Function, Fashion And Style

Electronic gadgets are flooding our lives. And the good thing is they are now equally stylish and well designed as functional. Nokia was probably the first major company to discover technology was about style and fashion as well as about function. While Ericsson was introducing new features to their mobile phones in the 1990’s, Nokia had interchangeable color covers. The memories of those times still come back today when I see a 3D printer printing a custom color cover for a Nokia Lumia phone on the Nokia stand.

Today Nokia has lost its glamor to Apple, but the good news is nearly every manufacturer of consumer electronics pays a lot of attention to the details in design. Recently I have been impressed the most by Jabra, the Danish mobile sound products manufacturer. While Jabra still has some homework to do to surpass Bose in quality of portable sound, the design of their latest products has surpassed even Apple. Take the new Vox in-ear ear-buds and have a look. There is a tiny sound – neutral magnet to hold them together when not in use. The plug is ultra-small and nicely bent, yet easy to handle. The cord is of a special square shape to prevent coiling. With the very detailed ideas and improvements, they simply took away all the annoyances that come with portable ear-buds. Then take their bigger siblings, the Revo. Probably the first headset that uses NFC to make Bluetooth pairing completely seamless. The headset is both wired and wireless. And the wire has 3.5mm plugs on both ends (and a mike) and can be used to interconnect two pairs together, to share the audio stream. Solemate, the portable audio speaker comes in a cloth bag that does not have to be removed, as it does not obstruct the sound. Plus it can double as a conference Bluetooth speakerphone. And has a perfectly shaped cable that fits in the interchangeable color rubber base.

At WiHo.me we think of introducing our own hardware, which is a monumental task for a software startup. Knowing how important the design part is, I approached Jabra, offering joint development (us: software, they: hardware). But I must have been a bad salesman, they said they were not interested in diversification of the product line. Fair enough. But if we continue with the hardware plans, we have to develop a completely unique approach to the design, when it comes to how the device looks and is built. Disclosure: we have already done that, but I have to keep it under covers for the time being, for obvious reasons.

The good news is, not everybody thinks and executes like Jabra. There are many examples of companies, who do not pay attention to what I call smart design. The crown example I often cite is Nikon. A few years ago a friend of mine asked me to help her buying a mid-range Nikon DSLR. And she wanted a GPS with it, for geotagging photos and selected the original Nikon GPS. The GPS came with a cable to connect it to the camera body. Very ugly solution. Couldn’t they use the flash mount? Even worse, the cable required the cap covering multiple sockets to be removed (leaving them prone to sand, dust and water). And even worse, the plug, when in the socket, was sticking out of the body in such a way, it was impossible to put the camera in a case and without proper attention the plug could have been easily torn out of the body, damaging the socket. Nikon simply never thought of how people would be using the product. This is good news, as we, being a small startup, still have a chance to leap over many big guys. After all this is what startups are about!