Now, here’s an intriguing story, from the BBC. 3, in conjunction with the Royal College of Art, have been running a “design-a-mobile-phone” competition, presumably to a higher level than the “design-a-whatever” competitions you see, aimed at 7 year olds…
Basically, students at the college were given a simple instruction: to design a new mobile phone. And it appears they were told to be as wild and innovative as they wanted, because there were some real mental designs.
That’s not to say they were bad, because they weren’t, but they were mental.
Of the winners, my personal favourite has to be the Vase, a phone that arrives to the user as a blank canvas with a blank touchscreen, and nowt else on it (yes, I slipped into my Yorkshire voice, then for emphasis). The idea is dead simple. The user then fills it up with whatever content, themes, apps, games or whatever that they want. It’s a nice idea, as it combines a really rather sleekified mobile phone, with the ultimate in personalisation. I reckon people’d lap that one up.
Amongst the other winners were the Teiko phone, specifically for kids, with a retractable hands-free, games, parental control and GPS built in; and the Free Key, where a flexible screen sits on top of a 40-key keypad, that users assign keys for, and that kind of makes it a pseudo-quasi-touchscreen-keypad-thing.
Top stuff, and it’s nice to see people bringing fresh ideas in. how many of them are feasible and would work as phones is another idea, but it’s nice to see innovation and frankly mental concepts. And let’s face it, even something like the LG Viewty started as a mental concept, that everyone went “Nah, they’ll never make that” at…
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