For the past few months I’ve been tossing together different interfaces for a smartphone. I spent time designing new, crisp, high res icons for Android. I fiddled with the idea of no home screen. I had a revelation. I wanted the minimalism of a Simplephone.
I started with Android 2.3 as my base – then stripped everything away back to it’s simplest of forms. I started adding icons here, and swipe action there when I realized this has all been done before. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to “redesign the smartphone UI”. Between the OEM’s, the OS creators, and the Modding community, all the bases are covered. So I took another direction.
What about the people who don’t need 867 bells and whistles? What about the people who just want a phone for what it is? A phone. Now that there’s countless piles of smartphone madness on every Carrier’s tray, there’s barely any room for a nicely designed, simple, and beautiful “dumb phone.” There has to be people out there – maybe even my own mother included – who just need a phone that has a dailer, and maybe text messages if you want to get fancy. So I took this concept, and ran with it. Below are my first mockups of the only three screens I would include in my Simplephone.
Note: The UI is movable – however, I’ve captured it here in it’s native 480 x 480, built for a portrait candybar cellphone.
