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April 26, 2010
Lumia

Enhancements – Design by Community



1. IntroGLOBAL – This is it folks, the final week of voting for Design by Community. Last week over 4,000 of you voted for what you want to see in the concept device’s camera. Eight megapixels and 4X optical zoom were the order of the day, along with instant capture, HD video recording and a combination of Xenon and Dual LED flash. This week though we’re all about enhancements. No, we’re not talking Bluetooth headsets and device chargers here, we’re looking right out into the future. Read on to find out what’s in store for this week’s voting.

What would be your ideal option for power enhancements? What about a kinetic power booster? Or perhaps a solar charger. Either, if the tech was available, would enable you to keep the concept device juiced up on the go. The alternative option? How about an extra battery?

Enhancing a device is part and parcel of how we live with it right now, either through hardware accessories or getting the software to do more. The latter is mostly done through apps and firmware upgrades. But what if mobile computers could behave more like their desktop counterparts. What about being able to upgrade the whole OS. Or take it even further and have a concept device that can run multiple Operating Systems? Running two at the same time might be asking too much, even for the future, though the option to run different OSs could be an interesting one. What do you think?

Music is playing an increasingly important role in our mobile devices. How could we make it better? Wireless headphones is a bit “right now” so how about surround sound speakers? Would that make music and movies a better experience? Of course, we could just go crazy and add a karaoke machine. There might be apps available for that right now, for individual artists and tracks, but what if your on-board karaoke player could do more. Would you want it to?

On device storage is something I think we can never have enough of. As we shoot, record and save more on our devices, we need more space to keep all our stuff. The other week we offered device based or cloud based storage as options. The majority of you opted for device based. Is expandable microSD support enough, or should we push it further. What about upgradable flash drives so we can keep our devices in tune with our needs, as they develop. Or taking it closer to the PC experience and having upgradable hard drives. Would that be of interest?

Finally we have camera peripherals. How far could we push mobile cameras? Adding a snap on flash and mic could be a nice option. It’d certainly be a way to overcome the Xenon/Dual LED argument along with enhancing the way we record audio. Alternatively, we could view the upgrade experience in new ways, with the option to add bigger and better image sensors. That might be a step too far though, so how about the option to turn this concept device into a mini DSLR and have the option to add interchangeable lenses. Impractical? You decide.

Voting is open now for enhancements so head over to Design by Community and let us know what you think matters most for enhancements.