Thursday, January 11, 2007

Phone of the Future?

News from 2008:

Apple introduces one-button iPhone Shuffle

The vast and adoring audience at Steve Jobs' annual Macworld performance heaved a sigh of relief when the Apple CEO announced the radically minimal new iPhone Shuffle. The company's first sub-$100 iPhone extends the iPhone line both a downprice and a downscale direction, beyond the $200 candy-bar-sized iPhone Nano, introduced last September.

"Now our iPhone and iPod lines are comlementary, top to bottom", Jobs said.

Like the iPod Shuffle, the new iPhone Shuffle has no display. It's an all-white rectangle with a little green light to show that a call is in progress. While the iPhone Shuffle superficially resembles the iPod Shuffle, its user interface is even more spare. In place of the familiar round iPod "wheel", the iPhone Shuffle sports a single square button. When pressed, the iPhone Shuffle dials a random number from its phone book.

"Our research showed that people don't care who they call as much as they care about being on the phone," said Jobs. "We also found that most cell phone users hate routine, and prefer to be surprised. That's just as true for people answering calls as it is for people making them. It's much more liberating, and far more social, to call people at random than it is to call them deliberately."

Read the rest of Doc Searls' humorous article here.

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