Core77
Simply Special
Two of my favorite brands, Samsung and Bang & Olufsen, released their combined efforts as the SGH-E910 this month in the US. One would think it’s like the old Reese’s peanut butter cup commercial where two people are headed on a collision course, one carrying chocolate and the other carrying peanut butter. When they collide, they taste the fruits of their hybridized peanut butter/chocolate experience and claim gastronomic success. Samsung’s got the phone technology; B&O’s got the alien design touch. I’ll have to check it out myself to pass judgement. Reports and commentary on the Net seem unkind. Personally I find nothing wrong with failure — the fact that it was even released should deem it a successful experiment in simplicity.
From a design perspective, the new phone borrows styling cues from the rotary telephone. With the success of youtube I would have thought I could easily find a particular historical video I saw a few years back. It was a short film from when the rotary dial was introduced in the U.S. to teach Americans how to use the then newly introduced interface. There was an extra-large dial prop with a smiling woman placing her hand into a circle and spinning the numbers one by one in an exaggerated fashion. The movie emphasized for me how some form of explicit learn-ing usually underlies what we perceive as a simple interface. My nostalgia for the rotary design draws me to the new Samsung/B&O phone, but for a younger person that’s never used a rotary phone the attraction is surely less deep.
5 Responses to “Dial S, B, O”
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If you fancy a mobile phone that’s like a rotary phone, I think it’s hard to beat this one:
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=286
My sincere thanks for giving me a laugh that I really needed. Thank goodness for creativity! I’ll need to get a new briefcase if I end up getting this phone instead.
It’s expensive, but this appears to be something mere mortals might own. Good to see experiments in minimalism.
Odd, though, that a phone supposedly designed for the pocket should feature sharp corners and reverse curves. And while I, too, love the rotary phone reference, the numbers aren’t in the traditional positions. It won’t be easy to dial this phone without looking.
It doesn’t matter that the rotary allusion won’t resonate with the under-30 crowd. I think this model starts at $1300. Doesn’t have an iTunes-style capability, either.
The ringtones are fabulous.
This may be what you were talking about…
http://www.archive.org/details/HowtoUse1927
Deep down I wish I were a Windows person or at least grew up as one. Seems like all the mobile phones out there dock well with Windows (and now especially so with Windows Mobile). Yes … I know that “Microsoft is” and so forth.
I’ve been an Apple person since the Apple II days onward and I’m locked into the platform. iSync and everything yes I know it “kind of works” perfectly. Maybe when the Apple phone eventually comes out my life will be better synchronized. For the life of me I haven’t been able to figure out the best mobile phone brand/model to do OTA e-mail/calendar in the Mac world in some flawless way.
A few days back, the driver that picked me up at La Guardia was the ultimate techie. He had a Treo synced with his Slingbox at home and demo-ed it for me while we were waiting for my luggage. The one thing that truly blew me away was his zero-hesitation to restart the Treo when it crashed. I asked him if it frustrated him that the Treo needed restarting. He waved it off as kind of like, “Well, it’s doing too much so I figure by restarting it I can give it a regular coffee break that it deserves.” I’ve never seen a person so understanding and emotionally sensitive to the ritual of resetting/restarting a device. His kindness for the Treo made me felt guilty about getting bent out of shape when reacting to a blue screen. Maybe there’s some sort of new yoga move out there called “the reset pose” that I need to practice.
Regarding the rotary movie, that’s not the one — I saw one with audio that was more contemporary, but that’s an even earlier work from 1927 so it’s even better. It makes a great b-day present so thanks Keith