As many of you know, I am focused more on feature phones than on "smart phones". While I love high-end phones, I want to see good experience available to the masses.
So I'm more excited by Alltel's Celltop than I am about Apple's iPhone. Sure, the iPhone looks pretty and looks like it has a good experience ... but Celltop will be available to a large portion of Alltel's customers. And your carrier can repeat the process now.
Celltop was designed by frog design, in cooperation with Alltel, QUALCOMM, and Motricity (all of whom need a good win). Users can get standard stuff (weather, sports, news, stocks, various sports), some on-device stuff (call logs, messaging center), and ringtones both on-device and available for purchase. All of this in an experience customizable by the user to content, widgets, and color and available with 1-2 keypresses.
I'm most interested in the reported extensibility. Already the widgets ("cells") are more compelling than many in Widsets, most of which are simply RSS feeds.
Interestingly, Sprint has had the same uiOne technology available on some of its phones for over a year, but they were too timid to move beyond fairly simple graphic and color customization of the standby screen and main menu. Maybe now they'll start listening to their own designers.
I'd like to take this a bit further. I want dynamic content on the standby screen (not just one keypress away).
I want some information available less directly, with background colors/textures designating information.
- The top part of the screen might have a background color designating how my portfolio is faring.
- The middle part might have traffic status for my route home ("ooh, traffic is looking bad. I'll work for another 30 minutes").
- The bottom might have weather projections for the next few hours.
But let's go beyond just this set of "standard". Let me jot down notes (text, voice, or picture) - where did I park? what am I supposed to get at the grocery store? I'll dismiss these when they are no longer relevant. There's so much to do, and Celltop is pointing the way.