Disposable USB Sticks, For Those Sad Memories You Don’t Mind Losing [Designs]: “
The creative minds of Art Lebedev have once again thought of something interesting to do in the USB world—cardboard. The design teams concept ‘Fleshkus’ memory sticks are supplied on printed card, with users able to tear one off as needed and write a description straight onto the back. [Art Lebedev via UberGizmo] More »
(Via Gizmodo.)
Movirtu’s Cloud Phone is “Mobile for the next billion”: “
CNN has an interview up with Nigel Waller, the CEO of Movirtu Limited and the man behind their Cloud Phone. Waller dropped the surprising statistic that worldwide there are one billion people who use cell phones–but don’t own one; instead they share, borrow or rent them.
The Cloud Phone was intended to serve this market. At first Waller tried to create a cell phone that could be manufactured for just $5 so that everyone could afford one, but he couldn’t pull it off:
…There are three key components in every mobile phone today, which cost about $5 or $6. There’s the display, the keyboard and there’s the RF [radio frequency] chip. Despite the hundreds of millions of dollars of phones that are manufactured, they still don’t seem to be able to reduce the price of those three key elements. You add up those elements and you’ve got $18 or whereabouts. You add $1 for the battery, $1 for the SIM-card holder and you’ve got $20, $25.
Instead Waller went with a $25 phone, but designed it so that a village of users could share it while still maintaining individual phone numbers accounts on a single phone. Activation cost? Just 10 to 20 cents per person.
Read the full interview, which is filled with interesting insights on how the other half uses their phones, here.
(Via core77.com’s design blog.)
This little site called I can’t find my phone just made my day! It’s brilliant:
Do you know those moments, when you can’t find your phone but there’s noone around you could ask to call you? Well, that’s what www.icantfindmyphone.com is for. Fantastic! And what an adorable execution. Too bad it doesn’t say something like ‘congrats, you found your phone!’, once you pick up!
(thank you Dave)
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(Via swissmiss.)
Video of the Fujitsu dual-screen phone with TAT-designed interface!
Be sure to check out the form factor switch around 2:50, whereby the screens can be re-aligned from short-ends-adjacent to long-ends-adjacent.
(Via core77.com’s design blog.)
Dario Jandrijic’s KLEXL lets your kids go Sistine Chapel on the walls: “
Before there was ‘Shit My Dad Says‘ there was ‘Shit My Kids Ruined.’
More than a few parents have discovered that a few minutes of divided attention is all it takes for their tyke to blaze a graffiti burner across the living room wall. Junior’s gotta express himself, so what to do? University of Wuppertal ID student Dario Jandrijic’s KLEXL Interactive Painting concept is for a projector that allows digital wall painting by means of an IR tracking camera.
Light pens take the place of crayons, light pixels take the place of those Neo-Expressionist smears, and plugging this thing into the wall’d be a damn sight easier than laying down a tarp and rolling over your child’s masterpiece. Plus you can presumably save the images, and reproject them years later when you want to humiliate your child, now in design school, for his poor sense of composition and line quality.
(Via core77.com’s design blog.)
Whipsaw-designed Pano Device (computerless computer) is smaller, greener, and award-winning: “
The Pano Device is like a computer with nothing inside it. You plug your monitor, keyboard and mouse into the back, but it contains no CPU, no memory, and no software; all of that stuff resides on a Pano Manager server, which hosts the OS and virtualizes it to the Pano Device.
So what’s inside the thing? Damned if I know, I think if you dropped it and it shattered there’d be little leprechaun bodies all over your floor. But the bottom line is this two-inch tall device is projected to cut business computing costs by 70%; ‘compared to a PC it consumes 3% of the energy, uses 4% of the material to make it, and is one hundred times smaller.’
Designed by ID consultancy Whipsaw, the Pano Device has won a 2010 Green Good Design Award, which is conferred by the Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies. (Sadly, the Good Design website was not working properly at press time so no direct link is available.)
(Via core77.com’s design blog.)
The Amazing Tribe’s interface design coming to Fujitsu’s “radical” dual-screen phone: “
A couple of weeks ago we showed you a ‘Future of Screen Technology’ video by TAT (The Amazing Tribe), which seemed pie-in-the-sky amazing and almost too fantastic to be realized. But just today TAT has announced that Fujitsu Japan ‘will reveal a ground breaking dual screen mobile phone user interface powered by TAT’s design and technology initiatives.’
(Via core77.com’s design blog.)
Bon-Seop Ku’s bad-ass aquaphone concept: “
Seoul-based designer Bon-Seop Ku’s wicked concept phone has a killer, if fictional, interface: The ‘Aqua GUI,’ comprised of water bubbles presumably manipulated by an electric current.
We should point out that while other blogs have picked this up and are insisting this phone was designed for Samsung, we believe freelancer Ku did it on his own purely as a concept.
In any case, it would be cool if you could pop the phone open and drink it during a dehydration emergency.
Check out the rest of the inventive Ku’s extremely thick portfolio on Coroflot.
(Via core77.com’s design blog.)