May 22, 2006

“Cell atlantic” personal cellphone booth offers portable privacy

Talking on the phone is no longer a private exchange. What if you could carry a phone booth with you and set it up when you needed to converse in private?

Out of the many gadgets and devices that have been featured on these pages over the years, the last one you’d think someone would make improvements upon would be the personal cellphone booth invented last year by Nick Rodrigues, which seems to perform its intended duty almost perfectly. Well NYU student Jenny Chowdhury, the same person who brought that team-building Mobile Assassins game, decided to take the mobile phone booth to the next level by making it both lighter and more private. Instead of the folding plastic and metal design built by Rodrigues, Chowdhury decided to use Chinese merchant bags to stitch together her cleverly-named, full-length “cell atlantic” phonebooth, as a symbol of the structure’s nomadic nature. Chowdhury hopes that people seeing or using the booth will take a moment to consider the impact of cellphones on our daily lives, while forcing them to stand still and concentrate on a call instead of engaging in the usual multitasking. (more…)


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Samsung Invents Sliding-Clamshell Design

Samsung has combined two popular cell phone form factors into one design, inventing the sliding-clamshell.

Having advantages of both sliding and folding phones, the new form is built from a soft cover, allowing the body to slide lengthwise as well as become extended and folded.

According to the patent application, clamshell phones have an advantage in portability due to their compact size; however the screen is typically very small. By contrast, sliding phones have large screens, but are often large. Additionally, LCDs on sliders are typically exposed without a protective cover, making them more susceptible to damage. Samsung’s sliding-clamshell invention attempts to solve these problems by having a large, protected display while keeping a compact size.


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