Orange Cone

A phone a day: Motorola Moto Q 9m (2007)

2012-04-16T16:25:48Z

I admit my eyes begin to glaze over with the quantity of me-too generic phones, but past the repetition there's always something interesting. Every phone is an attempt by a company to compete with others making very similar products and to simultaneously advance their own design and manufacturing. Seen from the ground-level, these micro-level incremental changes become significant. Every single device is the product of many people's best work to outdo their competitors and themselves. This phone, which superficially is identical to Samsung's phone from the same era that I profiled a couple of days ago, is trying to do several different things. Both are trying to chip away at RIM's (then) dominance of the business texting market, so their basic form is the Blackberry. With this phone, however, Motorola decided to do two different things: use Windows Mobile as the operating system and create a new visual interface for what they considered the commonly-used functions. Here's a close up:

Motorola historically made much more interesting (read: better) hardware than they did software, and this again proves the point. I would list the usability issues with this, but a blog post review from the era already summarized it well:

We will dispense first with the Q9m's highly advertised "Exclusive Multimedia Home Screen." This is, without a doubt, the most ill-conceived home screen I have ever seen. The iPod Shuffle has a better visual interface than the Q9m.

For starters, none of the buttons are labeled properly and there are not descriptions on the screen (tooltips, etc.) of what any of the buttons do. The icons are arranged in a circle, which makes navigating using a directional pad an adventure because nothing is intuitive. It took me a total of two minutes to fully appreciate just how bad the home screen was. Fortunately, the phone (unlike earlier Verizon cell phones) allows you to turn off the terrible interface and switch to the standard Windows Mobile interface.

Background on the A Phone a Day project.

A phone a day: Samsung SGH-a17 Blackjack II (2007)

2012-04-15T02:07:34Z

With a name like Blackjack, it's clear who Samsung is gunning for here: Blackberry. For practical purposes the phone is functionally indistinguishable from Blackjack models of the time. The difference, apart from the price (I'm assuming it was cheaper--Samsung was still competing at least partially at price at this point) is the design and finish of the phone. It feels like a business phone and not a phone for teens--the other group of heavy texters: it's solid, heavy and made with materials that feel sophisticated. The rubberized coating on the back is designed to keep the phone stable during (presumed) hours of texting, while the burgundy highlights feel professional (Samsung apparently made a variant for teens in light blue and pink, and it's interesting to see how color changes expectations of functionality). It's actually quite satisfying of a designed object to hold, the product of ten years of refinement of a type. This was released several months after the release of the first iPhone, and I wonder how it felt to the designers to have created a nearly-perfected version of a design that was functionally extinct.

Background on the A Phone a Day project.

A phone a day: Siemens sk65 (2005)

2012-04-12T17:26:18Z

Of all of the standard phone form factors, swivel phones have had the least success. I can see why people try them--slicing the phone along its thickness provides nearly twice the surface area to work with--but the swivel mechanism has to be made very carefully (twisting wires and contacts around is a notoriously difficult problem) and none of the individual surfaces end up as big as a slab phone. At that crucial pre-iPhone era where functionality was commodified, however, exploring form factors was seen as a good way to compete. RIM was one of the biggest competitors, and they owned the phones-with-keyboards market, but their keyboards were relatively small. Siemens must have decided that they had an opportunity to use the swivel form factor both to visually differentiate their phone and to create a better, bigger keyboard without impacting the overall size of the phone. In a unique design decision in all phone design (as far as I can tell), they came up with this awesomely wacky X-shaped design. It actually works pretty well, but it feels huge when open, which phones are not really supposed to do (they're, for the most part, discrete devices, even when used publicly), plus it's unclear whether the bigger keyboard adds enough to justify the overall increase in size. Still, after the 2003 70s sfi-fi craziness of the Xelibri phone line, it's actually a somewhat sedate design.

Background on the A Phone a Day project.

A phone a day: Nokia 7360 (2005)

2012-04-10T16:44:27Z

This phone is part of what can only be called Nokia's Baroque line. In 2005 they decided to fall fully into the idea of phones as fashion accessories, as a primary means of self-presentation. This was probably a logical move at the time, which in retrospect will probably be seen as a moment form factors began to stabilize and functionality began to stagnate. People had always bought phones for how they looked, and what that look said about them (and they continue to do this), but at a time when competition on what a phone did was stagnant, it was a natural move to compete on how it looked. Nokia's decision was to borrow the techniques and materials of high fashion and furniture design to create devices that were more about how they looked than what they did. This was probably the most conservative and lowest-end phone in that line, but it still has all the components: exotic materials, prodigious surface decoration, a sophisticated color palette. Plus, in addition to the suede and the gold-and-jewel like d-pad, it also borrows directly from fashion, most directly in its use of the fabric tag. Holding it today, it feels kind of cheap, but I think that's because it also understands that fashion IS cheap, that what's important is how a product reads from 10 feet away, not from 2 feet away. This was supposed to be a new class of costume jewelry, not an heirloom, but a fun thing that says something about your choices in commodities.

Background on the A Phone a Day project.

A phone a day: LG Xenon GR500 (2009)

2012-04-08T04:25:55Z

This phone does not particularly stand out in the pile of random phones for specific niches that continue to come out. This is a Danger Sidekick derivative (which is itself a derivative of the Blackberry) that's aimed toward people who send a lot of text messages and/or email. It has a post-iPhone touchscreen form factor, but it's clearly designed to be opened and typed on. What's interesting to me about it is that it's a Symbian device. There were not many non-Nokia Symbian devices, and they all suffered to some extent from Symbian's legacy as the "first" smart phone operating system (there are of course disputes about what a smart phone is and who had the first operating system, but Symbian has a good claim to be the best example of the first generation of smart phones, with iOS being the first of the second generation). To me, the use of Symbian means that LG was hedging their bets. I'm sure that they had their own in-house smart phone operating system under development--all the big companies do, I suspect--but that licensing Symbian was a way to have experience with it should it become successful. As we know, it didn't. That meant that this phone, and every other Symbian device, was locked into an odd role: it had the capability and infrastructure to be an open-ended computing device with a wide variety of different applications running on it (and it already has all of the affordances to be the equivalent of a netbook), but with almost no software available for it. Microsoft and Nokia are in that boat today with Windows Phone 7 and the new Lumia phones, and it'll be an interesting exercise to look back three years from now and see how well they do, and whether they end up like this phone.

Background on the A Phone a Day project.

A phone a day: Samsung SPH-a600 (2005)

2012-04-01T04:11:26Z

I believe that this phone shows Samsung's first early efforts to break away from making generic phones that sold primarily on price to try and introduce some of its own innovations and sell phones based on novel functionality (judging from the generic silver color and it's overall still generic look, differentiation by industrial design had not yet become a priority). The main innovation here is the swiveling camera. The little camera is placed at the pivot of the hinge for the phone, and placed on a small turret that moves from pointing forward to pointing backward at the holder. This is a variant on what Nokia was doing with the 3250, which came out a year later, so clearly at the time there was a perception that: cameras are important, but including more than one camera is expensive, and people want to point the camera at both themselves and at other things. Thus, one solution is to have a camera that pivots from front-facing to back-facing, so that the LCD display can continue to be used. Another is to have two LCD displays--one facing each direction--so that the phone phone can be moved. Companies tried both kinds of designs, but this is a great example of the somewhat rarer first idea. Did people actually use it this way? I suspect not. Frankly, I suspect there was a lot of wishful thinking about how carriers were going to drive the kind of high bandwidth use that this kind hardware functionality implied, and the carriers never priced that bandwidth low enough, or designed the functionality well enough, for there to be much adoption.

Background on the A Phone a Day Project

A phone a day: Blackberry Pearl 8130 (2006)

2012-03-28T16:48:10Z

The Pearl was RIM's entry into the phone market. Previous models of Blackberries lived in a universe of their own--they were technically phones in the sense that they were general digital portable communication devices but they were much more geared toward email than any other kind of activity--the Pearl aimed to take on Nokia at its core. This was a real phone in the sense that it was shaped like a traditional candybar phone, it had no full keyboard, and it had a prominent camera. In true Blackberry style, however, the company did focus on creating a good keyboard experience, and the keyboard on the Pearl is surprisingly good considering it abandons the one-key-per-letter philosophy and uses predictive text for typing. The gentle V dip makes it clear that they're still expecting people to hold it like a traditional Blackberry and type with both thumbs (it's essentially a tiny version of full-size ergonomic keyboards that angle the keys). The sexiest part of the design is, of course, the trackball. That's why they named it the Pearl. Nearly unique in mobile phone design, the trackball was not a glorified d-pad, but a fully-functional trackball that was tuned to being used with a single finger. As I remember, it worked really well (and, fwiw, you can still buy Sparkfun's breakout boards with these on them to play with) and accurately predicted how phone interaction would work when touchscreens ruled the land. I also think that it's an under-utilized affordance, and that more finger trackballs could be put on things.

Background on the A Phone a Day project.

A phone a day: Nokia 3250 (2006)

2012-03-27T16:40:51Z

This is one of my favorite cameras from the era when Nokia was really experimenting with form factors. The keypad twists 270 degrees (very satisfyingly, btw, with a great, solid feel and several satisfying index clicks) to move the music and video controls to the front of the camera and to move the camera lens, which is placed (perhaps uniquely in all phone designs) facing right in the bottom righthand corner. You're clearly supposed to flip the camera over, twist it and then look at the screen in portrait mode while pushing the silver camera button, which would fall under the right index finger. I think that this interaction owes a lot to the original Nikon Coolpix cameras, which split down the middle to create a more ergonomic handhold than a flat plane. It's an interesting early experiment in making a phone that's primarily designed to work as a camera and music player (the vestigial keypad guarantees that).

Background on the A Phone a Day project.

A phone a day: Motorola DynaTAC 8800x (1987)

2012-03-22T04:30:36Z

There is little that can be said about this phone that hasn't been said better elsewhere. It is the canonical first generation cell phone. This is a model from 1987 (specifically model F09DSD8826AN, back when what a phone was named or numbered was irrelevant), so it's not among the very first of these transformational mobile phones, those were from the 8000x series starting in 1983, but it's pretty damned close to the beginning, so it's not from the Cambrian Age of phones, but it's certainly from the Silurian at least. Compared the modern digital mobile phones, it's barely even a computer, most of its magic coming not from being a portable networked computer tuned for data--as digital phones were--but from being an incredibly compact, powerful analog radio. It's digital functionality (as I understand) extends to remembering up to 30 phone numbers, using an interface (the keys at the bottom) that was apparently notoriously difficult to use. That no surprise, because the vast majority of the user experience was not in the usability of the keypad, but that you could carry a phone with you. This fact by itself was so important that it dwarfed any other consideration and Motorola was able to manufacture these phones almost unchanged for more than a decade. That's unheard of today, but proof of how incredibly powerful the idea was--and how difficult it must have been to create a competitor. (Oh, and if you really love the design of this phone, you can get a GSM phone that's a nearly identical clone, and doesn't weigh two pounds)

Background on the A Phone a Day project

A phone a day: Nokia 6630 (2004)

2012-03-21T03:37:03Z

Much like the 3620 that came out two years earlier, the 6630 is one of Nokia's "round on the bottom" phones, tuned to the form of use where you hold the phone with one hand and either operate it with the same hand or the other (unlike the Blackberry derivative phones, which are used symmetrically, with both hands holding the phone identically, and typing with thumbs). It's instructive to see how Nokia had progressed in this design by comparing the earlier phone with this one. The earlier phone had a bunch of small round buttons that reinforced the droplet shape to make the whole thing look more organically round. Those buttons must have been hard to hit, since this phone makes all the button targets about the same size and really attempts to maximize button size, so that they're all tightly packed, but still fitting into the keyboard circle at the bottom. I don't know if this was for ergonomic reasons or esthetic ones, but it makes the whole thing look more deliberate and functional, perhaps less playful. That's oddly fighting with the fact that the phone is ultimately shaped like a dumbbell and inherently comical. This is emphasized by what looks to be an enormous camera lens on the back. Was that really necessary? All these things come together to make this whole phone line seem like a rather odd idea. I can see what they were going for, but the results are unbalanced in virtually every iteration.

Background on the A Phone a Day project.

A phone a day: Nokia 6103 (2006)

2012-03-19T16:30:02Z

When we think of phones as commodities, we think of phones like this. When looking up reviews of it online, what many of them started with was "it's a lot like the 6101." That says to me that the reviewers considered this class of phones to be interchangeable and generic, a sure sign that a product has become an interchangeable commodity. It could be that the commodification of the mobile phone, a fantastic futuristic device that barely existed 15 years before this phone was made, had hit its peak by this point, and that's what drove the massive demand for something fundamentally new (which is, of course, the iPhone a year later). Stepping back, however, perhaps what makes it generic is that it's a perfection of a form--the small clamshell--that had run its course for the moment. It most certainly is a futuristic device. It's what science fiction always imagined a communicator would look like: a smooth pebble that pops open to reveal the controls of a sophisticated technological instrument that can do everything from send text messages to take photographs. It's just that every other phone in 2006 was from the same future. The market clearly needed a new future to explore.

Background on the A Phone a Day project.

A phone a day: Anonymous Samsung Phone circa 2000-2001

2012-03-18T03:01:51Z

After a half-hour searching, I couldn't find the model number of this phone (help appreciated: email me at blog c/o this site). That may be just as well, since what matters is how it's designed to do what it does. In that, it's an interesting example of one of the last generation of mobile phones that we primarily phones, devices that were designed for talking. Not sending pictures, not browsing the net, just calling people and--to a lesser extent--texting. The texting angle is particularly interesting. This phone texts, but it still has a traditional keypad. However, texting had reached "hockey stick" adoption levels at this point (this source says that between January 1999 and December 2001 the number of text messages in the UK went from 100 million messages a month--already a huge amount--to 1.3 billion per month), but phones had not yet adapted to this new way of using them. Blackberry's great advantage was that RIM saw this behavior and began to design devices to exploit it. This device is still largely tuned to talking. It's big and it has that characteristic plastic flap that simultaneously covered the keypad and made the sound quality better. Because, of course, it's about the sound. It sits in the hand well, and the silver buttons are really easy to see against the dark blue background, because it's a phone for dialing people's numbers. It wasn't until the Danger Hiptop exploded, as I remember, in 2003-2004 that others realized that a new way of communicating had taken over.

Background on the A Phone a Day project.

A phone a day: Nokia 3220 (2004)

2012-03-15T20:17:22Z

I love the design of this phone. As Nokia's first Internet-enabled phone (according to Wikipedia), this phone was going to stand out no matter what, but Nokia also decided to push the envelope in terms of design, perhaps trying to capture in the phone's design the future that Internet connectivity represented. What they ended up with was something that looks exactly like what a prop from a 70s science fiction film about the year 2004 would look like: bright blue, biomorphic, with LED backlit translucent silicone gripper pads so that you don't lose it while in orbit. It also had a rave lighting ringtone mode that no phone come close to. Here's a video:

In short, it's a phone with enough vision and personality for five phones, and is a high point for Nokia's design, produced when they were probably at the peak of their confidence. It was also a pretty low-end phone, where all of the personality essentially came free with the manufacturing process. More phones should try to be this ambitious.

Background on the A Phone a Day project.

A phone a day: Samsung Eternity (SGH-A867) (2008)

2012-03-14T18:05:10Z

Ah, what's in a name? Without going too far into analyzing how phones are named (which really deserves a thorough analysis, since clearly a lot effort goes into it, with mixed results), the Eternity is interesting for the period it represents: released in mid-2008, it's a direct reaction to the iPhone. I wouldn't be surprised if it was rushed into design less than a year after its release, when it was clear that the iPhone's introduction was a major event. Reading and watching a CNET review from the time of its introduction, it's interesting to see that it was perceived as a medium-end business phone, and as much as the special AT&T features (TV and music) were touted, it didn't seem that that was the core point of interest for most people. That puts this phone into an interesting position: it's a slate, like the iPhone, but its design predates the App Store, so it's still tied to the old model where carriers provide functionality, which means that as an experience, it's limited to what's built into the OS and what the carrier has provided. A couple of months before its introduction in October 2008, Apple released the App Store, which represented the second giant wave of innovation in that space, and which swept the carrier-centric view of phones away, likely forever. By the time the phone was released, the App Store was exploring and exploiting the capabilities of devices like this much more than any single manufacturer or carrier could ever hope to.

Background on the A Phone a Day project.

A phone a day: Pantech Slate C530 (2008)

2012-03-12T17:38:02Z

This is another one of those generic phones that your eyes tend to slide over, but it represents the bread and butter of much of the phone industry. It's a direct descendant of the Blackberry, and tuned to optimal functional and economic efficiency by Pantech, which (according to the current Wikipedia entry) is ahead of LG in terms of sales in its domestic Korea. That means that this cheap phone--and it is very cheap: its retail price of $50 means that it probably costs Pantech $10 to make--is what see on the surface of a huge business. As such, it's interesting to see what it does and doesn't do: first, it doesn't have to be recharged for 10 days; second, it's very small and thin (it was described as "the thinnest messaging device" on its release); third, it's really good at texting. And that's it. Like an animal that evolved in a highly specialized ecosystem, this is the product of an evolution of phones for cost-conscious busy people who mostly need to send email and need their phone available all the time. In other words, the ecosystem that BlackBerry pioneered. This, in some ways, is a phone that RIM should have made, if they were willing to have microscopic profit margins and were able to capture a huge market.

Background on the A Phone a Day project.