Here Is a Mobile Phone I can Go For
It is interesting to see a growing resitance to the feature-creep that is central to mobile phone marketing. I’m sure there must be some folks who use all the features on their new mobile phones (as part of their careers in espionage or satellite navigation perhaps), but they are lost on me. At the risk of of sounding extremely non-geeky, I only use my mobile phone for voice and on rare occasions SMS communcations with a handful of people (and these days I’m literally talking about a number you can count on one, maybe two hands).
So, it was fun to see the International Herald Tribune highlight a portable rotary phone that comes complete with a serious
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. I really liked the way they listed the features you could not get with the new Motorola Razr V3,
“What the Spark Fun Portable Rotary Phone has is heft, at about two pounds, or about a kilogram, or almost 10 times the weight of the RAZR. It also has a rotary dial, a thick black plastic casing and a coiled cord, all of which the RAZR lacks — and a ring factor — as in clanging metal bells, for those tired of the “Crazy Frog Axel F” ringtone.”
Greg Restall:
June 27th, 2005 at 4:51 am
I own what might have been a top-of-the-line phone a couple of years ago. The Sony Ericsson T630. It is one of those fancy-schmancy cameraphones, with the redeeming feature that it is extremely lo-res. The other redeeming feature is that you can set a ringtone just like that one, and it sounds like a phone should.
f:
June 27th, 2005 at 9:06 am
Actually, those pics have a cool lomo quality to them.
Greg Restall:
June 27th, 2005 at 2:36 pm
Exactly. The shots have a kind of artefactuality which brings to the surface the fact that the image has been processed by some kind of machine (whether digital or analogue doesn’t matter), that I find attractive.
Toni:
June 27th, 2005 at 7:17 pm
For a long time I’ve wished there was a phone ‘just the right size’ which only worked like a phone. No txt.spk, no games, no clever modes or cameras and a normal ring tone. The number of buttons on the front could be reduced to 10 + dial and off. I’m sure the market would be huge, for all those grownups that wanted a phone to communicate with, rather than bling.
Oh, and decent reception and amplification would be nice too.
Phones:
June 29th, 2005 at 10:38 am
Feature Creep
With small keyboards and screens, how many more features can manufacturers cram into cell phones?…