Core77

Montreal-based product designer Thibaut Sally explores necessity and simplicity in his documented concepting of a USB cell phone with voice-only transmission and no screen. While some users prefer the widgety goodness of a phone that surfs the net, texts, takes photos and video, slices, and dices, Sally aims to appease basics-lovers while providing an alternative for feature fiends.

The brief is simple : design a compact USB device enabling the user to have wireless vocal conversations through a cell phone network. Nothing more. It's tempting to add features, but no, let's stay very basic and simple, even if it's just for the sake of this exercise.

After a month of concept development, Sally has devised two forms and interfaces that cater to voice-only communications.

As a conclusion, here is a transcript of Orange's director of technology Norman Lewis about 3G, during the '06 Emerging Telephony conference (link to his talk) : 'if every one of our customers, theirs families and their dogs had mobile phones and used them for 6 hours a day for the next 31.7 years, we would get our money back from what we spent on 3G licensing'.

In other words : a mobile phone transmitting voice only ? It may suits your needs, but not the telephone companies wacked business models.

(If you've got feedback, or "constructive comments" as Thibaut puts it, fire away!)