In an interview with The Guardian, Nokia designer Marko Ahtisaari suggested that he wants future Lumia phones to involve zero moving parts. We’re not just talking no buttons, either: he means scrapping the power and data cable for good.
Speaking to The Guardian, he talked about the next logical step in phone design being a complete stripping down, to the point where handsets are entirely sealed units.
“If you can take away a moving part and make it [the phone] more beautiful in the placement of the components, we’ll do it, so that’s something where we can certainly keep improving. Take it to the extreme, and why are there any connectors?”
The Guardian suggests that he’s thinking of removing the microUSB port from Lumia phones altogether. That would mean they would rely on wireless charging and presumably Wi-Fi for data transfer. It’s a big step, but it’s fair to say the technology’s already here to support it. And imagine how sleek those things would be.
In fact, he’s quite philosophical about the future of mobile phone design. “In the 1880s in the car industry cars had tillers — it took 15 years to agree on the steering wheel controlling the front wheels,” he said to the newspaper. “We’re in the middle of that part of the evolution of interaction.”
If we ignore for now some of the major stumbling blocks of entirely sealed phones — replacement batteries being the obvious one — I have to admit it’s a cool idea. Maybe not a useful idea, but a cool one all the same. [The Guardian]