The Emporia Elegance is not easily available in the UK but the Vodafone RL1 has many similar features.

I’ve long admired the work Ian Hosking has done on understanding how older people use mobile phones. Emporia telecom recently thanked me for introducing them to Ian and his work is helping to shape the next generation of Emporia phones. In this video from Mobile Industry Review, Ian looks at very specific problems – he’s fond of the phrase “the devils is in the detail”.

In the sixth video he looks at how the Emporia Elegance handset reflects understanding of how users interact with phones. Many of these features would be good on any phone not just and easy to use one and that’s a basic tenet of inclusive design. The Elegance was actually specified before the University of Cambridge became involved with Emporia but includes features that will prove crucial in future problems which allow the family to help the user get more out of the phone and maintain independence.

Easy to use mobile

Simon Rockman

The Panasonic has a bright OLED display

My training as a print journalist taught me that when using white on black you had to use a bolder typeface. White on black is harder to see. The reason for this is that ink spreads, especially on the uncoated paper used for newsprint. This is known as dot gain and makes pictures look fuzzy.

However with sharp printing and with screens the rules are different, and it wasn’t something I realised until I read a piece in New Scientist’s “Last Word” column.

A reader had asked why he found it easier to read white on black in poor light, and David Muir from the science department at Portobello High School in Edinburgh said

“Lenses focus light, not the lack of it. So as your questioner’s eyes focus light poorly, the white light from the background will impinge on the edges of black text, making it appear smaller and more blurred. Conversely, when viewing white text on a black background the diffuse light from the text impinges on the black background, producing blurred but perceptually larger text. This makes it easier to read than the black text. The shape of the “larger” white words is also more discernible than the shape of the smaller black text.”

So light has the opposite effect of dot-gain. The edges are still blurred but it makes the letters bigger, he goes on to say

“An analogy is to imagine the difficulty of perceiving black specks in a sunlit sky. Compare that with perceiving white specks of the same size on a black background, for example, stars on a clear, moonless night.”

What’s interesting about the sky analogy is that it’s transmissive light, like that from a computer or mobile phone screen, and not reflective as you get from reading a printed page. The diffusion around the edges will be brighter with transmissive displays and so the effect will be greater. In his response David Muir says “cellphone models frequently use white text on a dark background. I assume that this is a means of saving battery charge”, which I don’t think is the case as the light comes from the backlight and is just masked by a black display. The colours are generated by red, green and blue pixels letting the light through. The backlight doesn’t use any more or less power with different pixels on or off. Phones from LG and Sony are now using a new idea which LG calls IPS and Sony “Magic White” where in addition to the red, green and blue there is a fourth pixel which is either black or clear, letting the backlight straight through. This gives a much whiter white than having the three colours on. The manufacturers claim their screens are twice as bright, and this does save power.

What this means for making phones easy to see is that white on black, for both the display and the keypad works better than black on white. The phones that springs to mind which do this well is the Emporia RL1 and the Panasonic KX-TU301.

It’s something to bear in mind when looking at phones for people with restricted vision and focus.

Simon Rockman

Bazile Telecom, the company is named after Bazile the man who is always on call to help you with your phone and other services

One of the few companies in the world which really understands the senior market for mobile phones is Bazile Telecom based in Aix-En-Provence near Marseille in southern France.

I was lucky enough to meet one of the founders Yves Morel in their offices last week. What makes Bazile special is the Prestige service. This gives 24/7 access to an operator who can provide a number of services from calling an ambulance to ordering flowers, a bit like the concierge services you get with a Nokia Vertu phone or a posh credit card. What’s even better is the operator can connect you to a number. Either ask them to dial a particular number or select from a pre-defined phonebook. You can give them as many numbers as you like. You might just say “please call my brother”, although of course you’d have to do it in French.

The Candlestick might have been the world's simplest phone, but you wouldn't want to put it in your pocket.

The Prestige service is available on a wide range of Doro phones and a couple of Nokias but what makes it really special is the phone Bazile has designed called the Bazile Prestige. This is a one-button phone. Press the single button and it calls the operator. It’s almost the simplest phone ever built, I say “almost” because there is a century old pre-cursor, the candlestick telephone where you picked it up and spoke to an operator. Because the Bazile Prestige is a mobile phone it’s a little more complicated than a Candlestick and, while it doesn’t have a dial or a display, it does speak to you to let you know that you have a signal and decent battery life.

The Prestige service is also available on the Doro phones where pressing the assistance button calls the operator. This fits in well with Doro’s  view that the button should not just be seen as something you press in an emergency.

The company name comes from the name of the figurehead Bazile translates to Basil as in Brush or Fawlty but without the same connotations in France. It has more gravitas as a name that older, more distinguished people have and a new name for young children. I guess this is more like Henry.

This is The Bazile Prestige phone. A super simple, one button device

Bazile concentrates on service rather than price, it’s contract only and the per-minute cost is quite high for France, particularly since there is a new super-cut price operator. The emphasis on service has stood Bazile well and the company has continued to grow in the face of the stiff competition.

I very much enjoyed meeting Yves, his passion for building business around service and doing the socially right thing is infectious.

Operators who worry about their public image, and who are struggling to differentiate their services in a time when the internet companies are treating them as utilities could learn an awful lot from him.

Simon Rockman

In the third and fourth videos Ewan talks to Ian Hosking of the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. Ian is the world’s leading expert in understanding the needs of older people and those with disabilities when it comes to technology. In these two videos he looks at simple things that make the difference between a phone being seen as a useful friendly thing and a scary daunting one. In the second video he looks at Android’s Ice Cream Sandwich and how there is a trade-off between functionality and ease of use.

This is sometimes referred to as the “usability knee” and is well documented in the excellent book “Mobile Usability”

For More information on inclusive design have a look at the work Ian collaborated on in the Inclusive Design Toolkit 

Simon Rockman

The non-working model at Mobile World Congress had a really good meaty feel. It’s possible that this won’t be borne out in the shipping version but as these models are built to show the big corporate buyers what they are getting they tend to be pretty accurate.

We are seeing more and more GPS phones in the senior market, what they need to back them up are affordable tracking services and I hope to look at the options for this shortly.

Eveline Pupeter-Fellner is well known for her passion about phones for seniors

Ewan MacLeod works tirelessly at developing the website Mobile Industry Review, if you work in the mobile industry it should be on your daily “must read list”. He popped over to Austria to meet Emporia and learn more about their handsets. Here Eveline Pupeter-Fellner who is the co-founder of the company with her husband Albert and who is in charge of marketing and distribution for one of the best known companies in the senior market for mobiles looks at what makes Emporia telephones special.

Android like you've never seen it before. The User Interface has been built from the ground up to be simple and easy to use.

The tale of Mobile World Congress was that the phone industry is going the way of the PC industry. Once there was innovation in computer design: both how home computers were constructed and what they were like to look at. Then along came the PC and it became an issue of which version of Microsoft operating System you were running and which Intel chip was inside. Computers got dull and predictable.

Mass market smartphones are the same. This year it was about Quad Core processors and the Google “Ice Cream Sandwich” software. Next year it will be about having A15 processors and Google’s “Jellybean”.  A man from the chip company ARM said to me “We pretty much know what we are doing for the next eight years”. Google name their operating systems alphabetically (Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, Jellybean). So you know what letter is coming next.

It all get a little unexciting.

So it’s great that there was someone doing something very different with Android, and even better that the particular someone was doing it in the Easy To Use market.

the slider on the Doro 740 makes it easy to dial, the keys are even very slightly concave so that your finger is guided into the centre of the key.

The Doro 740 is the first Android phone with a 12 key keypad, it has a touch screen but is designed so that you don’t have to use the touch to do most of the things you might want from the phone.  Some people have commented that this makes it ideal for people like construction workers who want to use a phone wearing gloves.

All the Android menus, contacts, and programs have been replaces with Doro’s own easy to use equivalents  and doesn’t look or feel like other Android devices on the market; the UI is the first fruit from Doro’s purchase of the French development house Prylos last summer.

The fact that the mobile is built with a known software platform is ideal for mobile healthwhere you might want to use Bluetooth to link to blood pressure monitors, scales or spirometers, and the Doro 740 supports Bluetooth 4.0 which has the profiles for such devices..

Regular readers of this blog will know that I prefer clamshells to sliders, indeed a lot of Doro’s success has been on the back of the 610 and 410 phones. However Chris Millington, UK boss of Doro points out that to make the 740 a clamshell would have resulted in a huge, unwieldy phone. And the sliding mechanism of the pre-production 740 I looked at in Barcelona felt very good.

There is a 5MP camera which will no doubt be used for taking pictures of grandchildren but which also acts as a magnifier to help you read small print documents. A  Security function uses GPS location and of course there is a charging cradle.

What you can’t do is download apps from the Google Apps store. This is to provide a consistent, easy to use way of controlling all the apps on the phone. You can add apps but the have to be designed with the Doro ethos and you’ll get them from Doro. There is scope for third parties to build accessibility applications but they will have to match the handset maker’s look-and-feel, which it calls the “experience-based menu”. The first of these,euronews has already been announced.

There is a web-based system, called the Doro Experience which makes adding apps, phone numbers and other information to your Doro 740 very much easier than if you try to do it on the handset. This information can be added by someone else so if you have a friend or relative who is a bit of a computer whizz they can do it for you.

I was very impressed by the Doro 740, it’s rounded and very well thought out. I was expecting the first Android phone for seniors to be a toe-in-the-water, taking and existing phone and modifying it a little. I wasn’t expecting a comprehensive, ground-up product which put the consumer first. Although I was hoping that would follow.

The website CNET had a good first look at the telephone and you can see their video here:

You cann read the full Doro 740 specification by downloading this file.

Fact Sheet Doro PhoneEasy 740

1. Nokia 808 Pureview 41 megapixels

The talk of the show was a phone where talking is very much a secondary function. The pixel-waving Pureview 808

It’s not about the pixels, it’s what you do with them. Even Nokia’s Stephen Elop agreed with this but by having so many pixels to play with the Nokia 808 gives the bets 5 megapixel images possible. They’ve been working on the image processing and compression algorithms for five years. A good lens and sensible camera UI from the world’s biggest camera manufacturer makes it more than just a gimmick. Special audio software from Dolby makes the music sound good. It might be the last gasp for Symbian but what a way to go.

2. LG Optimus 4X HD

In raising the table stakes the LG Optimus ticks all the boxes, it has the nVida tegra 3 quad core processor running at 1.5GHz, Android Ice Cream Sandwich, and a beautiful 4.7” LCD (1280 x 720). This uses In Plane Switching (IPS) which has an exceptionally wide viewing angle so those sitting next to you on the bus can watch your videos. It has been tweaked to make it extra bright, letting light through from the backlight. It’s beautiful and thin with HDMI output through the micro USB connector using MHL.  available This summer for around. £500

3 Panasonic Eluga

Waterproof ‘Droid phones are the thing from Japan with Fujitsu, Sharp and Panasonic all offering similar products. The Panasonic Eluga is the one we are likely to see in the UK first, they have been selling non-smart phones here for a while. With chamfered edges it feels good in the hand. The Eluga uses a dual core 1GHz OMAP 4430 processor and has a 4.3-inch  960×540 screen,  There is NFC support but unlike the Sony offering there are no supporting applications supplied. There is an 8 megapixel camera and features to wirelessly link the phone to Panasonic Smart Viera TVs  . Currently running Gingerbread we should see ICS by the summer.

 4 Doro 740

While all the other Android phones struggle for differentiation there is no such problem for the phone from Swedish manufacturer Doro. They are specialists in easy to use phones generally aimed at older users. The Grandroid phone has a completely custom UI designed to be used either as touch or with the hard keys and a slide-out twelve key keypad. The 740 is locked down and there is no Marketplace support and any third party applications have to be checked by Doro for ease of use. There is a linked web service which allows family, friends and carers to update pictures, contacts and other content on the phone. Look out for a fuller write up on this tomorrow.

5 Padfone

Solving the problem of laptop, tablet or phone, the Padfone is all three. Your phone clips into the back of the tablet which can then clip into the keyboard. At the show it still felt a little way from being ready, the keyboard bounce was shocking, but they are claiming to be the first Ice Cream sandwich tablet. It’s a 1.5GHz dual core snapdragon, has a MicrosSD slot, with a 4.3”, 960×540, Super AMOLED display.  Announced for April, Price TBC

6 Rohde & Schwarz TopSec

A Bluetooth device with a difference, this device has a speaker and a microphone and encrypts speech using 384 bit elliptic curves during negotiation to prevent man in the middle attacks, and then uses a 256 bit AES key to encrypt the conversation. It sets up a VoIP link to someone using a another usint connected by Bluetooth to a phone or computer. There is a secure phonebook application. Rohde & Schwarz claim it is much more secure than software based encryption such as Cellcrypt. You can plug a headset into the device to provide hands-free use. A snip at €2500. Each.

7 Sony Xperia P

There is something undeniably cool about the Sony brand and from the people who brought you Bravia the 4” 1280 x 720 “magicwhite” display which adds a pixel that lets the backlight through is very bright. The clear band is a lever piece of technology. Based on 1GHz dual core ST-Ericsson chipsets this is currently only Gingerbread, Ice Cream Sandwich is on the way. 16Gb with no removable memory – and so side-stepping the political M2/Micro SD debate. The 8Mpixel camera will do 3D panoramas and there is NFC supported by a bunch of tags that come in the box.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

8 HTC one X

With similar specs to the LG the HTC one X has more tweaks to the UI (under the moniker Sense 4) and some brand sharing with Beats audio.  Another 4.7-inch, 1280 x 720 resolution, albeit lacking LG’s IPS, but a super-responsive camera that “works at the speed of light”, and f2.0 lens, a burst mode and the ability to take still pictures while shooting a video. The main camera is supplemented by a 1. megapixel front facing camera. Ice Cream Sandwich, NFC, 32Gb storage and MHL connector to give HDMI over usb. Comes with 25gig of dropbox storage.

9  Nokia Lumia 610

A budget Windows Mobile phone from Nokia. This is not important for the specs: 800MHz, single core, 8GB memory, 3.7” 800 x 480 screen, 5mp camera. It’s important for the price, SIM free at £160 it will be free with quite basic contracts and is just the thing Nokia needs to build market share. That in turn helps build the Windows Mobile ecosystem which is the top goal for Nokia and Microsoft. Even with the comparatively low spec it feels fine, although there is no telling how it will be once you start loading lots of apps.
 
 
 
 
 

10 Samsung Galaxy Beam

Pocket projectors have been around for a while and the promise of them getting small enough to be built into a phone has always been there. Now Samsung has come good on that promise with the galaxy beam. A phone that can project an 50” image. The resolution isn’t great at 800 x 480 and it is only 15 lumens but it’s more than good enough for watching a little video, or playing a two-player game using Bluetooth remotes. The spec is standard Android fare: Android Gingerbread, 1GHz Dual Core and a 5MP camera. Sensibly it has a microSD slot. No Launch plans or price.

Emporia will launch a 3G clamshell phone at Mobile World Congress.

The big trade fair of the year for the mobile industry takes place in Barcelona this week and I expect to see lots of phones for seniors. That’s not because there is a trend this way but because Mobile World Congress (MWC) has everything. It’s a huge event and of course I’ll be looking out for the news. I’ll try to post as much as I can when it happens but as I’ll be covering the event for The Register I might not have much easy to use blogging time.

This is being written before the show but what we know will be there is a 3G phone from Emporia – as that’s shown on their invitation and there will be an easy to use Android device from Doro. I had a sneak peak at it a couple of months ago but Monday will be the first chance I get to have a good look.

Meanwhile you might like to check out a series of Interviews with Emporia which is running on Mobile Industry Review. This is a great source of news and the general mobile vibe, produced by Ewan MacLeod. He’s felt the pain of the lack of appropriate, easy to use technology as a parent and grandson, wanting to send pictures of his son to his grandmother. Something he spoke about to great effect at Senior Market Mobile 2010.

You can find out more about his time with Emporia here. Or watch his video below.

The new Orange senior phones sells for €39

A new “Essentials Orange” category has been created by Orange in Spain to cater for the older user. This includes the Doro 410, with which Orange has been very successful and a new phone from ZTE. This is called the ZTE S202. This has been widely available around the world and is a very basic senior mobile in that it has just big buttons and an emergency button on the back. There is no hearing aid support, desktop charger  or speaking clock function.

The mobile phone chip manufacturer MediaTek publishes designs for how to use its chips in phones, know as reference platforms, and the ZTE 202 looks very much like other Chinese built phones built to the MediaTek specification. It’s not particularly elegant.

It’s a shame that Orange didn’t use ZTE’s more interesting senior phone the Easy Touch Discovery 3 which it makes for Telstra in Australia. The Discovery 3 is a much more elegant, clamshell design which has had a lot more thought into the form and functions.

Still it’s good to see Orange taking the category seriously, and perhaps it’s not surprising that this has happened in Spain where there is a good sense of family and Vodafone Simply was very successful.

The ZTE phone sold by Telstra is more advanced but more expensive