Rachel Hinman’s going on a generative sprint for the next three months.
“For the next 90 days, I’m going to think about, sketch, draw, and prototype ideas about mobile design and post them here. Like folks recovering from any addiction, I don’t know what is at the end of these 90 days. I’m just gonna commit to thinking about it every day for 90 days and have faith that something good will be on the other side.”
Link: 90 Mobiles in 90 Days (90mobilesin90days.com)
A slightly interesting article about innovation at Nokia is accompanied by some fun user-generated concept phones from their research.
Link: Nokia’s Dream Phones (businessweek.com)
MEX is hosting a design competition of sorts – encouraging people to showcase design ideas (or new products) for mobile. Here are some of them.
The Blind Phone concept seems to a bit of a dexterity obstacle course – I’m not sure how you could dial with a pinky finger and keep a decent grip on the device:
“The Blind Phone is aimed at filling a niche requirement for blind and partially sighted people. A phone designed from the ground up around the needs of a restricted sight person.”
Link: BSR Blind Phone
Delta deals with the particularly North American obsession with having full keyboards on devices. It has F keys, and I’ll leave it at that:
“At the heart of a Delta II equipped mobile phone is a patented, modified QWERTY button layout that is simple, elegant, and brutally effective. The buttons are large enough to easily read and far enough apart to comfortably press, even for people with large hands. The ingenious button layout takes advantage of the user’s motor memory and PC (QWERTY) keyboard typing experience. The result is new users typing a speedy 20 to 30+ WPM in less than 5 minutes; on single-hand operation mobile phones no larger than a business card – previously this was unheard of.”
Link: Finest Mobile Phone Keypad in the World
Motionized looks like fun:
“By using the movement of the handset to enable users to browse menus, pan and zoom within images, navigate web pages or play games, the Motionized handset introduces a breakthrough in user experience.”
Link: Motionized™ – using the phone’s camera to enable a new UI
Slide it (like SharkText, which became ShapeWriter) requires users to slide a stylus around to type faster:
“SlideIt, is an intuitive method to input text on touch screen enabled devices. Instead of tapping each letter, with SlideIt users simply point to first letter of a word and slide the stylus to the subsequent letters. Spacing is achieved by just lifting the stylus. Speeds of more than 50 words per minute are easily achievable. Consumers love the feel of writing quickly and accurately.”
Nicholas Nova has put together a list of curious cameras.
”[I write about this because] it’s both the interest in automatic cameras as tools for User Experience research and as curious devices from the near future. Automatic camera can indeed be used to ask people to reflect on their activities (with some ethical limits) and weird cameras are very interesting devices to imagine new uses.”
Link: A list of intriguing digital cameras (liftlab.com)
Published by Gabriel White.