…I got another bloody cellphone. It’s not what you think – this was a Christmas present from my father-in-law, and although he never heard of it before my wife put a bug in his ear about it, he has since gone and ordered one of his own.
It’s the MOTOFONE F3 from Motorola, and if anything, it is the total opposite of the iPhone. In terms of functionality, it’s the perfect GSM phone…from 1996. It places calls, it receives calls, it does rudimentary text messaging (only stores the last 10 received, doesn’t store sent ones, no predictive text of any kind, etc etc), it has an alarm, and you can pick from 7 pre-installed ringers. And that’s IT. Okay, it also vibrates and has a simple phonebook and speakerphone mode, but that’s all. No color display, no auto date and time, no animated wallpapers or Bluetooth or video camera or touchscreen or GPS or anything like that.
What it does have is, for starters, an e-paper screen. This looks like an old black-and-white calculator-style 12-segment LCD display. However, it remains static without power. This means that at any given time, it maintains what is “written” on it like a sheet of paper and only draws power to change what is displayed – meaning that if you pull the battery out without turning the phone off, whatever was on screen STAYS THERE until you put the battery back in. In short, unless the screen is changing what’s displayed, it draws NO power. You can imagine what this does for battery life.
It also has TWO internal antennae, one at each end. This improves reception tremendously. Better reception means less power wasted trying to patch onto a signal or boosting the transmission power to compensate for a weaker signal – which, again, means better battery life.
No flip. No moving parts at all, really – the keypad is plastic with rubber accents, familiar to anyone who’s ever used the old Sinclair ZX-80. Not a lot of space for dust or moisture to get in. Only the one port for the charger.
You’ve probably guessed by now – this phone is geared toward the developing world. No text ever appears on screen; the menus are a short series of icons, backed up by voice prompts that the phone speaks in one of three languages (determined at manufacture and based on point of sale; mine speaks in Spanish, Portugese or English and is thus suitable for almost anywhere in North or South America. A Canadian model would probably substitute French in there; the one sold in the south of Germany speaks German, Italian or English; one sold in India could speak Gujarti and Hindi, etc etc). In short: you don’t even have to be able to read to use this phone.
As a side note, they’ve almost accidentally created the perfect phone for the elderly and technophobic – the display is clear and easy to read, the keys are plenty sizeable, and it tells you what you’re doing every step of the way. Which gives them an interesting selling option in the developed world, but that’s not the target here. The target is the kind of place where there’s never been wireline infrastructure, where chances to plug in may be few and far between, where your typical RAZR would probably be ruined in a day and a half. It’s the kind of phone that suddenly means ready access to market prices, or news from the next town over, or maybe quicker access to a doctor or police. And it goes for around $30, total – or whatever the equivalent is. (You can pick this thing up in London on a new pre-paid activation for NINE POUNDS.)
When Nokia sold their one-billionth phone, it wasn’t some slick megapixeled 3G Series 60 iPod killer, it was a bog-simple Nokia 1100 somewhere in Nigeria. For Motorola, it’s all well and good to sell the next re-hashed RAZR in America, but they’re looking at a world where one of every two people has a mobile phone, and thinking, “How do we sell one to the other fellow?”
So I have one now. It’s a backup phone, obviously. It’s also a neat technology demonstration. But mostly, it’s a memento mori for my high-tech career – the iPhone may change the face of the phone business in America, but an F3 is the sort of thing that could change the world – at ten cents on the dollar, at that. A new toy AND perspective – as Christmas presents go, that’s not bad.