Engadget picked up on new phone concept designs by Japanese brand AU, but didn’t mention that one seems to bear the mark of Marc…

Very groovy and appealing ipod/dog-tag aesthetic, begging to display itself on a lanyard.

Perhaps reporting the death of the candy-bar form factor is premature? Instead perhaps it will flip to being a fashion statement – standing out from the crowd of clamshells…

Om Malik and Rajesh Jain have been thinking about a Massputer, a $300 device that

“should be able to do basic tasks like writing documents, Internet surfing, email and perhaps some business-related tasks like data entry.”

I am guessing that this is different to the much-touted “Simputer” of a couple of years ago, in that it is not designed to be mobile, ruggedised or adapted in any way other than to be affordable.

Om writes:

“The $300 sticker is vital- it keeps the devices affordable, and at the same time allows the corporation selling this massputer makes a decent profit. Gizmos such as color televisions, washing machines, refrigerators and air conditioners were snapped up in large numbers once they were priced right around $300. The proliferation of mobile phones in the emerging world is proof that at the right and affordable price people everywhere will adopt the right technology. There was a time when a mobile phone cost $400 and a mere 10 million people had the service. Now more than 400 million phones will be sold this year and 1.4 billion people, many in not very rich countries, will make mobile calls. That is because the price of the phone at $100 is now affordable in these emerging countries. More users means the price-per-minute has come down as well. In short, everyone benefits.

The social implications of Massputer cannot be underscored. Popularity of cell phones and text messaging promoted social revolutions, and peaceful protests in hitherto turbulent societies in Asia. Philippines comes to mind. I believe the availability of a Massputer connected to the Internet will help develop more educated, more informed and more open societies. If rest of the world has to embrace the principles of free markets, they need the tools. Massputer is a perfect example.”

Unlike the Massputer, The Simputer and other projects to create affordable, accessable ICTs have followed the dedicated, simplified ‘information appliance’ design route, assuming that the societies that need access to ICT need robust and simplified products to begin with.

Sugata Mitra’s work at the NIIT showed that even in rural areas with little exposure to technology and lower level of literacy – people, especially children learned to use computers (albeit with ruggedized input devices) in short order with no training.

Ultimately, people who want access to information and computing power want access to the same as everyone else, not a ‘special’ user-experience which keeps them on the wrong side of a new type of digital divide. Om and Rajesh make a great business argument for the Massputer also – let’s hope someone takes them up on it.

From the N-Gage site today:

“The N-Gage QD game deck has all the gaming features of the original game deck, plus a few welcome adjustments – like hot swap for your game cards. We trimmed off the MP3 player (and some of the price!), gave it a slick, non-sidetalking design, and shrunk it all down so it fits better in your pocket… Hey, you talked, we listened!”

Seeing phone design iteration cycles in the console world, even the portable gaming world is exciting – also that the N-Gage folk got the joke, listened, acted and then co-opted the gag…

…lives!

Congratulations to Christian [here’s his post showing off the new megapixel Nokia 7610 phone that will come with the lifeblog client preinstalled] and the entire crew.

This should probably be in /play, but whatever. They just played all 8mins of Kashmir on 6music. If you’re familiar with the overblown Zep epic, then there’s a really, really good breakdown in the middle with Bonzo’s drums, some strings and Plant mumbling and wailing a bit. They work it for a while, but just as it’s getting funky, they swerve back into the chugging riff that is the song’s trademark.

Which is a longwinded intro to making a LazyGadget request.

I’d like a small amount of sampling/looping/effect generation capability on my iPod/personal music device which I could access and manipulate with one hand. Just to muck around and extend bits like the breakdown in Kashmir long enough to ruin them for myself…

A couple of great quotes from a NYT Magazine article on the iPod that has been heavily linked already.

Jonathan Ive on the genesis of the iPod:

”Steve” — that would be Steve Jobs — ”made some very interesting observations very early on about how this was about navigating content,” Ive says. ”It was about being very focused and not trying to do too much with the device — which would have been its complication and, therefore, its demise. The enabling features aren’t obvious and evident, because the key was getting rid of stuff.”

Later he said: ”What’s interesting is that out of that simplicity, and almost that unashamed sense of simplicity, and expressing it, came a very different product. But difference wasn’t the goal. It’s actually very easy to create a different thing. What was exciting is starting to realize that its difference was really a consequence of this quest to make it a very simple thing.”

“Trying to not to do too much with the device” – coming back to scenario and persona-driven design again. If in the design process one tries to take the scenarios as they stand and create something that supports every need, every moment in the scenario or persona; then the simplicity Ive describes will be lost. Identifying the one key need or moment and honing the design without compromise is key. Victor’s ‘value-complexity’ matrix is a tool i’ve always liked – but I think there’s more intuition involved in a designer or team knowing what the one, focal moment or need is. I would love to be corrected and pointed to tools or processes that can assist…

Steve Jobs on design:

“‘Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,” says Steve Jobs, Apple’s C.E.O. ”People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Amen.

» New York Times: The Guts of a New Machine By ROB WALKER [Reg. Reqd]

“This is the point. Detail and nuance and texture and a sense of how users actually feel, what makes them smile, what makes the experience worthy and positive and sensual instead of necessary and drab and evil.

These are the things that are nearly dead in our mass-consumer culture, things normally reserved for elitist niche markets and swanky boutiques and upscale yuppie Euro spas and maybe cool insider mags like I-D and Metropolis and dwell. They are most definitely not to be expected of mass-market gadget makers. This is why it matters. This is why it’s important.”

» SFGate: Lick Me, I’m A Macintosh: What the hell is wrong with Apple that they still give a damn about design and packaging and ‘feel’?

“Something little observed outside of engineering is that pre-globalization, machinery had cultural accents. You could tell if you were working on something that was American, British, French, or Japanese. Science is science, but where you have choices available for achieving an end, cultural intonations will come through.”

» Inflight Correction: Friday, May 16, 2003 – 1:24 PM

The scale’s the thing
and so’s the flow

as above
so below!