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Nokia Unveils OLED Phone You Control By Bending
jldailey618 writes "Nokia just unveiled an OLED smartphone that is controlled by flexing the device with both hands. By bending corners and pushing the sides inward and outward, the user can scroll, zoom, and select. 'Researchers would not discuss exactly how the processor behind the twisty screen functioned, but they did say that it would be compatible with most current operating systems.'" Reader jones_supa adds a link to The Inquirer (with video), which points out that the twist-based (rather than poke-based) interface means "you can do many basic functions such as scrolling, zooming and answering calls even while wearing mittens."
I thought a resistive touch screen solved that problem.
Gee, just when you thought Apple had a monopoly on smartphone innovation and it was necessary for Google to infringe on their patents, along comes Nokia. Well, get with it, Google! It's not innovative until you've not copied it!!
...and if you disagree with me, you can bite my shiny metal ass!
~Philly
This sounds like an amazing pain in the ass.
So many concept models never make it out of, well, concept model status. I can think of many ways in which this concept is a failure (lack of precision, looks pretty tiring on the arm, durability issue (especially on the lithium-ion batteries!), ), but there's really no way to be sure unless I can hold one in my hands and try it.
This new twisty inferface slowed me down.
Must be part of the effort to get nokia in the news more and raise their profile. However, a bendy phone is old news, and the Samsung news is better:
Samsung plans to release them sooner: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2395535,00.asp
Yes, it will bend.
Nokia: Changing the way we bring RSI to kids.
...you get your own customers to gradually break their phones so they inevitably have to buy new ones. Smart thinking.
The great thing about my smartphone now is that there are no moving parts (except for the vibration motor). How many bends until the phone breaks in half?
FTA:
The smart phone prototype [..] has the gadget world buzzing with ideas about future products, and how exactly this product would enter the market. It is hard to imagine a phone that requires both your hands’ focus to control
Sure, because one can operate an iphone with just one hand. Since the smartphone, it seems to me that phones that can be operated single-handedly are things of the past.
The only way to improve on the idea of a phone that requires you to bend with BOTH hands to control it, would be if they could figure out a way to make a phone that required both hands AND a foot, or perhaps both hands and a tongue!
Good thing people never put their phones in their pockets, where they will twist in an uncontrolled an accidental way.
I once started receiving calls from my brother every couple of minutes for a half-hour. When I answered, I could hear background noises, but he never replied to my shouts of "Hello?!?".
It turned out that he was umpiring his kid's little league game, and every time he squatted down, he was inadvertently pressing the "Call" button, which was redialing the last number he had called (mine).
Just wait for M. Night Shlallalmyallan to make a crappy movie about it.
fad phase? Tell that to Samsung, the largest mobile phone producer in the world who uses AMOLED screens in all of their top of the line devices. Many people won't even buy a device without an AMOLED screen anymore...
This looks awesome! I can't wait until Apple re-invents this, infuses magic in it, innovates, and gets it right. It will change everything. Again.
That Apple has this copyrighted?
Its a picture frame concept. Even the booth was named "bendable DEVICE prototype", not bendable smartphone.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
...hope they applied for some, before Apple gets a hold on them
Though this seems very nice, and of course impressive at first, i have to wonder how good it will work with just one hand. Seems kinda difficult to imagine. I'm more impressed by the fact that we're seeing flexible screens closer to market
In Bellevue, WA, US, there's a filing office where IP is stored. It contains the secrets of Orange, of Sendo, of others who've partnered with Microsoft on the long journey to a useful Microsoft phone. All these gave up their IP for free, under the terms that Microsoft would help them build a mobile future - but Microsoft got their IP out of receivership when the venture failed because they hand the foresight to insist on that in the contract.
They've already racked the filing cabinets where Nokia's IP will be stored.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Nokia is still in business. Why?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You know Google sync supports the Exchange protocol and is freely available for all phones
Yes but it sucks. I have my HTC Wizard syncing with Google's exchange servers and let me tell you, the Exchange protocol is utter crap. Or at least the Google's exchange implementation + WinMobile 6.5 exchange implementation combination is crap. Why? Because I can't simply create contacts in the phone or most probably the Active Sync software (the sync utility on WinMob) will prompt me with a
"there was an error with the exchange server, all your contacts in the phone need to be deleted and re-synced again from the server."
This is annoying! If wasn't for my phone having a qwerty keyboard and me only caring about, you know, sending messages and making phone calls, this phone would be in the garbage for a long long time..
Control by flexing is a pretty useless feature. But makes a great phone if water tight for use in the building trade, the military and other places where toughness matters.... that is if it is tough? :)
And the voice coils in the speakers and microphone, the microswitches in the headphone socket, the accelerometer (you covered already), magnetometer, and for those phones with them, gyroscopes.
All this is beside the point anyway. Smartphones are flimsy devices. The slightest fall is met with a cracked screen rendering the phone completely unusable. In some designs even something as simple as putting a case on the phone will cause some weak points to appear across the screen or (dumbest idea ever) glass back.
My entire family has a reasonable history with phones. We've managed to break:
iPhone 3G with a broken screen (dropped from waist height).
Some Erricson world traveler model (resistive touchscreen stopped working one day)
Some short wide Nokia with a qwerty keyboard ("s" key stopped working).
But notably the ones that are still working to this day:
Nokia 8210 (dropped from the second floor of a building. The screen is cracked and won't display anything, but the moving parts still work fine and it still makes and receives calls).
Nokia 5110 (my favourite. There's nothing wrong with it. It has been passed through 3 family members before I got it. One of them was using it for business purposes and it was basically being used constantly from 9-5, and another psycho member used this phone to learn to touchtype while sending text messages. The mechanical moving parts have taken a hellovalot of abuse, the cases have been replaced several times due to cracks, but it still works as good as the day it was bought)
It's not the moving parts which necessarily break. It's the cheap parts that break. Users of IBM model M keyboards will know this very well.
bend ?
They are. I know, I used to be too but got better.
Cool tech but from the video you could do the same by using 4 buttons at the corners.
Today if you bend and break your phone and try to get a warranty replacement they'll tell you to go fish, you're not supposed to do that. The moment you make it part of the interface, there's people who will go way overboard like intense games, kids being too rough with it, have anger management issues and whatever. Even if it's built like a tank that no average person would ever wear out, there's a pretty thick tail of users who'll treat it way more roughly than everybody else. To me it sounds more like support hell than planned obsolescence heaven. If you want that then you should do it on some part you control the life time of, like say the non-replaceable battery running out, the screen fading away, no more software updates, anything you can reasonably control doesn't happen in the warranty period. This would be anything but that.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You're on crack. OLED displays are not only less fragile and less power hungry than LCD, but the contrast ratio is far, far superior. I have never had a problem with screen burn-in on an OLED display, I don't even think it's physically possible since each subpixel is self luminating and there is no grille or anything for the burn-in to occur on. LCD, on the other hand, has massive problems with dead and stuck pixels.
OLED is the first technology we have that is actually better then CRT quality-wise. When world moved from CRT tubes to LCD in monitors, the drop in image quality was very noticeable to those of us with keen eyes.
I just wish mass-produced 24" and above OLED monitors would get pushed down to reasonable price range soon, because I'm buying.
I've been using it on my iPhone since day one and it works great.
Remains the Windows 6.5 sucks part, but there's nothing new about it.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Works fine with my Nokia S60 with Google Sync (which in fact uses the Exchange protocol). Never had to re-sync, even though my phone only connects once every two days or so, which means there are often multiple contacts on both ends to sync.
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When the corners of the device are bent by the user they become rounded, and Apple can sue you!!!
The thing they DIDN'T point out, of course, is that you'll need TWO (or more) hands. You can't do all that bending and twisting with one hand.
I'm looking for a phone I can control by running over it with a truck.
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The thing that was demoed was not a "phone," but a bendable screen & chassis. They still need to develop bendable motherboards, processors, batteries, etc.
rooooar
Yeah!
Stroke that OLED baby! Go nuts!
-- Counting backwards since 1984!
Other gestures include pounding it on any hard surface or throwing it across the room.
Future versions will include moisture sensors to detect the inevitable users' sobbing over the device.
Have gnu, will travel.
You're phone was broken, Sorry. At work we have an iPhone user, a blackberry user and a couple of Android users, and a WinMo user, the blackberry guy has problems due to blackberry (as you've heard in the news) the rest of us have no sync issues with Google at all.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager