What Does A Simple Phone for Old People Look Like? A Tablet

Ahmed Nefzaoui’s blog post about RTL languages introduced me to this awesome video, which is funny, charming, poignant and incidentally makes great points about phone usability:

It got me thinking: what would a phone for someone like Dotty look like? The more I thought about it, the more I realised the answer is “a tablet”.

Imagine a 7″ tablet with 4G phone hardware, so it has an always-on, fast, low-latency Internet connection. It is nice and big, and so easily held and viewed, and the screen controls can be made bigger for those with poor eyesight. It has no fiddly close-together hardware buttons to push. It can be unlocked with a simple swipe. You don’t have to know which is the menu button, which is *, or deal with T9 predictive text input. It has twin directional mics and speakers, with echo cancellation, so it doesn’t need to be held to the ear and the speaker positioned accurately. It has a built-in stand, so it can be placed at a good angle for calls on any flat surface. It has a camera for video calls, which (given sufficient bandwidth and frame rate) also allows for lip reading. It can record, and then email or MMS, short voice clips, which are much easier to create than text messages. It has wireless charging (or perhaps a dock) to avoid having to connect fiddly micro USB cables. One day, it might have voice recognition and speech-to-text, but perhaps not today. And it’s still small enough to fit in a handbag on the rare occasions it needs to go somewhere.

Thinking of all the advantages… why would anyone build a phone for old people in a mobile phone form factor?

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