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Fujitsu's Latest Mobile Phone Splits In Two
angry tapir writes with news of Fujitsu's new phone which is taking the sliding phone keyboard a step further by allowing it to detach completely. "The F-04B was announced as part of NTT DoCoMo's new line-up and is scheduled to hit Japanese shelves in March or April next year. At first glance it looks like a conventional slider cell phone: grab onto the bottom of the phone and a numeric keypad slides out. But decouple a catch and the entire back half of the phone can be pulled off."
Here is a demo of the phone http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q15kGMW0N98&feature=player_embedded
Now I've got another piece of the phone I'm going to lose in the couch. Along with the remote and loose change.
Another part to get lost. Cool.
This ain't rocket surgery.
Now you'll have TWO overpriced batteries to replace instead of just one!
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Sweet, it's just like the Enterprise. This will come in handy in case of a warp core breach.
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Or, "...and can be reassembled."
I've had far too many phones that split in two, or otherwise fell apart.
No, see... the feature would be if both sections vibrated. That way you could have each half in separate pockets for 100% vbration coverage.
Oh right- like YOU'VE never let a call ring long when it's on vibrate in your front pants pocket...
... all while driving!
People already use their phones to watch movies and show pictures to people and such. A projector would let you do it for a wider audience. Life isn't just about business, you know ;)
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The only interesting use case they presented was if you are concerned about health issues of keeping phones near your head.
I overheard a conversation on Monday of this week. Some guy (who I would concider rather intelligent) was talking about cell phone waves. He was saying that (wet) grass would reflect cell phone transmissions. He then made the leap that if you were to make a call from a grassy field, you were essentially being bombarded by cell phone waves because "each blade of grass is like a tiny antenna". The amount of misinformation about cell phones is extremely misleading. It makes me mad...
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Quit gabbin' and get back to work!
True, true. And actually, it sounds like it might make for a perfect movie viewing device if you're over at a friend's place. I found a little more information about the projector here: http://www.gadgetvenue.com/fujitsu-f04b-dual-keyboard-projector-phone-11123400/. 2 hours of video at the highest brightness? Yes please!
Ah am not a crook! (\(-__-)/)
Another good use would be talking on the phone while looking something up or taking notes. This is fairly common, and the only way to do it with most smart phones is with speaker phone, which doesn't work in noisy environments, and is generally poor in quiet ones (the phone picks up the loud noises of key or screen presses). Of course, a Bluetooth headset would accomplish the same thing.
In the video, the girl mentions that for example, you can detach the screen while on a call, and then use the screen part to look through your address book or do other stuff. That's one case where I can see it being handy. Overall it feels like a gimmick, but maybe there's someone out there who is just dying to have this functionality. Japan's technology markets have always gone for this notion of technology fitting your purposes, whereas in the U.S., for example, you have limited choices to which you must tailor your use.
and only one of them rings when I call it.
Well, that's partly because a cell phone is the wrong implementation for this sort of thing. I thought about doing something similar a few years ago, but for a laptop. You have a keyboard that hooks into the bottom of the screen, forming a screen-protecting lid to carry it around. When you unlatch it, the hook parts flip upside down and lock into place, forming a keyboard stand. Another stand flips out of the back of the screen to hold it up. This way, you have the simplest, least breakable hinges with no wires running through them. That would eliminate what is probably the second most common cause of laptop failures behind hard drive crashes.
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Doesn't this seem a bit much for a phone?
A modern phone has 128MB or 256MB of RAM, up to around 32GB of flash, a 600MHz 32-bit CPU, an OpenGL 2 ES GPU, an video processing unit that can encode (and decode) 720p H.264 in real time, a network connection that can deliver 3-7Mb/s anywhere or 54Mb/s on a WLAN and bluetooth for local input. It has better specs than the workstation I was using just a few years ago and similar specs to the desktops that a lot of non-geeks that I know are still using.
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The only problem is I can only do it once...
So when will Banach and Tarski release their phone prototype?
That's nothing: My wife can make ANY phone split into multiple parts. All she does is fling it to the ground when she can't immediately figure out how to work it.
Also; TV remotes, house thermostats, lawn mowers....
];)
Regards;
It is so that you can lose one part and have to purchase a replacement for it, only to find it in your couch months later.
Whatever. Call me back when it can split into five lions.
Here's the link to the website where I found the measurements. I haven't found any other sites to back that data up, so it's possible that the listed values are incorrect.
After doing some more searching, another site gives these values: "114x51x20.4 mm" it would appear that the first site goofed up when converting between cm and mm. If this site is correct, the phone is still pretty fat (in my opinion), just not nearly quite so much.
Based on the numbers from the first site, the phone would actually be as wide as an iPhone/Droid is tall and almost twice as tall. At that size a 5 cm depth wouldn't be terribly bad, but it would be a comically large phone in general. At that size it would be more like a small tablet device.
I'm American so I don't really think in metric. Thanks for catching the slip-up.
That's kind of a terrible way to say it, sticking a $5,000 lens in front of a $5 sensor wouldn't make the sensor work any better.
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