Well given Apple’s track record in its short time in the mobile business so far, you wouldn’t bet on it. Nonetheless, I’ve just sat through a very impressive demo of the ‘First ELSE’ handset from Israeli firm ELSE, part of the Emblaze group.
The Linux-based handset is due to go on sale in the second or third quarter of 2010, and according to ELSE CEO, Amir Kupervas, offers “a new level of usability – maximum usability”.
The company says its approach has been to make the device application-centric rather than phone-centric. In its vision, the phone part of the phone is just another application, alongside messaging, media playback and everything else.
One of the key features of the phone is one-finger, or to be accurate, one-thumb operation. During the demo, one of Kupervas’s colleagues showed how the thumb could be used to select items, zoom in and out of photos, and navigate a small onscreen soft QWERTY keyboard, thanks to text prediction and a magnify function that enables the selection of single characters.
There were other neat-looking features too, such as the ability to find out if a call coming through to you while you are in a meeting is urgent, by sending a preset return message asking the caller to hit one key if it is urgent and another if it isn’t.
There’s also the option of creating your own shortcuts by drawing a letter on the screen with your thumb. So in the demo, a scrawled ‘A’ opened a new text message and a ‘B’ brought up a ‘Reminder’ prompt screen. I wonder if ELSE was inadvertently paying homage to Apple as this reminded me of the Graffiti text entry system on the long-gone Newton PDA.
The climax of the presentation, though, was a demo of the sPLAY user interface. From an initial homescreen displaying three items – Phone, Diary, Media – resting the thumb on any one of them brings up the sub-menu relating to each one. Within each sub-menu, a slight move of the thumb to the left opens up the next level of sub-sub-menus for that particular item. Apple’s carousel user interface has been much-mimicked. I suspect this one will be too. And overall, the device looks like being a welcome addition to the Smartphone ranks.

David Murphy
Editor