t02 Slider Concept Keeps Things Smooth
By Simon Sage on Thursday, August 27th, 2009 at 8:34 AM PST In Concept
Here’s a simple solution to a pretty common cell phone design problem. Most sliders will have a fairly direct lateral transition when you open and close them, giving the phone an irregular and sometimes uncomfortable profile. Some of the more clever manufacturers, like Palm (NSDQ: PALM) with the Pre and Sony Ericsson (NYSE: SNE) with the XPERIA, have been playing with curved sliding mechanisms, but it’s still only a half-solution. Designer Matthias Pugin coooked up these renders of a phone, the t02, that includes a proper second dimension of movement, resulting in flush sides when the handset is both open and closed. The pictures don’t show exactly how the mechanism would work, but I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard to figure out.
[via The Design Blog]
Seriously, there’s so much real news, why confuse everyone
with fake phone concepts?
There are sites for that kind of thing.
There aren’t many, honestly. I’ve got 7 design blogs in my RSS feeds, and only one of them is dedicated to phones. I don’t post about concepts often, but when I do, it’s to offer a broader kind of content and mix things up from the usual “Phone X is coming, it has specs a, b, and c, it looks a lot like phone Y”. I make sure to keep the word “concept” in the headline precisely to avoid people from getting confused or feeling baited.
“Fake” is a harsh word – you make it sound like it’s somehow done something dirty. Design is largely something I don’t think gets the coverage it deserves among tech blogs, so I like to throw ‘em a bone once in awhile.