Archive for December, 2008

Nokia E71: 40 years of progress in handheld devices

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on December 26, 2008
in Design history
. 10 Comments

I just got me a Nokia E71 smartphone. It looks like a particularly well-constructed gadget, though I reserve judgment until I’ve used it a while – stay tuned!

However, I can already share one observation: the incredible amount of technology crammed into this tiny device. A few years ago we’d marvel at its slimness if it were only a cellphone; but it isn’t only a cellphone. It’s a cellphone, and it’s a PDA, and it’s a GPS, and it’s an MP3 player, and it’s a video player, and it’s a recorder, and it’s a radio, and it’s a web browser, and it has bluetooth, and it has WiFi, and it has Infrared, and…

Nokia E71 smartphone and JRC VHF transceiver

You get the idea: this device has everything under the sun, and it’s still tiny. So for comparison, I present it here next to another 2-way communication device, a VHF transceiver made by the Japan Radio Co., Ltd., sometime in the sixties. I won this at a raffle in the annual meeting of the Israel Amateur Radio Club in the early seventies; and at the time I had to get a special license for it, it was such a big deal. It was also considered very miniaturized, since it used transistors and could be held in the hand – just like the Nokia beside it; however, this JRC was not a PDA, and it wasn’t a GPS, and it wasn’t an MP3 player, and it wasn’t a video player, and it wasn’t a recorder, and it wasn’t a radio, and it wasn’t…

You get the idea: back then it was all they could do to pack a radio transmitter and receiver into this 9 inch long box; today, the sky is the limit. And so, one can safely state, we’ve come a long way… and I can’t help but think that, with all respect to Kubla Khan and his stately pleasure dome, it is Nokia’s engineers who should be credited for giving us a miracle of rare device !

Butter and common sense

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on December 23, 2008
in Good design
. 0 Comments

These days food products come with lots of information, as mandated by our well meaning consumer protection laws. Information, however, does not always enlighten us.

I was looking to try a butter spread that doesn’t harden into a brick in the fridge. There are many such products on the supermarket shelves, each proclaiming its virtues – “Naturally soft!”, “Easy to spread!”, and so forth. What they fail to explain is what about the product makes it resistant to hardening. Is it a mechanical texture? A chemical additive? A food chemist would probably figure it out from the ingredient list, but not us regular mortals.

Lurpak spreadable butterSo I want to give kudos to Arla foods, the Danish maker of Lurpak butter. Their spreadable product bears the following inscription: “Made with specially selected butter, blended with just enough natural rape seed oil to make it easy to spread directly from the fridge“.

This may be less quantitative than the usual ingredient list, but it makes a great deal more sense: you can immediately grasp what was done to the butter, to what extent (what a clear image, “Just enough”!), and that no “unnatural” acts were involved.

And indeed, it does spread well directly from the fridge.

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on December 19, 2008
in Odds and Ends
. 1 Comment

Had this strange deja vu at an IBM HRL seminar… I met there the CTO of PopTok, a start-up with a product that allows you to use short video clips from your favorite movies, TV shows, and music videos in your online conversations on Facebook or IM chats. So, if you wanted to express anger, you could use a short clip of King Kong throwing a tantrum; and so on. The clips provided come from well known movies that have become a part of our popular culture.

So, this immediately reminded me of the Star Trek TNG episode Darmok, one of the more memorable ones in the series IMHO. There, Captain Jean-Luc Picard has to establish communications with a humanoid alien that seems to speak in riddles, until Picard realizes that the alien’s nation can speak only through allusions to its shared folklore and mythology; so, if they want to denote the establishment of friendship after a struggle, they say “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra”, referring to two ancient heroes that underwent such a process at that place; and so on. It’s a weird (and rather dubious, perhaps) linguistic practice – but then, as we used to reassure the kids when they were very young, it’s only a story… and it’s a good one.

Anyhow, expressing oneself by sending representative clips from universally known movie folklore instead of straight text seemed very similar to that alien practice…

Multi-device remote controls

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on December 15, 2008
in Bad design and Good design
. 2 Comments

Used to be, a TV set had a remote control (used to be, farther back, it didn’t; but that’s prehistory). These days, however, everything has a remote control; indeed, I can’t wait for someone to create a tiny remote control for the larger remote control itself! 🙂

Three Remote Control unitsThe proliferation of these gadgets has created a real problem, and home electronics makers are responding by creating R/C units that can control more than one item; most typically, a TV set and the DVD, PVR or VCR feeding it.

Which is all very well, but how do you make one control work on many devices without confusing the user? There are different ways, and they vary in their usability a great deal. Let me illustrate with three units from my home: the remotes for (left to right) our LG recording DVD, our old Sony VCR, and the HOT cable company’s PVR. The first two can also control our Sony TV; the red one controls the cable box, the TV and a DVD or VCR. And each goes about the choice of function in a different manner, seen in the close-up photo.

Remote Control close ups

The R/C on the left simply has a section at the right dedicated to controlling the TV, with its own On/Off switch and channel and volume controls. This results in some redundancy with the controls of the DVD (which also has power and channel controls) but it completely eliminates any possibility of confusion.

The VCR controller in the middle incorporates a disappearing species – a mechanical slide switch at the top that determines what device is being controlled. The buttons on this unit change their role depending on the position of the switch, and have color coded dots to indicate whether they apply to the TV. Having to slide the switch is a bit more of a hassle than with the black R/C but at least you get definite visual feedback of which position you’re in.

The red unit works like this: you have to press the button (in the second row) corresponding to the device you wish to control; then, until you press another of these buttons, the unit controls that device. This is for sure the cheapest to produce; it’s all in the electronics. The price you pay is that there is no visual feedback at all; if you forget what you pressed, you will find yourself changing channel or cycling the power on the wrong equipment. There is also no labeling of which buttons work with which device.

All of these units do their job, but to my mind their user friendliness goes down from left to right. Not surprisingly, so does the cost to produce them…

Where have all the cradles gone?

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on December 12, 2008
in Design history
. 2 Comments

In the early years, when portable electronic devices were considered wonderful miracles of technology, they used to come equipped with cradles. These would at a minimum charge them – the case with the “dumb” cellular phones of the day – and later also provide cabled connectivity to a computer, as in the early Palm Pilots. The cradles were meticulously designed to be functional as well as good looking; I remember a cellphone I had that had a two-slot cradle – one for the phone, the other for charging a spare battery. And it was indeed utterly convenient to plop or push the device into the cradle before bedtime and forget it until the next morning.

So where have all these cradles gone? These days, even the smartest devices charge through one cable and connect through another; connecting a cable is no major problem, but it is still less comfortable than dropping a device into a slot, and it leaves the device flopping about on one’s desk with much less dignity than the cradle afforded. Some manufacturers do make cradles as accessories, or you can get them from third party manufacturers, but they are much less common today.

Palm PDA in a Cradle and HTC smartphone with a charger's cable

Of course, a cradle is less portable; when I had my Palm V I had to buy a separate “travel kit” that replaced the cradle with a cable and plug arrangement. But when I would return home from a trip I’d be greeted by the more permanent arrangement, hooked up to my notebook’s docking station.

I was never certain whether the cradles of yesteryear were eliminated to reduce manufacturing costs, or because users preferred the flimsier cable system. What is your view on this choice?

The ideal fly repellent solution

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on December 8, 2008
in Good design and Odds and Ends
. 2 Comments

There are many solutions that claim to repel flying insects; some even work.

For instance, there are chemicals – stuff you put on your skin, stuff you burn like incense – at least this makes sense: we can see how some smelly material may offend the insect’s finer sensibilities. Then there are hi-tech solutions, like the electronic gadgets that supposedly emit a hypersonic sound that mosquitoes can’t stand. We once tried this out – my son sneaked up on a mosquito standing on a wall and turned the gizmo on right next to the critter’s ear (or whatever they have). The insect didn’t even deign to move an antenna; maybe it was deaf (or maybe we were sold the electronic equivalent of snake oil).

Water bag used to repel fliesBut the most amazing device is one I snapped in a restaurant today: a nylon bag filled with water, hanging from the rafters (I’ve also seen them hanging from tree branches occasionally). And this traditional system is in use not only in Israel – as I discovered in Google, the same method is used in the US, Mexico and elsewhere: so it’s really globally known.

I asked the waiter why a water bag will drive flies away, and he said with great certainty that the fly sees its own enlarged reflection in the water and it scares it away. I heard this explanation before; presumably the fly thinks it just met a bigger, meaner fly, and decides that retreat would be prudent.

I have no idea whether anyone confirmed this theory (any input on this is welcome), but whether the explanation is correct or not, you have to admit this is one solution that is perfectly acceptable from all angles: environmentally friendly, harmless to humans, humane even to the flies, and as cheap as it gets.

A gentler car horn?

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on December 5, 2008
in Odds and Ends
. 3 Comments

Car horns are designed to be earsplitting; if the driver in the next lane starts to swerve into your path, you want to be able to alert him with a blast he won’t mistake. For such safety related uses, the high volume and jarring tone are justified.

However, people also use the horn for another purpose – to draw another person’s attention. The driver in front is dozing off when the light changes to green? Honk! You want to ask directions from an absent minded pedestrian on the sidewalk? Honk, honk!

The problem is, we only have one horn, which – as noted already – is designed to be loud. Yet for waking the sleepy driver at the light you don’t need a loud blast; a gentle beep would be quite enough, and reduce the noise pollution on our city streets. And we don’t have a gentle beep in the car!

So, what can we do about this? Many drivers ignore the matter and just use the loud horn. Others, the more considerate ones, try to hit the horn button fleetingly, cutting the blasts short. But it would be most useful to everyone if auto makers were to simply equip their cars with two horns – a loud one for emergency use (activated from the steering wheel as today) and a more quiet one, that would be triggered by a smaller control, for drawing attention without annoying the general population. In fact, this could be designed to emit a pleasant tone or tune that would create goodwill rather than antagonism and road rage at the receiving end…

A really poor choice for a freeway logo…

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on December 3, 2008
in Bad design
. 1 Comment

The Menachem Begin expressway is one of the better engineering projects built in Jerusalem in recent years, providing a rapid path for driving across much of the new city. It has cut my commute time to work by 70%…

Begin Expressway, Jerusalem

Image: Adiel lo, via Wikimedia Commons.

There is only one minor detail about it that I always find amusing yet annoying. The builders picked a logo for it, which is prominently displayed on the signs leading to it. And here it is on the left.

Begin Expressway Logo     Freeway Sign

Now, at first glance it seems highly appropriate for an expressway, showing lanes and an interchange. But when you look closely, you notice:

  1. The symbol is pretty tangled, like a knot really. Hardly the image of a freeway, where the main concept is that you zip right through. The standard freeway road sign, at the right, does a far better job of conveying this idea.
  2. There is no way to travel this path on a freeway interchange. At first I thought you might do it in the UK, where they drive on the wrong side of the road, but even that is not true – there, the road on the logo would cause cars coming from both directions to collide in the middle of the bridge.

What were they thinking!? 🙂