After my recent announce of the new AU Summer Collection, I had to wait a couple months before the official release of the Casio W53CA phone.

I got the phone a few weeks ago and it's a beauty, as always. It's even thinner than the 43CA, the hinge is even smaller and more elegant. The screen is wider and QVGA (480x800) resolution. You know all those phone ads where the screen looks incredible crisp, but then you buy the phone and it's some crappy 120x60 resolution... Well the 53CA screen makes pics look like printed matter. Simply incredible.

The camera is pretty amazing too. It does take beautiful Exilim pics, better than any other camera phone I have ever seen. Of course, certain lighting condition will always be challenging but this thing can survive just about anything.

So is there anything to complain about?

This just in!
A week after DoCoMo announced their new accelerometer-fitted mobile phones, AU have just done the same with their own Summer 2007 collection...
10 phones!

Quick snippets:
- 2 Casio phones. One of them (the W53CA) is now branded with Casio's digital camera brand Exilim and boasts a 5.1 MP camera! You know which phone I am already considering buying... ;-)

I have been following with interest the development of Spanning Sync's Google Calendar <-> iCal syncing software.
But after 7 months of hard work, the development team gave the finger to 18,862 beta testers couple days ago, by launching the final v1.0 with a very steep pricing scheme that resulted in more than 90% of angry comments on their blog post announcing the launch.

Updated
The Spring 07 collection of AU phones is out and AU has not let me down this time. It will have finally taken 12 months (3 collections) to lure me away from my uber-awesome bestselling W41CA. It is now time to upgrade!
Out of the 10 phones on the shelf, only 2 caught my eyes. They are the only 2 phones to have the new WVGA screens with resolutions of 800x480px. And unfortunately, the forever-beautiful-W41CA-inspired form factor of the W51CA will probably not be enough to distract me from those screens.

[Bethemedia] And kids (and Media Types from London) are telling me my blog is totally Book. WHAT? Here's the great new thing. Because 'Book' comes up before the word 'Cool' on T9, effectively kids are now re-associating the 'Signified' - our perfect Platonic notion of 'Cool' - with a signifier that shares no traditional meaning derived from existing language, but jumps to another (almost) randomly associated signifier - simply because of T9 associating them through structural similarities.[via]

[37signals] There's an interesting tradeoff presented by the iPhone. While the phone can do more, and its interface is fluid, in some ways it widens the gulf between human and computer.
When you touch it it doesn't touch you back.
That may prove to be a good thing. It may prove that what we think we need we don't really need. The tradeoffs may payoff. But we've certainly lost the tactile feedback humans are used to when dealing with things that are right in front of us. Now the connection is simulated. Rich textures have been replaced with androgynous glass.

How can you dial the iPhone without looking at it? How can you reach in your pocket and press "1" for voicemail? How can you orient yourself with the interface without seeing it? With a traditional phone or device with buttons you can feel your way around it. You can find the bumps, the humps, the cut lines, the shapes, the sizes. You can find your way around in the dark. Not with the iPhone.

Another playful project by Nendo. Sounds like he had carte blanche and he made full use of it to push the metaphore of the glass until he drowned in it! ;-)

This mobile phone handset was a collaboration with NTT DoCoMo and NEC. We wanted a product that felt accessible and close to home, so we used the concept of a drinking glass, a form familiar to the hand.

Updated [MP3 Insider] Synaptics wasn't offering its technology to any other MP3 player companies until recently, and it still doesn't offer the round version found on the iPod to anyone but Apple. However, as mentioned above, the company made a straightened-out version of it for Creative's Zen Touch, which evidently doesn't violate whatever agreement Synaptics has with Apple. It makes a bit more sense conceptually, since song lists run up and down instead of in circles, but the scrollwheel lets you scroll faster, because your finger can go around continuously instead of returning to the top of the strip. To make the Zen Touch even more competitive with the iPod, I recommended to Creative that it implement a new feature that would scroll down one screen.

The last time I bought an actual CD was 4 years ago, so the only contact with my music collection for 4 years has been lists and lists and lists of titles... Lost the emotions of handling your own CDs, broken covers, and gaze at their covers. When is the last time you had a discussion with a friend about a great CD cover art.
For me, music is a line on a P2P soft, or on the iTunes store, then a line on iTunes and then sound.
Imagine if the time continuum warped and all the people who ever designed a CD jacket disappeared in a sneeze... We wouldn't be left with much.

Cover Flow is a new software that brings back physicality to your CD collection in an overwhelming, submersive 3D interface.

[Bosch] The Integra Vision dishwasher is so quiet, we had to create INFOLIGHT, a device that beams a small light onto the floor so you can tell it's running.[Via]

Was this really the only way to let us know that it is running or not? I refuse to believe this. I understand the need and also the limitation considering that they like to keep their doors free of any buttons or indicators but the solution is way too stretched. A light embedded in the handle, making it discreetly glow or reflecting on the door just seems a more logical way to do that since this is where the action happens when you open a dishwasher.
How weird!!? Can't really get excited for that one...

Dave Phelan commented on Tom Hume's excellent blog:

"Two different people displayed the same behaviour on the train yesterday: shaking their mobiles to get them to do something."

Was going through my links in Bloglines.com, trying to create a specific folder for Interaction Designers. I have quite a few now, so I wanted to share this list before adding it to my side column.
Are there anymore of you not listed here, do you have any other good links to recommend me?
Leave a comment please.

What is the thing you enjoy hoovering most. That is, what is the situation where it isn't a total pain to pull out the hoover? Dirty jokes and Dyson aside, I love hoovering spilled sugar, salt, cereals, sand... any powdered substance really.
Why? Because I find the sound it makes going up the hose quite satisfying; as opposed to hoovering hair or invisible elements. When you pass the hoover in your flat's entrance after a walk on the beach, you can hear the dust.

Updated. The city has just become more exciting!
We built what we thought was most missing in our city of Tokyo: an Art and Design amplifier. We know there are hundreds of artists and venues broadcasting in the city, yet so few ways to hear about them.
Now there is Tokyo Art Beat.

Yet another article (in Wired this time) about tags and folksonomies and yet another article that fails to mention any potential problems associated with a taxonomy uncontrolled by people (a folksonomy).
Tags work very well on a personal basis, you tag the data that's of interest to you, da_way-youWant. But what happens when the sites need to harvest the potential of those tags to empower the users?

[SvN] All items in a list are not created equally. That’s the idea behind weighted lists that, via font size, emphasize popular items and minimize unpopular ones. The cool thing is that by merely altering font sizes, these lists suddenly gain a dimension; You can still find items alphabetically but you can also use visual weight to find the most requested items. My guess is we’ll be seeing a lot more of these weighted lists.

Indeed, since this post, 2 months ago, Technorati and Metafilter have added tags to their sites and launched their own weighted lists.
And I did too!

[Mouseradio] The mouseradio is a fully functioning radio without buttons. The idea was to use the mouse navigation and to implement it in a radio.
Moving the radio vertically changes the volume, moving the radio on the horizontal axis changes the frequency. The radio is on, when the black speaker points up in the air. (1998)

[PhysOrg.com] Samsung Electronics unveiled the world's first "3D movement recognition" mobile phone SCH-S310. 'Accelerometer' is built in to accurately calculate and ascertain movement in three dimensional space and then carry out commands according to those calculations.
Mobile phone input devices to date include the keypad, touch screen and voice recognition. In the future, however, 3D movement recognition technology will become an important user interface and revolutionize mobile phone designs and features.
This technology will do away with the need for complex keypads on mobile phones, MP3 players, digital cameras and other handheld products. This will particularly effect the way games are played on a mobile phone. Many functions will be controlled by movement instead of buttons.

Seen on Cool Hunting last week is the Jimi, a plastic card case that is a little unconventional in its function and looks for people who don't like traditional wallets. The website is kinda overdone too but it was nice to see such an insignificant object get some functional attention. For my part, I bought a similar plastic card case in Amsterdam last April and have been using it happilly ever since.

[CNN.com] A GameBoy Advance title "Boktai" uses sunlight as an essential part of the game. The amount of light determines the amount of power your hero has to defeat his enemies.

The content of the game changes according to time:
- the Undead come out at night and stay in dungeons during the day

and according to sunlight:
- Solar Gun power is charged by sunlight.
- Puddles dry up if exposed to sunlight continuously.
- The stronger the sunlight, the stronger the wind in certain areas.
- There are enemies that reveal themselves when the sunlight is weak.
- There are enemies that slow down when the sunlight is weak.
- The Pile Driver becomes more powerful.

[37signals] The Seattle Post-Intelligencer launched an innovative home page redesign today. The layout changes based on the time of day.

[Widgetopia] As sites have grown larger and more complex, ways to navigate them is changing. The hyperbolic tree shows promise. The one found at the XRCE website is particularly easy to understand and navigate.

[Social Circles by Marcos Weskamp] Social Circles intends to partially reveal the social networks that emerge in mailing lists. The idea was to visualize in near real-time the social hierarchies and the main subjects they address.

TIME Magazine: What's Next?

I was looking forward to playing with this. Ready. Set. Go...
Erik Benson's Weblog: idea database

Cooper: Getting from Research to Personas: Harnessing the Power of Data
Adaptive Path: Finding the Righ Users

[CNN] Name tags, [Scott] says, serve as a modern-day front porch. They're a welcoming invitation for people to be sociable.

HELLO, my name is Scott! website

Granted, it might not land the company a load of cash to sell products that people will stop losing or misplacing, but they look great and the little girl in me (??!!) wants the whole collection.

[kottke.org] Greg Elin had the best idea at the LazyWeb as Competitive Sport BOF last night. He wants a way to dump calendar items, tasks, and the like out of his calendaring system (iCal, Outlook, etc.) and have those items display as ads on the web sites that he visits. So, when he goes to Slashdot, a banner ad tells him to stop for orange juice on the way home. When he goes to news.com, there's an ad telling him that his mother's birthday is coming up.

A game designed by the Swiss Federal Office for Public Health. It is one of the examples given by BJ Fogg from the Captology dept. of Stanford University to explain what Persuasive Technology can do. They argue that the game is designed to persuade sexually active people that unprotected sex is dangerous, the ultimate goal being to motivate condom use.
While I can see that, in this case, the chosen media makes it easy to reach more (younger) people that videos or brochures could, I am only mildly convinced by its possible effects.

TecO: Ubiquitous Computing. A great collection of publications. Even recent ones!

The coming of age of calm technology is a really simple to understand article about the importance of products which designs are empowering us through a subtle and multi-level flow of informations rather than all in our faces at once.
Thanks to Adam for the heads-up. ;-)

AskTog, 2001. How to Deliver a Report Without Getting Lynched
(via rM)