Mobile Phone Concepts
My mobile phone contract was recently up for renewal, and as such I spent some time researching the different handsets available. In doing so I realised two things;
First, none of the major handset manufacturers have anything that comes close to the iPhone with regards to UI design, even though 12 months have passed since it was announced.
Second, there are a number of great mobile phone concepts out there which deserve to see the light of day, but for whatever reasons never will.
Nokia Aeon Concept
Nokia's Aeon concept, which first surfaced way back in 2006, comprises two touchscreen elements united by a central docking strip. The smaller bottom screen displays a numeric keypad when required, though presumably either screen could be configured to display different tools.
What I like about the Aeon is that it is not a great departure from the design of current mobile phones. This is not a crazy wrap-around-wrist type device, nor fantastical super-slim folding display years from commercial development. The Aeon looks like something that could be put into production tomorrow.
Why Nokia did not run with the Aeon, I'll never know. It's a great looking handset, far more interesting than their present, insanely dull, product line-up.
BenQ-Siemens Black Box
The Black Box concept, from the now defunct BenQ-Siemens, is another interesting concept. Like the Aeon, the Black Box isn't a vast departure from what we presently understand a mobile handset to look like. What is special about the Black Box is the main menu interface.
The idea was to have a tag-cloud style main menu, whereby the phone would learn which functions its owner used most frequently and give greater prominence to these items. It's a wonderfully simple concept that would have made for an intuitive and helpful main menu interface - something woefully lacking in current mobile handsets.
Taking a punt on the K850i
Incidentally, the handset I eventually settled on was the Sony-Ericsson K850i. It was an easy decision in the end, given the limited choice out there. I'm not going to touch any of the present generation Nokia phones due to their ghastly interface and operating system. Motorola is even worse than Nokia when it comes to interface, so they were immediately discounted as well.
It was essentially a toss-up between the Sony-Ericsson K850i and Samsung D900i. The K850i won out in the end partly because I'm not too keen on slide phones (which the D900i is), and partly because I find Sony-Ericsson's interface the easiest to get along with. The best of a bad bunch, as it were.
In case you're wondering, I'm not quite ready to splash out on the iPhone just yet. I'm hoping the next 12 months will see iPhone contract prices come down, and possibly even the iPhone generation 2. Well... I can always hope, can't I?
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Kitsimons...
...is the online home of Simon Kitson, a web designer with a healthy enthusiasm for standards-compliant, accessible design and a penchant for blogging about nothing in particular.
Notes
- Nice Nike Football ad from Madonna's better half.
- Top marks for the realigned BBC News website, bringing it more in line with the lovely new, jQuery driven, BBC homepage.
Beautiful full-screen image browsing served up by the snazzy PicLens plug-in. Impressive, though practicality is debatable.- Yahoo shifts to search the
semantic web
. Potentially huge, and very welcome news for usstandards nuts
. 
The Coke Zero Game. Latest masterpiece from the infuriatingly talented North Kingdom.
It's sites like the Red Bull Flight Lab that remind you what Flash is for. Brilliant application and an awful lot of fun.- Rejoice! The new Indiana Jones trailer has finally made an appearance. Can't wait.
- Help the Email Standards Project get Google's attention in the hope they will finally improve Gmail's awful rendering of HTML email.
- Awesome panoramic view of the Airbus A380 cockpit interior. This is the super-future.
- Excellent article from accessibility supremo Roger Johansson on how inappropriate, or overuse, of HTML features meant to aid accessibility can actually have the opposite effect.
Tom Graham
25 February, 2008
Personally I’m waiting for the “GPhones” (Android). Looks very promising…
kitsimons
25 February, 2008
I’m interested to see how Android turns out. Google’s UI design has been a bit hit or miss in the past, but what little can be gleaned from photos published by CNet doesn’t look too bad. There’s even what looks like an OS X dock-esque menu bar in the first photo.
Tom Graham
27 February, 2008
There are some interesting demos in this YouTube video, even a phone which resembles the iPhone (by LG I think) that was running Quake.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJHYqE0RDg
Woody Kitson
9 March, 2008
I like it Simon :¬) I have been toying with the idea of the iphone for a bit and have not fully investigated the competition handsets with good wireless/browser/phone etc.
Whilste outside on a fresh near-spring morning, appreciating the offline world, I decided to leave it entirely and stay with my vintage mobile. Net ‘timeout’ is needed sometimes for me, and I don’t think I have the discipline to stay away with a pda that gives me web 24 / 7!
I am weak