Diaries of a Nokia Fan Boy

I’m not sure if anyone’s actually heard of Modu. Its a neat phone if it actually ends up taking off (and coming to NAM!!!). The idea behind it is that you have a single phone which contains your SIM card, memory, processor, as well as speaker, mic, basic screen, and some buttons. The phone itself isn’t very user-friendly however you can also buy several different “Jackets” for it. The jackets can be whatever you like, since the port is standardized. Basically its a modular phone with infinite expansion options, and since the phone itself is tiny, the expansions aren’t going to be over-sized either.

Well it seems like Modu has announced a successor to its original modular phone, and the biggest update is the addition of a touchscreen (see picture below, left-most phone). Now sadly this thing is coming to UK and only in 2010, so who knows when it will get to see the light of our NAM sun, but hopefully it won’t take too long.

Personally I love the idea of a modular phone like that, and would even go so far as to say that the module shouldn’t even have an ear piece, mic, screen or buttons, that everything UI-related should be on the “Jackets”, and that the module should only contain the SIM, memory, and “brains” of the phone. That way the module can be extremely small (I’m guessing a little larger than a Compact Flash card, if including the battery and cellular, WiFi, and Bluetooth antennas), and the jackets can still be quite cheap. Of course there are some other design elements that would have to be included in one or the other, such as camera and GPS chip. Of course we could modularize even further and say that the camera and GPS and other pieces can be broken down into their own modules, but I think then we’ll have more plastic encasing the modules than we will of actual functional pieces, and the phones will get very large.

This would also greatly appeal to teenagers, who may want to switch from a QWERTY jacket for school for messaging, to a big screen or big speaker jacket for being outside of school, and a big battery or awesome camera jacket for traveling.

-Nokia FanBoy

via: GSMArena (read)
and: EngadgetMobile (read)