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 the future...

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.

Re:if this is the future...

Please. I'm holding out for the artificial molar that allows perfect sound reproduction through bone conduction [wikipedia.org], and removes one of the last visual cues that distinguish me from a raving lunatic: a visible phone.

I'll walk down the street talking to myself, and smacking myself in the face whenever I lose signal, and (this is the good bit) I'll never get panhandled again.

Re:if this is the future...

Screw that, if this is what the future holds -- I'm going to enroll in whatever program they're in and design a cellphone that is also a baseball bat. That way, when future-people are talking on their annoying cellphone anal-beads or whatever, I can take out my cellphone and have the satisfaction of bludgeoning them to death.

As usual

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

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.

I see

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.

Re:I see

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?

Re:I see

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.

New Yorker Cartoon

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?"

I am fairly convinced that...

...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.

Nothing else to do

These are the same people that want to bring fashion to space suits right?

Fashion in Space [slashdot.org]

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!

Actually...

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.

The phone is your friend?

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.

But will it get

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?

TFA suggests that these phone designs are concepts that may be workable by 2015.

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.

I wish...

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?

personally...

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.

Beads?

If you're so inclined (I'm not)...you could use the beads for.......all sorts of alternative uses?

These are from design student's

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

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.

Caught in the old Paradigm

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).

I Want a Bluetooth Speakerphone Badge (ST:TNG)

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.

Good short term designs

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.

Silly?

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...

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.

The Most Important Question

Slashdot isn't what it used to be. Sigh

All this is fine, but do they run Linux?

Here we go again

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.

My Nokia "collection"...

... 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).

same old, same old

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!

Um,

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.

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 /. that's gone in the handbasket.

rick

Design students on crack

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.

I'll believe it when I see it

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...

Oh come on

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.

The important "Mouth to Ear" measurement

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?

"F"s for them all.

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.

Always new "concepts"...

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.

I just want to talk on the GD phone

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.

OK, against the mainstream...

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?

These are a lot like concept cars

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.

I still haven't found what I'm looking for

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).

eenie

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?

crazy cell phones

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.

Pfft...

The real future of mobile phones can be found here [nttdocomo.co.jp] and here [vodafone.jp].

I think this one actually has more features than my HTPC... http://www.vodafone.jp/english/products/model_3G/v 905sh/index.html [vodafone.jp]