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There was a stretch where phone design went bananas

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Re: There was a stretch where phone design went bananas

#51

Post by bombcar »

SnooSux wrote: post #48
bombcar wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel for you - those buttons will stop working very well quite soon and trying to enter "12" will get you 1, 2, and finally 12. Check every elevator carefully, ADA regulations sometimes require at least ONE elevator in the building to have real buttons (for the blind, for example).

Sounds like the buttons are all real, there are just only 10 of them.

Yeah, which could be really annoying for someone who has a challenge pressing two buttons fast enough to trigger.

A hotel I stayed at had touchscreen "requests" for elevators (you put in your floor and it would call a elevator for you) and it was super annoying (trying to get floor 12 would doublebounce on 1 and 2 so you'd often get 11 and 22 before getting 12) until I found a pedestal out of the way that had real buttons for all floors.

The "hold your keycard up against the thing" is also really annoying when it is 5 feet off the ground; imaging having to wait for an elevator until someone comes along who can hold your card up there for you.

Re: There was a stretch where phone design went bananas

#52

Post by awkward »

Late Nokia phones had this feature where you could enter numbers and the phone would autocomplete based on the numeric character codes. So 4 [GHI] 3 [DEF] 5 [JKL] would give "Hello" as the first option, and so on. It's still the best typing experience I've had on a phone.

Re: There was a stretch where phone design went bananas

#54

Post by jillesvangurp »

woopwoop wrote: post #13

> They literally designed this entire thing for dads that couldn't get the hang of T9 I had a phone like this, although not that model. It was great, T9 sucked. In fact, it was much more pleasant to type on than a touch screen.

It was actually aimed at the blackberry crowd that valued having a full keyboard at the time. I had one for a while in Nokia. It was great for things like email. Much lighter than the 9500/9300s it replaced. Those were heavy bricks. Different times of course but I do miss hardware keyboards.

I think we lost something with all those hardware form-factors converging on essentially the same design: a rectangle that barely fits in your pocket.

Re: There was a stretch where phone design went bananas

#56

Post by BuildTheRobots »

I've got fond memories of trying to order from the Farnel website with a Nokia 6800 back in 2006ish... I think via wifi. The entire experience was awful and infuriating on a number of levels, but it did actually get on with it. Might have been running Opera as a java app. Thanks for the post - I've been trying to remember what that was and failing to google for a couple of weeks now.

Some of the ire and sarcasm seems undeserved and seems to miss the point of some of the handsets - I wonder if the author is old enough to remember them first hand in the wild (eg for the k800 no one downloaded MP3s through their phone, but having a 2gb SD card and a USB connection was extremely handy).

Edit: to clarify what I meant; I didn't meant to disparage anyone's age. Merely that I remember some of this tech making sense in the context of the time, though looking back from today, I can see why it wouldn't.

Re: There was a stretch where phone design went bananas

#57

Post by Eric_WVGG »

I almost bought one of those "lipstick" phones. I figured, if all I'm doing is making calls, why _not_ have the smallest phone possible? The only thing that really stopped me is that I never figured out if it would work on American cell networks. https://twitter.com/GerryMcBride/status/1591908903964622848

Re: There was a stretch where phone design went bananas

#58

Post by pc86 »

bradknowles wrote: post #10
shubhamjain wrote: post #7

I did some investigation around this. At their peak, Nokia launched 46 models a single year [1]. I believe Apple has launched somewhere The genius of Steve Jobs was in showing that you can have whole company focus on making a brilliant device that works for everyone. I still don't get why companies are so much focused on launching hundreds of different models instead of one and leveraging economies of scale. [1]: htt…

Samsung squits out like 50+ phone models a year. That's like one every week. How can any of them be any good? How can any of them ever get any useful time in the spotlight?

You're right, if they had any business sense they'd be making more than a piddling $1B/month - https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/26/22902283/samsung-earnings...

Re: There was a stretch where phone design went bananas

#59

Post by blululu »

blululu wrote: post #55

Sure, you can sit around Twitter all day whining about how Apple won't make your favorite phone or you can get on AliExpress and send $20 USD for a brand new Ferrari Phone: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256802047473717.html?spm=a2g...

Also comes in flip phone form factor: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2251832310833680.html?spm=a2g...

Not into cars. That's fine. How about a phone for people who really like soda: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2255799830362840.html?spm=a2g...

Once you drop the giant screen requirement that all smart phones cater to as their design center you can kind of go nuts on the ID. A relatively modest amount of NRE will let you spin up your own absurd vision into a feature phone. (Though you may end of losing a quarter million dollars just for the pure joy of having a rotary dial mobile phone with eInk display).

Re: There was a stretch where phone design went bananas

#60

Post by mortenjorck »

SnooSux wrote: post #48
bombcar wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel for you - those buttons will stop working very well quite soon and trying to enter "12" will get you 1, 2, and finally 12. Check every elevator carefully, ADA regulations sometimes require at least ONE elevator in the building to have real buttons (for the blind, for example).

Sounds like the buttons are all real, there are just only 10 of them.

This was the same setup in a condo tower I used to live in. Touchscreen grid of floor numbers and a keypad (with Braille) at ADA wheelchair height.
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