Futuristic Nokia Concepts Reviewed 100
nitinah writes "Nokia design concepts is an ongoing initiative from the Finnish communications giant that invites designers around the world to create breakthrough cellphone designs. Phonemag has coverage of this year's entries, which includes the
Aki,
a wrist wrap device for programmed self expression that tunes its behavior and outgoing/incoming communications based on the moods and gestures of the user,
and allows 'talking' without speaking, just by gesture.
Another design is the Acibo, which features a mini buddy device that has an entirely voice driven all-in-one personal communicator which
can be charged by bio-energy. More featured concepts include a wearable, shock proof and waterproof device, the SURV1, a necklace based communicator called
the Global Nomad
, and a complete communication device called the Colores, with virtual storage to access all your personal information on the go."
Re:well, let's just do the future, ignore the pres (Score:5, Interesting)
As for your complaints of the current phones on the market, "Phones that work. Phones that sound good. Phones that have decent battery life." From what I understand and have seen, nearly every phone in the store has those attributes. I myself have a brand new phone that I picked up about a month ago. It is a phone that you would not want. Two high resolution color displays, mp3 player with stereo speakers, 1 megapixel video / still camera.
"It works. " Check.
"It sounds good." Well, I have had no problem hearing people. I have taken it to a bowling alley, and people I talked to did not hear the ambient noise in the background. The speakerphone is also very clear and loud, and surprisingly lacks the echo that seems to be prevalent on most landline phones. I was impressed.
"It has a decent battery life." I use about 500 minutes a month. I have gone as long as 36 hours without plugging it in and making average amounts of calls throughout my two days. Also, I was testing the phone when I first got it. I watched a little over an hour's worth of video, listened to music for about an hour, and of course made some phone calls (didn't take note of how many) but in the end the battery was showing half full. Not exactly scientific, but batteries and power management are getting good across the board.
So, my recommendation is to buy the phone that you hate the least, and in a week you will be used to it. There you go.
Re:well, let's just do the future, ignore the pres (Score:4, Interesting)
anyways, even nokia makes still low-end phones that have intentionally cut features, like 1110, if you want to pay practically the same you would for a j2me phone with a color screen..
put it this way: why would you as a _geek_ want to pay the same for a device that only does one thing as you would for a device that has flexibility to do a lot of things - if you wish - and it still does the phone calls good. call quality in a well built network has been excellent since gsm came(first gsm network was launched in 1991), if your network is shit then it doesn't really help what the phone is. also if your operator ties it's plans to phones you don't like then it's your operators fault, not the phone manufacturers who just manufacture what is bought from them..
switch operators if your mobile doesn't work as it should and you know it's not borked.
Re:well, let's just do the future, ignore the pres (Score:3, Interesting)
He recently discovered that he can make it crash at will simply by checking his email on his desktop machine at the same time the phone is attempting to check his email. I mean honestly, what the fuck is up with that?
I understand the desire to push the technological envelope, but you can't continue to add new features by sacrificing reliability. Oh wait, I guess Microsoft proved that that kind of business model could make you billions of dollars, so maybe you can.
I've been in the software development industry for 10 years, and this continues to be a huge problem. Management pushes for more and more functionality without ever allowing adequate time to make sure the functionality you're adding actually works worth a damn. The result is that you get 500 features in one device, and if you're lucky 2 of those features actually work as advertised on any kind of a consistent basis.
Better ideas (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Unusable (Score:4, Interesting)
if you dial long numbers by finger memory, and would need a traditional 9 pad for that, then you're in the minority of people nowadays. most of the numbers people call are stored in the phones phonebook(it looks just unnatural when people in tv shows or movies type long numbers into the phone when calling someone who's number they should have in it already).
but these are just *concept* models, not "real".
Re:Make Phones for Consumers (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:well, let's just do the future, ignore the pres (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't even remember when I've had a phone that didn't work. In the past 10+ years, the battery life on every phone I've had has been good enough that I have charged them about twice a week; that's 3+ days of real-life battery life that includes plenty of calls, text messages, etc. Reception has always been good and the only time I remember having dropped calls is when I've been in an elevator going down to an underground parking hall or something as extreme. Hell, even on my recent hiking trip in the mountains in Norway, there was reception half of the time. And that was far from any civilization! On the roads on the way to the mountains, there was good reception 100% of the time. Either way, reception is more about the deployment of base stations than about the phone. The last phone I had with an external antenna was 5 years ago anyway.
As far as functionality is concerned, I also don't get the complaint at all. There are plenty of models for all tastes. Let's look at Nokia, which this article is about:
Nokia 1100, 1110, 2650, 2600, 3100, 3120, 3220. None of them have a camera. You are free to pick one. Or if your carrier doesn't offer one, it's probably because nobody wants them!
Having said that, I wish people would get over the "phone" label. It's a device. Who gives a damn about what the name of it is? Not wanting a "phone" to have a camera or mp3 player is similar to saying that your don't want your computer to have the ability to play mp3's or view photos from your digital camera. It's a COMPUTER. It should only COMPUTE.
Seriously, it's a device and it has a bunch of features that makes sense to people in their daily lives. And you get whichever device (or none) that makes sense to you.
I have a Nokia 6630 right now and it's perfect for my use. It has 3G, EDGE and GPRS. It has tri-band GSM and it has Bluetooth. That means I can use it pretty much anywhere in the world! And with 3G/EDGE and Bluetooth, I can get Internet access to my laptop anywhere in the world too. I can sit in Starbucks in Shanghai and surf the net and read emails on the laptop while the phone is in my backpack, without ever touching a button on it. That's important to me, because I travel a lot and because I like to work in cafes, restaurants etc.
The phone has a 1.3 megapixel camera and a lens with less crappy quality than on most other mobile phone cameras. That allows me to snap pics of booths on tradeshows and MMS or email them to colleagues back in Finland. "Check out what company X is showing!". Or I can send my wife pictures of the beautiful lake by the sauna at the company off-site. "Wish you were here!". Obviously, it's not a replacement for my actual camera, which takes 100x better quality pictures. But the useage is different and I don't want to carry around my camera everywhere!
The phone has an email app. It lets me check my email when I'm somewhere where I don't want to take the laptop along. For example, I could be hiking in Lapland but I still want to check if we got that major deal that I was hoping would have been done before my vacation began. I don't use it much, but there are times when it's been a real life saver.
The phone has an XHTML web/wap browser. I use it to check the news, weather, TV-program listings, view webcams from Finland when I'm traveling, check what movies are in what theater and at what time, and even to order movie tickets once in a while. It's also good to do the occasional Wikipedia or Google lookup.
It has Symbian OS and Java, so I can play some fun games on it to pass the time on the subway or while waiting for a connecting flight. Or I can run some other useful apps, like IRC, AOL IM, MSN IM, SSH, BusWatch, WorldMate, Opera, etc. There's tons,
Worst thing that ever happened (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:well, let's just do the future, ignore the pres (Score:2, Interesting)
(Bluetooth of course has nothing to do with where you can use it.)
If only that were true. The world uses four bands. Nokia for some reason likes to market 850/1800/1900 MHz phones (sorry, "devices") in the U.S.A. and 900/1800/1900 in Europe. I wish someone there would wake up and realize that if you have to build two versions with different frequencies for different markets, then it's not a "world phone"! I guess that's where the "pretty much" in your comment comes into play.
This is more than just a theoretical problem. There are countries which have little or no GSM infrastructure other than 900 MHz (much of the Middle East, for example) so U.S. Nokia "world" phones don't work there at all. I bet European "world" phones get pretty bad coverage in parts of the U.S. that are served by 850 MHz. AFAICT, Motorola is the only vendor [*]
who realizes that "world" means quad-band, and unfortunately Motorola has never learned that the UI matters. (Of course Nokia seems to be forgetting that lesson as fast as they can so maybe a window is opening for Moto).
[*] Other than vendors of PDA-type phone devices, who mostly seem to have a clue.
Re:well, let's just do the future, ignore the pres (Score:2, Interesting)
"There is nothing as deceptive as an obvious fact" --Arthur Conan Doyle.
That may be true, but I don't think it's the only possible conclusion. It seems just as likely to me that the problem manufacturers such as Nokia are attempting to solve is that "just-a-phone" phones have become a commodity, and nobody likes to sell into a commodity market... or at least not high-overhead companies that are used to high profit margins. So they're expending their war chests trying to create (and capture) a value-added, high-fashion, high-margin market. Quite possibly they are willing to take a loss for quite some time in the effort to do this, because the other alternative (embracing the commodity market) looks like death for them.
In this scenario, current consumer demand has little to do with the introduction of the combination phone, camera and turnip twaddler. The vendor throws together whatever random bunch of features they can fit on a chip (and get approved by a marketing executive), puts it out there with a glitzy advertising campaign and a lot of Flash on their web site, and crosses their fingers. Note that the marketing executive has every motivation to take risks and none to conserve resources -- if the product catches on big time, the exec is a hero. If it flops, the exec might get spanked, or not. If the exec does nothing and the company manufactures commodities, well, they can lay off their entire marketing staff, can't they?
Supply and demand, you know.
...works over the long term, not the short term.
This article [lightreading.com] seems to me to be at least tangentially related, insofar as it says something about the guys calling the shots in Helsinki.