The One Button Phone
2:33 pm January 21, 2009
This recent post from Ewan at Mobile Industry Review got me thinking as my smartphone experiences have been similar, although without quite his patience. I had the first two Symbian Smartphones, the illustrious Ericsson R380 and the Nokia 7650. At the time it was great, you’d sit there texting on the bus and people would stop and check them out like you were visiting from the future. This made you overlook the fact the battery life was awful, the UI was slow and they were so bulky that they made you walk lopsided. For a time, they were the coolest phones in the world. The R380 had a touch screen and the 7650 a camera when such things were unheard of.
Then along came the Sharp GX20, a phone which basically did everything the 7650 did (that an average user cares about) better and quicker on a ncier screen, and for me, the Smartphone world hasn’t really caught up with feature phones since. I’ve had a selection over the years, but most don’t last a week before relocating to the Masabi testing desk to be replaced by my trusty Samsung D600. It handles voice, SMS and Java apps well and has passable battery life, in a small pocketable package – in short it just works.
I’ll admit I am tempted by some of the more exciting data applications that I’ve seen recently, but not enough to compromise on what my phone does well today. However, this has got me thinking about cutting back the functions of a phone to the absolute minimum - a mobile with a single button. Like the original landline phone you simply turn it on and speak to an operator who then connects your call. If you want the premium service you get a human to speak to, whilst the cheaper option could use voice recognition - like a (good) IVR system tied to Spinvox. This would work nicely for sending and receiving text too.
You could also offer a web console where people could track their usage, add their numbers for quick dialing or to read their messages. As you’d only be dialing one number it could be cheaper too, ringing into the switchboard and then connect over VoIP to wherever you’re calling. I’ll admit there are some flaws which would need ironing out – playing with SpinVox recently it seems to think I’m of Middle Eastern descent, transcribing Ed Howson as Ahmed Hassan, but I still think the idea has potential. Think of the benefits:
- Battery Life – no screen, no Bluetooth, no applications processing, no WiFi – it could last for weeks
- Form Factor – Just a radio, a SIM, a button and a battery – no screen and the removal of a stack of components would free up a world ofinteresting possibilities. The phone could be the size of a Bluetooth headset.
- Central storage – All data (call records, messages, contacts etc.) would be held centrally, impossible to lose…
- Price – the hardware would be cheap as chips, making for a phone that’s effectively disposable or ideal for keeping in your car in case of emergencies.
Anyhow, there’s the bones of the idea, any VCs reading who want to make it a reality drop me an email 
2 Responses to “The One Button Phone”
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Barbara Ballard January 27th, 2009 at 6:08 pm
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[...] a head of steam is the idea of mHealth and we fully expect it to take off in a much bigger way than Ed’s brainchild the ‘One Button Phone’ has. As the topic seems to be gaining more and more traction in the news I have been tasked with [...]
Temono » mHealth, the next big thing? October 2nd, 2009 at 4:55 pm
I saw a system like that in use at a hospital last week. The entire emergency department was wearing pendants around their necks. They’d push a button and say “call Gayle Stevens.” Success rate was … not great. The background noise and poor microphone placement really made things tough. I asked a few employees, who pretty much universally hated it.
The source: http://www.vocera.com/