From smart to genius: will design define future gadgets?

In a pre-iPhone age, mobile phones came in all shapes and sizes. Remember the clamshell, candy bar, swivel, backflip, slider, dual-slider, lipstick, and, of course, the taco? Nowadays, most phones have a touch screen, rows of icons and are rectangular.

In short, they all look a lot like the iPhone.

Now, in the wake of the Apple Inc vs Samsung Electronics trial, where the U.S. firm won what the South Koreans scathingly called a monopoly over rectangles with rounded corners, the fear is that an era of rapid and exciting innovation in mobile design is over. The iPhone has won the day and all those whose handsets use Google's Android operating system, the argument goes, will either give up or tread carefully for fear of litigation.

But others argue the opposite.

Paul Pugh, creative vice president at frog, a San Francisco-based design company owned by India's Aricent Group, believes companies may now unshackle their designers to come up with genre-busting form factors and user interfaces that breathe fresh life into the industry.

We don't know yet how far the impacts are going to go from here, says Pugh. I do hope it's an inspiration moment for the Android platform and the manufacturers to put their bets on innovation ... to come with great user experience based on users' needs, and not stagnate based on the patents crippling them.

SMARTPAD

Frog knows how hard this is to bring to market. Take the SmartPad; a prototype Android phone the company unveiled last year that at first glance looked, in the words of one reviewer on the technology website Engadget, like yet another plain smartphone - dark, nondescript, and maybe a little like an iPhone 4 that's had its right-most extent sliced off.

Flip open the two layers, however, and you had a phone with twice the normal screen size. Suddenly it's a little tablet, two screens forming a 6-inch slate, the Engadget reviewer wrote.

... contd.

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