New Mobile Phone Makers on the Block? 10
Ingerod asks: "I just spotted this article in the Swedish daily paper, DN, about two mobile phone makers: Finnish Benefon (no, I don't speak Finnish) and Swedish Spectronic. Check out Benefon's ESC! model with built-in GPS, and Spectronic's Sidetouch, which looks like a Nokia 9000-series done right. Where did these guys come from? Why haven't we heard about them before? (Or have we...) Are there more gadgets like these around that could use some attention?" The links above are in Swedish and Finnish, so you'll need to use a translator to glean any further information on either of these new companies. The phones themselves look stunning though. How long until such technology is available, worldwide?
esc specs in english (Score:2)
Re:What is the fascination. (Score:2)
An amazing feature of many mobile phones is the ability to turn them off when you don't want to receive incoming calls. Using this feature, you have the ability to make outgoing calls whenever you want, and are still able to receive calls when you know you might need to by turning it on selectively.
Re:What is the fascination. (Score:1)
You're dead wrong. Mobile phones put you in charge. They generally have CLI so you can see who's calling and you get the option to reject the call (don't try that with people that work for cell phone companies; they can probably see that you didn't want to speak to them!) .
Combine that with the fact that you can switch them into silent/vibrate/discrete/whatever mode and still switch them off if you want some peace and quiet and they aren't a pain.
Some *people* are a pain: the loud "I'm on the train" commuter, people who leave their phone switched on during meetings... But these are not faults of the technology which is tremendously useful.
Spectronics have been around for a while (Score:3)
It is not so surprising that small independent (have no idea about their indepence actually) company can build a phone since most GSM circuitry are standard components nowadays. The hard part will be to market the gadget. Some say the mobile phone market is more marketing driven that technology driven these days.
Lars
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Re:What is the fascination. (Score:1)
Benefon has history (Score:3)
Benefon (http://www.benefon.com/ [benefon.com]) has been in the mobile business for quite a while. They were strong in the NMT networks during the eighties and early nineties, but were late in switching to GSM. This probably set them back financially quite a lot.
The new products from Benefon are geeky gadgets at their best: innovative, ground-breaking and stylish. They've also entered some interesting niche markets lately. For example, they provide a german medical service (Sorry, can't remember the name) with automatic mobile reports on a patient's hearbeat and other factors. I believe it can also send out the exact location of the patient in the case of a heart attack.
There's a small section explaining the companies history on their website. Check it out.
Re:What is the fascination. (Score:3)
Holy! Which telco gave you the phone with a CLI?! I've been dreaming of doing some batch scripting and 'make's from my Motorola, but all I've got to work with is their freaking GUI. Will it do filename completion? Command history? More details, please!!!
In the Beginning was the Command Line [cryptonomicon.com]
Nerds do not need GPS (Score:1)
english info (Score:1)
What is the fascination. (Score:1)
What portable phones do is to give people the power to bother you anywhere at anytime. I don't particularly want people to have that power over me. I can't count how many times I have been with my roommate when his girlfriend called up with some "crisis", and I have to sit there and wait for a half hour while he calms her down.