BenQ's iF award-winning Black Box concept has designers all over the world going "but that thing's been on my sketchpad for months!". Well, we could all have won an iF award guys. The pictures released by Benq show the device as a mobile phone, a calculator, a radio and a sort of ambient fishbowl. All good and useful things but nothing near what the device truly represents.
Instead of BenQ's mobile phone-type idea, what we're looking at, folks, is the next generation of mobile device. The one that will change literally everything for quite a lot of people. Every tech editor and gadget fan has been preoccupied for the last year with products like the fabled next generation video Ipod . The gorgeous Onyx concept from Pilotfish and Synaptics treads similar ground. It seems to be all about growing the screen in your pocket.
The little surfaces that Gabriel White has devoted an entire blog to are about to get a little bigger as the screen expands to fill the front of the device. The history of buttons is about to get a virtual chapter as we chuck out those tiny QWERTY thumb boards. The tactile issues will get sorted and someone will liberate us from fingerprint smudges and scratched screens. The touch screen is finally developing to match the physicality of human hands. Maybe we're reaching the tipping point for convergence.
If this description makes the next generation look like a gentle evolution of the current generation of Communicators, Palms and BlackBerries, take heart. This is not about the device. The most attractive thing about the Black Box is it's name. If it truly is a black box and no longer a phone masquerading as all sorts of other stuff, then the potential can be unlocked. What its really about is access. Leave all the smartphone baggage and the tiny computer baggage behind for a moment and consider a device that doesn't get in the way of people's access to internet, e-mail, documents and contacts. A transparent device designed for open ended access.
Because it accesses and stores these online, the device has less software, storage and processing power. A black box. Not exactly a phone nor a computer nor a pda but something able to perform the most essential actions of those devices as well as any of them, maybe better. All that at the lower cost of a simpler device.
This is not the Origami, and it's not the $100 laptop, it's what these things will be by the time they're useable mass-market products for the whole pyramid. If they manage to somehow fit in your pocket.
In a simpler device, the pre-existing design sophistication of all those Googly web-based apps is connected to mobile broadband instead of having a powerful device and heavy proprietary phone applications. It's an alternate-reality realization of the partly unfulfilled consumer-level application service provider dream.
In addition, a Black Box can support total language and culture customization. Instead of imposing Scandinavian or American logic and Roman script on others, make the portal transparent to each culture. All anybody needs then is their own culture, eyeballs and fingertips.
At the bottom of the pyramid, people have already demonstrated their willingness to shell out months of wages for a mobile phone.
It's the utility, convenience and economic potential of these items that makes them so desirable. All of these could be dramatically heightened by the next generation. If the device is not a cultural and technological hurdle but an easy portal to go through, this could be the next emerging growth market.
Mobile phones connect the world's poorest to other individuals. The next generation device could connect them to the world. It has the potential to change everything from banking to grassroots business networking. It's an enormous leap for the biggest mass market but can it be made effortless? That's the challenge but it's not such an outrageous one.
As Niti Bhan
Tasos Calantzis is the managing director of the award-winning design company Readymade
