Don't you wish you had a pen that was as fat and heavy as a cell phone? Don't you wish you had a cell phone with no keypad? Now you can have both. This is just about the most horrible UI for dialing a phone number that I can imagine!
"Siemens goes small with the new PenPhone, the first ever tri-band mobile phone housed in the unusual shape of a pen and offering all the features of a standard mobile phone. The 140mm (5.6") long PenPhone recognizes handwriting for dialing numbers and writing text messages directly into the mobile phone -- no matter what surface you write on."
Wow, that's almost as bad as the abomination that is Nokia 3650. Who the hell can intuitively dial a rotary phone in the dark nowadays?
And the numbers on it don't quite match the rotary dials of my childhood, either. They started about 90 degrees clockwise of their current setup. How annoying.
If it actually had a rotary dial, I could fully endorse that. But no.
Worse if I'm recalling correctly, that's not the correct pattern for a rotary phone anyway. It's upside down.
But think of the hilarious possibilities for misdialing!
| @M 2 FUx0R|NG 31337 4 7h|5 C1@55... hello?
BWAH-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA
Not to mention... I don't know anybody's phone number any more. Why on earth would I want to start with that crap again? 10 numbers my left butt-cheek!
The blurb says that the "writing" bit is the interface for text on the phone too. ie when you write Chris you should get my number. Still not a good idea but I don't think that they totally forgot that people ain't that good at remembering numbers.
"no matter what surface you write on."
Including the door to the DNA? ;)
What an...unbelievably bad idea.
Obviously, no one believes that there are any new product ideas out there, or at least that any new product ideas are worth the time it would take to develop them, so "innovation" has been reduced to making existing products smaller and/or shinier, and when they can get no smaller and no shinier, combining them with other existing products. And, apparently, no one involved in this "innovation" stops to consider whether the newly-combined product performs any of its functions any better than, or even as well as, the formerly-separate products it comprises. I think the most egregious example of this I can recall seeing was the combination desktop calculator/powered letter opener. That immediately became my benchmark for "solution looking for a problem" (it was, of course, in a Sharper Image catalog).
Funny, I tend to think of Sharper Image products more as problems, with the same solution for all of them: sell it to some gadget-obsessed sucker for too much money.
Then there's the . Yes, it's a real product. One of my friends has one, purely for the amusement value.
Perhaps the phone is equivalent to email....
every project will grow until it can read email. those that cannot scale that way will be replaced by those that can.
(Zawinski's Law, though I can't find anything more to back that up.)
Every product will grow until it can make phone calls...etc.
This is great! I've always wanted a mobile pen.
...and thus Siemens provides perfect illustration of the saying "Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should."
Seriously. That there is gratuitous technology.
given it's shape, the silent alert feature will be very popular.
...they win some wank-worthy "industrial design" award for this.
That's what Nokia calls it, internally at least. You should see some of the designs targetted for Asia and Europe. Those are just trippy.
I can't remember the exact number of new phone designs Nokia releases per year, but it's somewhere in the 20's.
So when you whip this baby out to give someone your phone number you call yourself.
"Now you can have both". HAHAHA! omg, can you please leave a comment in my LJ so I can add you to my list of favorites? (I can't do it from thic computer). I totally love this blog. I would hate it if I couldn't re-find it later.
PLEASE!
A couple years ago in a dollar store, I saw a vibrating pen. Not only is that cheaper than this thing, but I can think of more uses for it...