Nokia Touch and Type feature phones should be reintroduced
|Dimitrios Vlachos has served us another set of photos that show some forgotten and unannounced Nokia devices. There are some well known and less known prototypes, some new shots of both cancelled e-readers (the one in cyan colour and Nokia Pino) that Nokia planned to announce back in 2011 and also a shot of Vertu Constellation feature phone.
If you are a die-hard Nokia fan, do check the Twitter thread, but I’ll just mention a few that I find interesting. I remember when touch controls became popular that Nokia introduced touch and type devices like Nokia X3-02 Touch and Type. I considered that to be the perfect combination of two worlds colliding. That way your T9 typing skills wouldn’t be sacrificed and you could still pinch and zoom or zoom out your shots. Also, those devices looked great, and do check out the Nokia RM-920 with the glassy front and cool icons. I am not sure if this device was called Asha 503 since that one had the modern square look with a double-layer polycarbonate body. I think that this device would be popular even today, but I know that this will never happen.
I like the design experiments Nokia and other manufacturers used to do, although I think that something like the Nokia Prism slider wouldn’t pass today. The device has some recognizable lines borrowed from vertu devices. The flat keyboard might not be the best for typing without looking, but it makes the device stand out. I also miss the compactness of the sliders and I still think that there is a place for sliding mechanisms in modern smartphones. It doesn’t have to hide the qwerty keyboard, just the selfie camera or some player controls.
Thanks Dimitrios for the shots. This thread is worth checking out.
Does anyone know what is the purpose of the sensor on the top of this prototype?