Reviews

New Telephone “Made for Storytelling”

I’m behind the times on this one, but in 2007 Nokia put out a telephone that’s designed specifically for storytelling. Imagine that—a telephone designed for storytelling!

They also held a contest in which people submitted 4 photos (that tell a story) made with the telephone. The results are somewhat interesting and you can see them at the N82 Storytelling website. But that isn’t what fascinates me about this whole thing.

What I find most interesting is that Nokia put out a phone and marketed it as a “storytelling phone” as opposed to a regular camera phone. Cell phones have only been in our hands for the past ten-to-fifteen years and some people are complaining that the iPhone is lacking in features. Does it have web access? Video? Can it play Mp3s? Soon we won’t need laptops.

The technology seems to move faster than we know what to do with it. When film became cheap enough for every household to own a camera, there was a full life-time to learn how to use the thing and turn film photography into an art. Now that stuff is digital the tools matter less and less.

So Nokia sells a phone that can do what every other phone does, but they market it with a storytelling slant and then try to get people to do some amazing storytelling which they can capture and feature on their website. Problem is, the spotlight is on.

The real-life stories that get told naturally on Nokia phones are far more interesting (and mundane) than anything that gets sent in for a contest. If Nokia sold a “voyeur phone,” that would be interesting. That is, you could listen in on someone else’s conversation similar to party lines of the past.

If a company wants people to create stories with their tools, their tools can’t be run-of-the-mill. This phone, while it might be reliable or whatever, is still not doing anything that another comparable phone can do. Nokia labeled it “storytelling phone” and yet we all know that we aren’t going to use the phone for anything else.

Sell us a phone that also measures our bioelectric energy and tells us what nutrients we’re lacking so we can eat a balanced diet. Sell us a phone that can tell us where to find the best deal on the item we’re shopping for. Sell us a telephone that connects to China for free. Sell us a phone that does something no other phone can do. Then hold a storytelling contest and watch the entries come rolling in!