Mobile phone concepts

Breaking into the world of phone design with my Blind Phone has been a most interesting foray into an area I had only really touched on working on handset customisation with Orange.

It has shown me that actually most phone design is really rather staid, and based around three standard forms which have been adopted as much because of their familiarity as their design aptitude. This is not necessarily a problem – the QWERTY keyboard story shows that often designs become standards for all the wrong reasons.

So I have taken great delight in scooping up a few more interesting phone designs and presenting them to you giftwraped, to allow you to idly consider the weird and wacky world that phone design could be.

Handphone

First up is the brilliant Hand Phone by Italian design outfit Biodomotica, and introduced to us by Textually. I love this, as it is such a familiar hand movement. To have a phone that allows you to mimic the international sign for a phone call must surely be the most intuitive phone I have seen!

One thing that slightly bothers me is the keypad being on the back of your hand. In the palm would be better, if they could make it flexible, or how about just having the mike and earpiece on little thimbles, linked to the main body of the phone by Bluetooth?

Wooden Phone

Next is a green phone – well a sort of wooden one. We were really in love with the Mobiado, but they cruelly wouldn’y give us a phone to play with, so instead here something we unearthed from the Greener Gadgets competition. An Eco-development of the Nokia Clip-On phenomenon of a few years ago. The delighfully named Gernot Oberfell came up with the idea of using WPC (wood plastic composite) to provide a case for a suspiciously iPhoney device.

Digimoda

The daddy of all these though, is the seminal combination of Ideo and MIT producing what can only be described as the basis of all mobile communications and wearbale information device concepts, the Digimoda. Nearly 10 years old now, it is a fabulous bit of imagineering which really starts from what you as a user needs, and develops some wonderful concepts around it that I still use. The Rings of Availability are my special favourites.

Mobile iVista for your nightmares

Finally, to show the opposite of good, here is a proper match made in purgatory. One bright spark has decided that what the iPhone really needs (rather than 3G, improved build quality and some haptics) is a different operating system. And not just any old one, oh no. Apparently Windows Vista is the ultimate operating system for an iPhone. Which is nice for it, as it certainly isn’t ideal for PCs.

Finally, if you are coming along to MEX Mobile User Experience Awards on the 27th, please give me a woop. I’m in the Freelance category, and up for MEX Mobile User Experience Innovator of the Year.