Why this phone could be the shape of things to come （570words）

By Jonathan Margolis

Aubrey Anderson's offices are only 20 minutes' drive from San Francisco's Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, where Tim Cook unveiled the iPhone 7 last week. But both Mr Anderson's company, Monohm, and its first product might as well be 20 light years away.

The Runcible phone, which cost $1.2m to develop, an amount raised mostly through crowdfunding, takes the form of a 7.5cm diameter disc. It is Android-operated, but with a lot of customisation of the software.

The phone looks a little like a pocket watch, and it comes with interchangeable backs. Current options include black plastic made from discarded bottles fished out of the Pacific and sustainably harvested madrone wood from Mendocino County, California. Coming soon: non-poached, wind-fallen Koa wood from Hawaii and shed horn from Ankole cows in Uganda.

“Our first design principle is to focus on humanistic, emotional aspects and see if we can make an electronic [sic] that … follows a form with which humans have had a longer relationship — and can potentially develop a still longer relationship,” says Mr Anderson, about his unorthodox smartphone, which will be available in the US next month.

His point, that humans knew circles from the natural world before the invention of the rectangle, is valid — but it would still be easy to dismiss the Runcible as wilful gimmickry. Yet looking at the $399 Babbage and the $499 Lovelace models as I interview him via Skype, I cannot help thinking that they may conceivably be the shape of things to come.

One thing is certain: we will still have mobile communication devices in the future. But it is also clear that the wearable phone is a flop. I got that loud and clear the day I wore an Apple Watch for the first time and, as I was walking through a quiet park in London, a call came through on my wrist.

I took it, Dick Tracy-style, in sight of a homeless man. He looked at me with a loathing that could pierce armour and I realised how idiotic I looked. In effect, he was an analyst, because the global market for devices that make you look like an idiot has proved limited (remember Google Glass).

If I had taken the call on a Runcible, and was talking just to the microphone on my headphone lead, it may not have excited the man's ire.

On the other hand, I remember making my first mobile phone call with a Motorola “brick” outside Preston railway station in northern England in the late 1980s and gathering a small crowd. In that case, however, the mood of the meeting was more wonder than hatred. One teenage girl explained to her mate: “It's a Yuppie.”

Handheld mobile phones did eventually catch on. But as Mr Anderson says: “Square screens are just cheap and easy to make, and that's the only reason we're beset with rectangles.”

I had never thought about it that way. We look at the world through round windows — our field of vision is circular. Watches are round. TVs were originally. So why — other than for the convenience of manufacturers and the lower cost to consumers of mass production — should phones be rectangular? I wrote back in April about the almost desperate search for innovation in mobiles, but nobody then was proposing a different shape.

Perhaps this radical new disc design could be the breakthrough to what Monohm calls “The third age of electronics”.

請根據你所讀到的文章內容，完成以下自測題目：

1．what about the shape of the Runcible phone?

A．rectangle

B．square

C．rhombic

D．circular

答案

2．Which country's people can buy the Runcible phone next month?

A．Britain

B．America

C．Africa

D．China

答案

3．What is a flop in the writer's opinion?

A．the wearable phone

B．interchangeable backs

C．Runcible phone

D．the pocket watch

答案

4．Which one is not right for the Runcible phone?

A．square screens are easy to make

B．square screens are cheaper than circular ones

C．the phones' backs are interchangeable

D．It is Android-operated

答案