Clicks Communicator is phone purpose-built for taking action and communicating in a noisy world with deeper context, versatile input and greater control in a compact design.
It’s more common than people realise within the phone industry. The Titan 2 is using old Blackberry Passport displays and the new iKKO Mind One is using a display that is seen on some handheld retro gaming devices. Fairphone has historically used a lot of generic parts too. These smaller companies generally don’t have the money or power to get everything custom designed, and re-using existing parts ensures long-term stock availability.
This is going to sound super generalized and possibly ethnocentric, but that’s not my meaning: buying shit on Amazon since the advent of the non-brand (you know, like ZMDRROI or BRRWE or CLQQIU or whatever) has brought to my ordinary consumer attention how much overlap there is in suppliers overseas. You can buy like, a skin care set, and a cake decorating set, and a nail care set, and a model kit set, and a clay working set of tools and there will be overlapping pokers and curvy pokers and hoopy-doos that appear in every single one. And I put this crude topology together in my head of what must be going on over there, and it’s just like, “I’m a factory that churns out little pokers the way some villages produce nails or bullets from raw metal, and I need to sell to second-level manufacturers and convince them that my poker is a good fit for skin care, cake decoration, nail scraping, Gundam model detailing, and clay art,” and then those second tier manufacturers (if indeed they aren’t the same guys as the first tier) are like, “I’ve got to use these taco bell ingredients to make as many conceptually varied remixes as I can, to cast as wide a net as possible in the marketplace.”
Sorry, had a few drinks, I hope I’m making sense. I know it isn’t really interesting, but I do think it’s kind of interesting. In the pre-Amazon age we just didn’t have much cause to think about generic elements of consumer products. But also, especially in the age of maker stuff, it’s very obvious. I built a little smart typewriter thing, and I bought an eink screen which was prescribed in the design, but that thing was originally marketed for like…digital signage at supermarkets, or whatever, to update prices on the fly.
I dunno. It’s kinda interesting. Kinda cool in a ‘scrappy manufacturers versus the world’ kind of way. At least, I’d rather think of it in those terms versus “cynical companies tricking us into buying the same shit over and over by putting new labels on it” :p
It’s more common than people realise within the phone industry. The Titan 2 is using old Blackberry Passport displays and the new iKKO Mind One is using a display that is seen on some handheld retro gaming devices. Fairphone has historically used a lot of generic parts too. These smaller companies generally don’t have the money or power to get everything custom designed, and re-using existing parts ensures long-term stock availability.
This is going to sound super generalized and possibly ethnocentric, but that’s not my meaning: buying shit on Amazon since the advent of the non-brand (you know, like ZMDRROI or BRRWE or CLQQIU or whatever) has brought to my ordinary consumer attention how much overlap there is in suppliers overseas. You can buy like, a skin care set, and a cake decorating set, and a nail care set, and a model kit set, and a clay working set of tools and there will be overlapping pokers and curvy pokers and hoopy-doos that appear in every single one. And I put this crude topology together in my head of what must be going on over there, and it’s just like, “I’m a factory that churns out little pokers the way some villages produce nails or bullets from raw metal, and I need to sell to second-level manufacturers and convince them that my poker is a good fit for skin care, cake decoration, nail scraping, Gundam model detailing, and clay art,” and then those second tier manufacturers (if indeed they aren’t the same guys as the first tier) are like, “I’ve got to use these taco bell ingredients to make as many conceptually varied remixes as I can, to cast as wide a net as possible in the marketplace.”
Sorry, had a few drinks, I hope I’m making sense. I know it isn’t really interesting, but I do think it’s kind of interesting. In the pre-Amazon age we just didn’t have much cause to think about generic elements of consumer products. But also, especially in the age of maker stuff, it’s very obvious. I built a little smart typewriter thing, and I bought an eink screen which was prescribed in the design, but that thing was originally marketed for like…digital signage at supermarkets, or whatever, to update prices on the fly.
I dunno. It’s kinda interesting. Kinda cool in a ‘scrappy manufacturers versus the world’ kind of way. At least, I’d rather think of it in those terms versus “cynical companies tricking us into buying the same shit over and over by putting new labels on it” :p