Is the mobile industry prepared for a circular phone?

This week I had the good fortune of an email exchange with Laia Quintà, Executive Planner de PR Agency Román y Asociados, about scheduling media interviews regarding my company, dTOOR INC. SPC, participating in the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. As a part of the 4YFN startup program, dTOOR will be bringing its first prototype of Cyrcle, a circular-shaped mobile phone focused on women with SEEED’s RePhone Kit inside, and will be displaying it at booth 4F. Eager to hear what she thought of our product, I asked Ms. Quintà for her top two questions, and she absolutely nailed two of my main challenges right out of the gate.

How will the apps and web pages fit a circular screen? Is the web industry prepared for this change?

As for the arrangement of the icons, selections, and keyboard entries on the screen, I have a design which I hope to reveal sometime in the future. However, regarding the porting of apps and web pages into a circular shape: I have been working on this idea for two years, and recently am beginning to see even more solutions for this challenge with the advent of circle-shaped smartwatches.

Originally I thought I would design my own circular touchscreen with a radial design for the touch layer, radiating out from the center like the spokes of a bicycle wheel. Yet this would demand programming radially instead of in the traditional X and Y coordinates. So for applications to be easily ported to this new device, a sort of translation program would be necessary to map all the application software coordinates from X and Y to circular. (Most people’s eyes glaze over about here…)

However, in the last 12 months I have seen advances happening on circular smartwatch displays, which still use an X and Y grid, some of these making the user interfaces delightful to use and pleasing to the eye within a circular-shaped display. They successfully navigate apps and can even browse web pages[1]. I hope to learn from the good and the bad, and pay it forward to the next generation of mobile phones.

So, in short, yes, I think the mobile industry is ready just at this very moment for the launch of a circular handset.

Will the phone be practical and big enough? The problem of our pockets is not only the shape, but also the size. A phone which will fit in our smaller pockets will have to be small and perhaps less practical….

 I think the only way that this phone will be practical and big enough to become a mainstream competitor is if it has two beautifully circular touchscreens on each circle half, each of which reach the very edge of the device and perhaps beyond (go, Samsung Edge![2]). As I get older and my eyes get weaker, I really need and value that larger screen space. But if forced to choose between seeing more, or being portable, I choose portability each and every time. Case in point: my desktop is attached to a large display, but I don’t choose to carry that display around. Instead, I carry an ultra-light-weight laptop with a tiny display which I will not resent lugging around multiple airports. Or even better, for daily life I chose to carry just my mobile phone – and hopefully, in the future, in my pocket. 🙂

This year the technology to accomplish this ideal is limited in three ways: 1) the lack of availability of non-rectangular touchscreens (not just circular but other shapes like triangular, ovoid, leaf-shaped, etc.), 2) battery life verses display, and 3) juggling the “multi-monitor” aspect of having two touchscreens. However, I have seen some devices appearing in just the last few months which are getting around this. LG’s displays never cease to amaze me, and I am always thrilled to see their new flexible screen technology[3]. If there is a way to make a perfectly circular screen, I would bet on them. Regarding the second, Yotaphone’s[4] new dual screen mobile phone is a fascinating solution. Furthermore, on the battery front there are advances every year.[5]

The mobile phone of my dreams is merely a prototype this year, but I think the full impact and adoption of circular touchscreens will be possible in next 3-5 years. In the meantime I am determined to gain some valuable experience performing usability testing and shipping simpler and smaller (and less expensive!) circular-shaped mobile phones in the next two years, with SEEED’s wonderful RePhone Kit[6] inside. The fact that people are delighted to see even these scaled down versions is an unexpected surprise and very encouraging to me. I think to them in my mind, “I’m so glad you enjoy this version. The next one will blow your socks off!”

Picture: www.linkedin.com