The Need: just a cell phone
Rob often floats his concept image of the ideal cellphone in the BBG editor chat channel: an elegant, touch screen with spartan, square-edged design and no functionality whatsoever short of making phone calls. I have described it as the "prettiest crappiest cell phone ever": Rob agrees with the assessment, but wants it none the less.
I can understand that. After my Nokia proved incapable of penetrating the walls of my altbau, I bought a cheap, $20 unlocked phone with the bare minimum of functionality. At first, I reveled in the purity of a device that could only really fulfill a cell phone's ostensible prime function, but soon I was annoyed by the ghastliness of its Tourette's-like T9 prediction, an annoyance that forced me to actually use my cell for its primary function even for the most frivolous of communications.
Basically, there's something philosophically pleasing about a device doing only one thing perfectly, and a cell phone that can only make and receive calls should be that device. But that's just a semantic illusion. But we don't have cell phones anymore. We don't want them. We don't need them. What we want, what we have, what we need are portable communication devices that allow us to quickly, easily and with mobility communicate with other people across a broad spectrum of different mediums, each suited for a specific type of transmission. A "cell phone" without decent text messaging fails.
So I look at the Need concept phone and I'm skeptical. It's beautiful: a six-inch long OLED touchscreen of rod-like thickness that could only really do phone calls. But the simplicity of the design, the promise of its name only works if you still think a phone is just a phone with a lot of extras slapped on top to drive up the price. But in regards to features that actually help you choose the method in which you communicate, I'm not sure that's true.
Update: Here's my phone design, which John talks of here. It would be called something precious, like "Minim." You could imagine that display to be some fancy touchscreen, but I just picture it as glowy sub-surface backlighting, walkman style. Battery life!
Background: John and Joel both have iPhones. I have a Moto F3, which I only assented to after failing in my brief quest to live completely phone-free. I lasted about a month—and might try again when the Peek's software does IMAP and the IM networks.
Need [Behance via Gadget Lab]
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I'm Curious as to what you think of your Motofone, and why you do not feel that it already fills this niche?
I'd love to have a cheap, dedicated cellphone. Half the time, I just want the phone so I can call the Mrs to make sure I haven't forgotten something at the store. And at 38, I've still sent fewer than 10 text messages in my life, three of those to someone who was texting the wrong number trying to arrange a 11pm booty call.
I have a Motofone and like it well enough. The interface, however, is atrocious due to the way the eInk display uses "LED clock" style characters.
My ideal Motofone would be an inch shorter, keep the eInk display but use an actual font, some built-in memory for phonebook, and longer battery life.
I don't actually have an iPhone yet: it'll be arriving on Saturday. Also, to my shame: it's only the 2G model, and I bought it used from Joel! So there'll be some crust to scrape off the screen.
I have felt this need as well.
I've imagined an anti-iPhone, that is excellent at making calls, ALL of the computing power of a modern phone dedicated only to music studio quality digital sound and background noise reduction all wrapped up in an ugly retro industrial casing that you could drop-kick if you wanted.
Of course you need text too. What are you going to do? Text is an extension of phone service these days.
There is a definite need for a simple cellphone, but its NOT this one.
I want a phone designed to make calls and do nothing else. Something that gets reception in an office building in a city or up in the mountains, has battery life measured in days rather than hours.
It doesn't need to be fancy, it doesn't need a touchscreen or a camera. It just needs to be dependable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_1101
The motofone is great, except for two things:
1. The design is workaday.
2. While the e-ink display is lovely, the characters it displays are terrible. 6 characters a line, and the characters are old-style calculator numerals. This goes beyond "simple" -- it makes it barely usable for viewing phone numbers, let alone text messages.
A motofone with more character (and more legible characters) would be about perfect. A sexy chassis would be a lovely bonus.
There's a Samsung model through T-Mobile which gets close (the a727 http://www.madsteve.com/a727.html), but it's more like a standard shitphone with stuff taken out than something minimal from the ground up, like the Motofone F3.
The basic Nokias I don't like. They're thick and ugly, refugees from the 1990s.
If you haven't, check out that e-ink display on the moto f3. Though it's not put to good use (See above) it's beautiful, and looks very modern and matte.
Wakka nails it.
the only thing I do with my phone is make calls
I have 2 phones, 1 work and 1 personal.
So i have a sumsung upstage which is tiny functional and not that different then what you have above.
Here is the problem. Cell phone companies don't give us the phones we want, they give us the phones they can make a profit from.
What I need is either a phone that can handle multiple lines and or small cell phones that are say the size of a watch.
I value excellent execution of basic functionality in a cell phone. But I think your "ideal" phone design is no good.
First, the buttons are useless. I need to be able to feel the buttons, because I may not be able to look closely at the phone. Not only where the button is, but also how many times I've pressed it. (Voice dialing is a basic functionality.)
Second, much too small! It works better if it fits my hand. It lasts longer if I can find it among my stuff, and if I can sit on it without hurting it. The sliver in the picture would be lost or crushed within a week.
Text messaging? You'd probably have to include it, but not for me. My experience has been that text messages are spam or banal interruptions. Those are anti-functionalities, not basic functionality. It is the use, not the technology that's to blame. (Email is effective because it's easy to filter all that junk.) I stopped looking at text messages years ago.
Text messaging is an absolute must for those of us who live in areas prone to natural disasters. Phone networks can become so saturated, you sometimes can't make voice calls for up to a week. Text messaging, however, works just fine.
Just a phone, huh? You mean no phonebook?
Once you start adding even the tiniest of features (like a screen at all) you might as well include text messaging, Bluetooth, phonebook, volume controls, even stupid things like a clock.
I'm wondering why we have these fancy color screens anyway. The ol' b/w screens with indiglow are perfect, and don't consume as much power as a color screen. In fact, why do we even have screens at all? Hasn't anyone been working on a audible-only interface? It is as plain as day to me.
text-to-speech-on-a-chip has been around for ever. You don't have to spend life staring into a tiny screen. Why even look at it at all?
The main reason I haven't got a cell phone (I had a company-owned one for a couple years, which I gladly jettisoned as soon as they got too cheap to pay the bills) is that they all have directory functions, and I am too weak-willed not to use them.
I have all the phone numbers I need stored in my head. Seriously, I have 30 or 40 numbers memorized, and I can type 'em out faster than I can retrieve them from a phone list in a typical cell phone. Cell phone busted, you can't call your buddies now? I can call on anybody's phone.
You can only achieve this if you're in training for it all the time. As soon as you get a cell phone with directory functions your mental acuity starts to decay, and shortly thereafter you become the usual sort of drooling idiot who can't even remember the order of parameters to a 15 element function call.
Txt is out of place here. If you want a modern phone, that reduces this to a call for UIs that don't get in the way of whatever functions you happen to like. If you want a simple- (as opposed to cheap-) looking phone, that's yet another thing.
The idea of a plain phone is more radical. No txt, not pretty. I would say real buttons, because touch pads are a kind of fashionable self-torture.
One reason not to have txt is to be able to truly claim that your phone doesn't do txt. In other words, it's not just that I don't want to deal with txt, my phone actually doesn't do it.
(Personally I heavily use txt, calendar, address book, and camera on my Treo.)
You might be right there, Drew. But maybe what we would like is a device built from the ground up; a simple, streamlined design, whose features begin with the best possible reception; then, comes the phonebook, volume, texting, a so on. More like a landline than a laptop. Or simply stops there.
Now, I would also demand to be charged only for the features I want, but that's where I would conflict with the manufactured needs of the cellphone company, which is where the root to the problem (?) lies.
I don't carry my phone around anymore. Id like to ditch my keys AND wallet, but I still need those to get back in the house, buy lunch etc.
I'd like to have my keys, id, money, phone on one biometrically locked device the size of a credit card. I remember finding a solar powered credit card sized calculator back in the late 80s. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. And it was.
The only problem with the credit card form factor is that it doesn't make a very good hand cannon. See, I also want to be able to fire 10mm sabot rounds from my phone. Maybe I can get a pen that will do that. I don't mind carrying a pen. So either a pen or credit card form factor.
#18 -- Engineering by Committee is what makes most phones, and most devices, quite lacking.
I met a guy when I was working in handhelds. His whole thing was he wanted "The Grip." I think he wanted some kind of rubberized pieces thrown into the case. He wouldn't do anything unless it had "The Grip," feature set be damned.
I want a phone that has voice dialing as good as my Sony Ericsson phone from 2000. You trained it, so it worked almost all the time and you didn't have to match the name in the phone book..."shithead" for your brother would be fine, or "Cat" for Catherine Zeta Jones. You pressed a button on the side of the phone, said the name and presto, you called that person.
That's what I want you to put back into phones...make it *wicked* easy to make calls.
I long for a small Nokia-style candybar phone made out of titanium, strong composites, big clicky keys and a power-saving monochrome display that can stay on all the time behind a mineral glass screen. Something militantly functional and outright difficult to destroy.
RE: #6 posted by MrGlass:
I agree, I'd like a phone where the engineering is spent working on advanced radio functions, not advanced "smartphone features". Imagine a phone with s signal so strong I can place calls from inside a data center, with adequate noise-cancelling on the mic so I don't have to scream into the phone. I suppose text messaging would make sense as the one "advanced" feature, along with a large address book with easy sync to a PC/removeable card.
Heh. Wouldn't it be funny if the killer app for cell phones is a contact database in a CSV file that is stored on a removable SD card... I wonder how many patents that violates!
I bought a lovely Nokia75. Gorgeous! Dang thing broke 1st time I dropped it. Bought another one off of eBay-(fool me twice...) Taped it all over (I WANTED this phone!) Broke the second time I dropped it.
Researched "just a good ole basic cell phone". Bought a candybar old- style but new version Nokia 6030 on eBay that can withstand repeated falls, takes no photos and that probably can text but its user (moi) is text-challanged. It's silver, small, good battery life and feels good-n- solid in my palm. Love it.
#22 Amen. I have bought my last three phones outright (no contract for quite some time now), and am looking for a new one that can handle some basic "Yea, I am a klutz." type abuse. I last bought a Sony Walkman type thinking it might handle some abuse and I would put up with the white case. Well it has, except the proprietary headset connection has worn out so no tunes, no radio (won't work with the Bluetooth) and the white looks so hip in my office. . . oh, and it dials my GF at weird times.
If you want 'just phone' Nokia 6310i. Best battery life I've ever had from a phone, the right size for your hand and pressing the buttons. Good reception and great call volume (important when you work in the noise industry, Monochrome screen that can be seen under most lighting conditions. Plus it used the same batteries as my old Nokia 5110 (the second best phone of all time) so I had spare batteries.
It'll also text, bluetooth, act as a bluetooth data modem, wap etc. BUT you don't have to use those bits.