimile...
Check out my film trailer of "Eve" for a possible future scenario to do with just this concept.
Visceral Psyche Films