WiRRESWiRKEN

I A Technology heißt das kleine Unternehmen, welches ein ganz geheimes Handy vorgestellt hat. Zu geheim, um es auch nur in Aktion zu sehen. Was kann das gute Stück? Angeblich hat das ‘Zumba’ eine perfekte Stimmerkennung. Außerdem sind alle Adressen usw. auf einem Server gespeichert. So braucht man also keine Tastatur, nichts.

The phone is called the Zumba, and comes in two parts:  a giant, flat plastic ear and a rather retro looking box with a pie-chart shaped set of buttons on the front. Designer Dean McEvoy is dyslexic, and so designed the phone to be used without any typing or reading, ever. Sadly, the handset is too secret to even demonstrate. Or possibly, too not-working to show.

More: The phone is a “cloud” phone. All the heavy lifting is done on the company Web site, along with storage of your address book and presumably text messages. This site is apparently “100% secure”, a claim we have heard more than once before. As McEvoy points out though, this does have the advantage of making the handset a dumb terminal — if lost it’s nothing more than a brick, free of personal information. Not that anyone would ever steal such an ugly box.

So what does the phone do? It appears that some super secret sauce lets you touch a single button on the earpiece and then speak. Your intentions are recognized and a text message is send, transcribed from your own spoken words. No mention is made of actual calls, but we’d think that this was just an omission from the film.

(wired)

Die Idee an sich ist ja garnicht so schlecht. Aber bei Worten wie “perfectly” und “100% secure” werd’ ich immer skeptisch. Mal ganz abgesehen davon, dass es vielleicht – trotz allem – sinnvoll ist, wenn alle seine Kontakte nicht irgendwo im Internet gespeichert sind. Mal sehen, was da rauskommt…

Hier noch ein kleiner Film über das top-secret-cell-phone