China is famous for exporting 3 things: delicious food, communism, and mobile phones that look remarkably similar to devices sold in the west, but are sold for far cheaper since they’re nothing but clones built in shady factories that the government turns a blind eye to. With the release of the Nokia E68, or Nokla E68 if you will, the Chinese have done something previously unheard of before: they actually innovated.
Check out the design in the video above. The device is small when you need it to be, but at the push of a button a screen ejects from the top so you can do all the things you usually do on a smartphone, but without squinting at a one line display. I’m loving this, especially since it’s a counter attack to the recent trend of device manufacturers building new models with larger and larger screens. I’m throughly convinced that we’re about to era of de-convergence, that we’ll all be carrying multiple devices that specialize at one specific function, and that our smartphones will be the conduit to which said devices will connect to the internet.
It’s no coincidence that one of the most popular features of Android 2.2, code name FroYo, is the ability turn your device into a WiFi hotspot. On numerous occasions where my home internet has died, or when I want to check for new issues of magazines and newspapers on my Amazon Kindle, the hotspot feature has proved to be remarkably useful. There’s also a trend I’ve been noticing among the young people of Finland. While their parents have high end, feature rich smartphones, the youth all carry a low to mid range device and then an iPod touch. It’s why smartphones like the Sony Ericsson X10 Mini and recently announced Huawei Ideos peak my interesting since they’re cheap, small, pocketable, and can offer that hotspot feature.
Sticking 3G or 4G connectivity inside every piece of hardware that can benefit from internet connectivity isn’t the easiest thing to do because of regulatory hurdles and patent commitments. WiFi on the other hand can be put into just about anything, so can Bluetooth, so why is it we’re not seeing more hardware on the market with either of those two connectivity options and then our smartphones become the bridge that brings them online?
In fact, why don’t dumb phones specialize in this? The less than 100 EUR Nokia C3, which has WiFi, is about the same size and price as the recently launched Huawei E583C wireless hotspot (pictured above), so why isn’t a hotspot feature built in?
[Via: Engadget]