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The future of mobile hardware
Posted by Leonard Ah Kun in Interaction Design
Mobile phones have gone through all shapes and forms. We started with ‘the brick’, then they got smaller and smaller until we reached the RAZR era. I used think it was cool to have the smallest thinnest phone, even though I strugged typing on my Sony Ericsson W880i as they tried to squeeze all those buttons in the smallest space possible. Apple then slapped on a full on touchscreen and you no longer had to interface with the device via buttons, but my the software that ran on the phone itself. Now, all these ‘smart phones’ have huge screens and phones seem to be getting bigger again. I wonder if it shares the same cycle as the fashion world. Like with sunglasses for instance. Back in the day where Hasselhoff used to sport those big aviator style sunglasses, they were cool. Then came the Keeanu with those small matrix sunglasses. Morpheus’s ones didn’t even have the wires that hook around your ears and to this day, I it still boggles my mind how they stuck on. Now it seems that we’re back to the Hasselhoff age.
So will our phones stay in this cycle? Well, there is some research going on in making shape shifting phones, where the shape and center of gravity of the device is used to give haptic feedback to the user. It’s not exactly form-factor centered, but I think the concept it pretty cool. Anyway, here are 2 people in this area of research.
Fabian Hemmert
Shwetak Patel
Link to his research paper, SqueezeBlock
