What the world needs are more concept devices, and thankfully here come Pilotfish with their Ondo to fill that gap. Best known for their work on the Synaptics Onyx interface, Pilotfish have now turned their attention to more media-centric mobile devices with the Ondo cellphone concept, a twistable, touch-sensitive and modular music experience.
Label-whores, mobile pros and finger-thumpers rejoice, LG have finally made official what we long expected – the PRADA phone (otherwise masquerading as the KE850) will go on sale in Europe at the end of February, followed by Asia in March.
Overshadowed a little perhaps by both the iPhone and LG’s own legal case against Apple disputing the originality of that very handset, the KE850 has a respectable feature-set operated via a very interesting UI. Its 12mm thin chassis packs tri-band EDGE, a 2-megapixel camera (with LED flash), microSD memory expansion of the as-yet-undisclosed internal storage, office file viewer, a DAP supporting MP3, ACC, ACC+, WMA and RA, as well as a video player compatible with MPEG4, H.263 and H.264 formats. All of the above are accessed through a Flash-based interface developed by Pilotfish, who partnered with Synaptics to create the Onyx concept cellphone SlashGear covered last year, and whose DNA is very much present in the PRADA phone.
Looks like some congratulations are in order! Our friends over at Synaptics have been awarded the red dot online design concept award for Interaction & Communication for their Onyx prototype, as exclusively featured on SlashGear back in October 2006. Onyx is a new paradigm in gesture interface, where users control their cellphones via one and two-fingered sweeps, flicks and shapes.
We’re still waiting to see the first commercial application of the technology, which combined Synaptics’ proximal sensor pads and Pilotfish’s GUI design, so let’s hope that 2007 is the year for it! Congratulations again, guys.
JP
