Let’s face it; mobile phone technology is suffering from stagnancy. Everything we need in our phones, we already have and even the conceptual designs have run out on inspirational steam when it comes to innovation and we keep seeing the same technological motifs repeating across the platform. Having said that, it is always a little refreshing to see a design that focuses on making the existing functions of a cellphone more interactive and this mobile phone concept called Von is a pretty good example of exactly that.
Conceptualized by freelance designer Mac Funamizu, the idea is stemmed around a cellphone that is sensitive to sound and lets the users interact with their device in nontraditional ways. The piece is designed like a cross between a piece of a xylophone and a slimmed-up iPhone and comes packed with interesting features like Knock, Shake, and Tap. The Knock feature on the device allows you to simply knock on the phone to see if you have any unread emails or texts. When you have any, the phone knocks right back at you with a different sound being played for either kind of message! It may not be very functional or technologically stimulating, but it makes for a hilarious moment in your routine phone usage.
The Shake function lets you find out how many uncheked RSS feeds or Tweets you have on your phone. To check, you shake the phone and it rattles, much in the same way as you’d shake a box of candy or cereal to check how much of it is left in the box. The more unread items there are on the phone, the more sound the phone makes, which makes the otherwise simply displayed number more interesting for a while.
The Tap function is more of a gaming feature/app, and lets users tap the rhythm of a song on to the phone’s display. If you do it right, the phone will guess the rhythm of the song and play it for you. This basically means that you might have to really struggle with the device if you happen to have a lot of songs with similar beats stored on the phone to get it to play the one you want at first go!
Via: Petit Invention