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.

Comments

if this is the future...

[gEvil (beta)]

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.

As usual

[mwvdlee]

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.

Vaguely interesting

[Rob T Firefly]

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.

Nothing else to do

[Nicodemus101]

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!

Re:I see

[Bogtha]

Forgive my neo-Ludditism, but why does a cell phone have to be more than a phone?

Because the big, bulky, annoying, expensive part of carrying electronic devices around is a combination of:

• Screen
• Keypad
• Battery

Why carry more than one of each of those around when you don't have to?

These are from design student's

[planetmn]

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

Re:These are from design student's

[Jott42]

An industrial designer makes forms that follows function and is within the possibilities of engineering. The design you are talking about is the same as art and SciFi-movie prop design. The things presented in the article are scifi-designs, which have very little base in reality... (i.e no account is taken for batteries or antennas.) And a phone with a larger antenna will have better reception, it follows from Maxwells equations. But the current market does rather accept so-so reception than an antenna. But you are right in part: The lower antenna performance can to some degree be compensated with a better network.

Re:I see

[Bogtha]

isn't there some critical mass of things you can cram into a small package at this time?

Phones have been getting smaller and smaller up until a couple of years ago, where they levelled off. I think that's more to do with the fact that you can't make phones any smaller without making the interface unusable rather than any space issue.

Battery technology being what it is, it seems the more you ask a device to do, the less it will actually be able to do.

Obviously battery life is important, but how many of these features are actually wasting power when they aren't in use? And if they are in use, then what are you saving the power for, if not to use the device?

I think when a tool tries to do too much, it is in danger of not doing anything particularly well

That may be common, but I don't think it's an intrinsic consequence of convergence. And even if separate devices are of a higher quality, two separate devices of high quality aren't necessarily better than a single device that is good enough.

For example, I'm not going to carry a camera everywhere I go. I am going to carry my phone everywhere I go. I might be able to get higher quality photos from a digital camera, but that's of no use to me if I don't have the camera with me when I want to take a photo. Thus the camera phone is of more value than a separate phone and camera, even if the quality is lower. Sure, if I'm going somewhere where I expect to take photos, I'd bring a camera, but that's of absolutely no use to me when most of my photos are taken on the spur of the moment.

Here we go again

[houghi]

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.

I just want to talk on the GD phone

[karlandtanya]

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.