My goal with this blog

I write about relevant changes in the way that people use the web and how startups are built to provide services and products for this ever changing wonderful thing we still know as "the web." As a former entrepreneur turned early-stage investor, my greatest hope is for this to be useful to other folks that are like me in the hopes that they can avoid some of the mistakes I've made.

From:
Antonio Rodriguez

Bring back phone formfactor diversity

tech
by Antonio on

Lately it seems that I'm seeing iPhones everywhere. And if not iPhones, ham handed attempts at "improving" the iPhone by jacking the screen size up 130%— thus making a mongrel device that looks like the product of an iPhone and an iPad.

It just can not be that this is the one form factor to rule all of going forward in smartphone technology. And yet, outside of RIM* and the much ridiculed HTC G1, who is trying to do anything with real buttons anymore? Who remembers that not that long ago we all ridiculed a future filled with consumers stroking glass all day, unable to feel the satisfying poggle of a well-built physical button?

Back in 2005, I sat in the back row of a cross country flight with a guy who had just gotten a Nokia e70, the coolest cellphone I had ever seen, both because it had a numeric keypad and the greatest full keyboard implementation I have ever seen on any mobile computer. Where is that sort of form factor innovation today?

Despite the fact that everyone loves to write Nokia off, I'm hoping that they go back to their roots and start building products like the e70 again. When combined with their moving to Android (as opposed to their confused Symbian/Meego story on the OS side), this could be the genesis of a real formidable world wide attack on the open face sandwich form factor that Apple and all of its competitors are foisting on us over and over.

Diversity is good— especially in something as personal as a mobile computer.

* And while RIM nailed the email use case, they've not done anything in terms of hardware diversity since 2001. And what is more, their software sucks the big one for anything that is outside of the sweet spot app.