WillCOM is always good for an interesting take on mobile phone design. We love seeing what the Japanese company is going to come up with next – modular, torch-light, headphoneswhat‘s next? Well, their newest concept is the fruit of a joint project with Sanyo – the AA battery-powered mobile phone that you see to the right. This thing is just about as bare-bones as it gets. You get a few buttons, a receiving speaker, microphone, and…that’s it. No display, no extraneous buttons, nothing more than what you need to make a simple phone call.
Oh, and it’s powered by a singe AA-battery. Pop in any AA-battery and you’re good to make screen-less phone calls for 5 hours of talk time on the Japanese PHS network, or wait for an unknown caller for 250 hours of standby. Why the phone has to be as large as it is, we don’t know. But, we kinda like the quirky, battery-shaped design that pays homage to its power source.
We’re glad to see WillCOM and Sanyo working on a AA-battery-powered mobile phone for the masses. But we’d rather pick up that Philiphs Xenium NRG phone that rocks a AAA-battery power source – it’s got a screen and doesn’t look ridiculous.