Cool Phones: None Will EVER Cost Less Than $50

This from Silicon Valley News:

What will your mobile look like in 2015? Like a necklace, some specs, or a ring? See the photos here.

Those are just some of the ideas dreamt up by 26 design students from London's Central St Martins College of Art and Design, tasked by phone maker Nokia with coming up with the next must-have device for 2015's users.

As part of the union, Nokia set the designers a brief of creating a mass market mobile - with the winner seeing their design made up by the Finnish firm and receiving an internship with the company this summer.

(the gallery is here)

I think some of these innovations are like food pills. Possible, handy and cool: we may never see them. People sometimes weigh value by the pound. Look at laptops vs. desktop computers. You can put a huge amount of computing power into the space of an LCD monitor. Desktops still rule.
Cellphones will (continue to) be huge. Why? The answer: cellphone dealers. The profit margin has to yield enough dollars for the phones to be worth selling. Too cheap and they're in the realm of disposable cameras. Too much and a predator will come in with a cheap product. By packing features, you can keep the price point stable and keep the dollar flow stable to resellers. Discreet devices will carry little value because of their size.

I'm Thinking Of A Letter...

From http://www.physorg.com/news69039322.html:

"B-O-N-J-O-U-R" he writes with the power of his mind, much to the amazement of the largely French audience of scientists and curious onlookers gathered at the four-day European Research and Innovation Exhibition in Paris, which opened Thursday.

Brunner and two colleagues from the state-financed Wadsworth Center in Albany, New York were demonstrating a "brain Computer interface (BCI)," an astounding technology which digitalizes brain signals emitted as electrical impulses -- picked up by the electrodes -- to convey intent.

While no spoons were bent, this was definitely mind over matter.

Without recourse to nerves or muscles, BCI "can provide communication and control to people who are totally paralyzed" and unable to unable to speak or move, explains researcher Theresa Sellers, also from Wadsworth.

Dr. Sellers estimates there are some 100 million potential users of BCI technology worldwide, including 16 million sufferers of cerebral palsy, a degenerative brain disease, and at least five million victims of spinal cord injury. Another 10 million people have been totally paralyzed by brainstem strokes, she said.

Scientists have been experimenting with ways to translate thought directly into action for nearly two decades, but BCI has only recently begun to move out of the laboratory and into the daily lives of those trapped inside bodies that no longer respond to their will.

Possible applications extend beyond the written word into physical movement -- it is only a matter of time, Sellers says, before the same technology is used to operate motorized wheel chairs. "We can do already. But it is a complex problem, and for now it would be unsafe," she says.

Read more from http://www.physorg.com/news69039322.html