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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
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.
... all while driving!
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!
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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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.