One of the world's most futuristic phones began life as a block of wood with a painted-on screen. Swedish start-up Neonode created what was at the time an innovative design for a phone--a super-compact device with a large touchscreen and menus that flipped with the swipe of a thumb. European mobile operators who saw the phone back in 2002 were intrigued, recalls Mikael Hagman, Neonode's chief executive, but none dared bet millions on the unproven gadget.
In that pre-iPhone era, Neonode's concept seemed alien. "It was our three founders in jeans talking about the future of the mobile-phone industry," sighs Hagman.
Such is the yo-yo existence of many innovators. They're either declared geniuses or lunatics.
Few technology industries lavish such generous rewards--or such cold indifference--on their innovators than the mobile-phone business. As phones become more ubiquitous and cellular networks open up, new designers are coming to the fore, including start-ups, industrial design firms, fashion houses and even cellphone enthusiasts. The worst designs are impractical or just plain ugly. The best drive innovation, win huge profits and shake up the industry status quo.
Take Neonode. Its handsets--the N1, introduced in 2005 and phased out last year, and the recently launched N2--challenge conventional notions about cellphones. The core vision since the firm's inception in 2001, says Hagman, was to create a phone that fit neatly in the palm and did anything a full-sized computer could, including e-mail, Web surfing and gaming.
That led to a compact body (3 inches long with a 2-inch screen) with virtually no buttons and a streamlined menu that only featured six icons at any time. To distinguish between different menus and features, the company devised three ways to interact with the touchscreen: taps, sweeps and gestures. A sweep from right to left accepts a call, for instance. One in the other direction declines it.
Those ideas were incorporated into a real product--first the N1, then the N2. The N1 had online sales of 7,000. Since its debut last fall in Europe, the N2 has sold 30,000 there--a promising beginning for a handset maker that employs only a few dozen people. Hagman is betting big for 2008. By the end of the year, he hopes to launch the phone in the U.S. and sell at least 200,000 more.
Industry giants such as Nokia, Motorola and Sony Ericsson take a different tack, employing hundreds of engineers and partnering with start-ups like Neonode to get a jump on the freshest ideas to both enhance the company's own lineup and to license to others.
Nokia, which runs research labs in Finland, England, Boston and Palo Alto, Calif., devotes nearly $4 billion annually to research and development projects. In the past year, it has debuted three concept phones that incorporate unusual software designs and novel sensing technologies, including ways to monitor the user's health or the local weather. "It's a way to go from theoretical to concrete," says Nokia spokesman Keith Nowak. "We can show it to people, get feedback and start conversations."
Sony Ericsson agrees. "The key drivers are consumers, who want something intuitive with a little bit of a 'wow' factor; our operator customers, who have their own strong opinions about handsets; and the applications community," says Jon Mulder, Sony Ericsson's product marketing manager for North America.
An energetic online fan club called Esato also creates and publicizes concept phones that it hopes Sony Ericsson will consider manufacturing. So far, however, it's mostly wishful thinking: "Some designs are pretty cool but most are kind of fictitious," says Mulder.
Instead, the company focuses on the direction in which it expects mobile technology will evolve over the next decade. Promising projects are made into prototypes and vetted by teams working for the chief technology officer. Among the futuristic features that Sony Ericsson has embraced so far is "shake control," which enables a phone to sense motion, and is used to let consumers engage in interactive games.
In North Carolina, a Sony Ericsson team dubbed the "Clamshell Center of Excellence" is rethinking how to design "clamshell" phones--possibly with rotating swivels. Results could be unveiled in 2009. "At any given time, we're juggling hundreds of concepts that are potential candidates," says Mulder.
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In a world of feature-packed, data-hog phones, Motorola's focus is on alternative energy: solar, thermal and fuel cells. A joint venture with Canadian firm Angstrom Power recently produced an external fuel cell the size of a regular lithium-ion battery, but packed with more energy. The goal is to refine the cell so it could power a phone for a week or two and be built directly into a handset.
In labs around the world, 800 Motorola employees are also investigating radio frequency technologies and intelligent sensors. "We're not Bell Labs," says Jerry Hallmark, Motorola's manager of energy system technologies for mobile devices. "We're very well aligned with the business."
Carriers desperately want people to spend more time on their phones, which has some of them exploring novel concepts and designs. NTT DoCoMo, Japan's largest mobile operator, regularly pairs with start-ups and manufacturers, including Mitsubishi, to create other-worldly phones. Its Wellness handset is crammed with functions to enhance its owner's health, including a pedometer, body fat scale and bad breath meter. Another concept, unveiled late last year, uses the body's electricity to transmit information, such as payment or identification data, to a mobile phone.
This semester, T-Mobile is tapping graduate students at the Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design for research insights. To investigate how people use their mobile devices, the students are staking out their local Starbucks and asking subjects to document their phone usage with digital cameras.
The project, which will last until May and could shape future mobile plans and phones, has already spawned one insight: Young people prefer text messaging to voicemail because it's more direct. "It's about how we deal with information ... such a rich field for designers to explore," says Associate Professor Vijay Kumar, who heads the workshop.
"None of this is on a particular roadmap," notes Nokia's Nowak. "Some concepts may never come to pass. But some may very well change the way we make devices in the future."
