Building the Perfect Smart Phone: PC World's Design

26.11.2008
What would you include in the perfect smart phone? Here's a concept we've put together; it melds the to build the dream device of tomorrow. This is not a real product....yet.

INTERFACE: Our FrankenPhone would add vibration feedback to the , or maybe even the ability to depress slightly when clicked (what RIM calls ClickThrough). We love accelerometers, BlackBerry-like trackballs, and the , too, but we would stick with the nonslip keys of the .

OPERATING SYSTEM: Imagine the elegance of Apple's iPhone OS and iTunes App Store mixed with the openness of . The result: killer apps like , which uses the T-Mobile G1's camera as a retina-scanning replacement for passwords. Add support for true multitasking and Flash, and we'd be happy campers indeed. See our for more.

STORAGE: The 16GB storage of the high-end iPhone 3G is sweet, but the support for the 16GB+ MicroSDHC card in recent BlackBerry devices and in the T-Mobile G1 is sweeter. .

CAMERA:The N96 also has a 5-megapixel main camera (with Carl Zeiss optics, dual-LED flash, auto-focus, and 20X digital zoom) plus a front-facing 0.3-megapixel (640 by 480) camera for video calls over 3G. We like. We'd stir this in along with a dash of the

GPS NAVIGATION: For getting around, . It has traffic, pedestrian mode, voice prompts, and turn-by-turn directions. For the iPhone, TeleNav is readying a similar application that adds even more 3D pizzazz than its version for offers. (Of course, we'd spice things up with photo-realistic imagery and tight, Android-style integration with Google Maps.)