GLOBAL – You guys have had a lot to say over the past couple of weeks and it’s mostly been about Design by Community. When we started out on this road we never expected this much of a response.
In a little less than two weeks almost 54,000 design submissions have been made, along with scores of comments. Last week you decided on the display and user interface and this week size and shape are under scrutiny. It’s obviously struck a cord and got you guys talking. Quite naturally then, we’ve picked a Design by Community comment for this week’s Comment of the Week accolade. Join us after the jump for more.
Over the past week a whole army of you have been commenting on Design By Community. Each nugget of opinion counts for us and we’re constantly evolving the process, thanks to your feedback. Road Warrior, our comment of the week, has this interesting snippet for us:
RoadWarrior commenting on Design by Community
“I believe a phone should be a phone, with a minimum of computer features (just the most urgent ones), and notebook should be a notebook, and they should not replace each other. There have been multiple attempts to converge palm/pocket-size devices and full-flavored ones, beginning with HP620LX (or maybe even earlier?), and they were coupling and decoupling each time. There cannot be a reasonable compromise: never can you work conveniently at the screen and keyboard of the handset size, nor can you be happy with a handset of a notebook size. This a design feature of a human body, and no claims are accepted by the Designer.”
So, this comment isn’t directly about creating the ultimate concept device. Far from it in fact. But it does raise an interesting, albeit pretty fundamental question. Do we need to think of phones, simply as phones, or has the world changed forever? Given the proliferation of smartphone type features hitting a wider selection of devices (step forward Nokia C5) the age of a phone just being a phone could soon be over. Is that a good thing? Or a bad thing? Your thoughts please.
To RoadWarrior we are thankful for highlighting a topic which is pretty fundamental, and we hope will spark another load of debate. Enjoy the Nokia Research book called Nanotechnologies for Future Mobile Devices (signed by the authors) which we’ll be sending out to you shortly.