I guess I just changed my opinion about simplicity and cell phones…
Seems like some developers did their usability homework.
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Monthly Archive for November, 2007
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I got a new cell phone. While most people try to get new phones with more features, fancier ringtones, better displays and cameras, I made a major downgrade and bought the dirt cheap low-end mobile Motorola MOTOFONE F3 from a gypsy at a hairdresser in Budapest.
The thing is that my phone broke on the trip to Budapest and I tried to find a quick replacement, without selling my soul to a Hungarian mobile carrier. So the hairdresser gypsy was the best given option.
While configuring the new phone I really started liking it.
Quite unusual for a phone these days, it offers no functionality but making a phone call and sending a message. The device has even barely a menu. The e-paper display provides space for 6 digits in two lines, no pixels or colors at all. The address book contains one name and number per entry, there is no camera and maybe 7 basic ringtones. It does feature vibration mode though, but no profiles of course.
Text messages are very rudimentary too: I can pimp my lower case text messages with commas and question marks. That’s it. No smiley or other funny symbol, not even a point, an exclamation mark or quotes.
Due to the lack of a menu you do advanced menu settings by typing totally abstract number codes, like ***470* for setting the time format for instance. Isn’t that just great?
It’s a plain phone and it’s fantastic!
Ok, now it’s official, I’m getting old. I never ever would have thought that I’ll watch something like this.
Isn’t that insane?
Well, this video shows what it looks like when things don’t work as expected. Ouch!
Big air is awesome spectacular, but street is still more complex, with style and nicer to watch.
Why is it for some media companies so hard to understand that the internet is a borderless space?
And why bother and tease and let people search the site when it only leads to that message, instead of blocking “wrong” IP ranges instantly. Maybe the producers want us to find and view their content, but can’t do it because their legal department said no.
Ah, ok, now I get it, they want us to save bandwidth, go to YouTube and see if the TV show is already there…
TomTom did the obvious step and raised their offer up to 30 EUR per TeleAtlas share, making TeleAtlas worth a decent 2.9 billion EUR.
Why do I get the feeling that, no matter who wins the poker game, the loser will run into big “devices without data” troubles?
The point I’m more concerned about is how will the outcome of this poker game affect other TeleAtlas clients. It’s quite obvious that the future TeleAtlas owner will try to get the investment back. And what would be easier than to have a look at existing costumers? Since TeleAtlas and NAVTEQ (now part of the Nokia empire) were in monopoly excellent data vendor positions, many clients depend on their services.
Just like a considerable part of public administration (transport planning, etc.) relies on TeleAtlas (or NAVTEQ) data. So I guess, thanks to privatization and outsourcing, the TeleAtlas bill is partially going to be paid with tax money too. [via heise]
Emanuel posted a short video clip showing how the map projection we recently did works.
We used two vertical menus in our interface: one to show static indicators and one to see relations between selected countries. The static indicators are basically triggered by placing a token on a menu item, then an animation starts playing without much interactive features. On the other menu the user selects an indicator the same way and starts then placing two additional tokens on countries to do comparisons among each other (or moves one token around as it is shown in the clip). The first chosen country is 100% and the value of the following country relates to it, visualized by scaling circles.
We submitted this project to the upcoming Art and Cartography Symposium here in Vienna and are planning to set up the installation there again. I don’t know who else will be attending, call for papers just closed and the program isn’t released yet, but the title itself does already sound very interesting.