Another day, another mobile phone company claims it’s going to revolutionise the industry. This time it’s the turn of UK company IA Technologies. Their handset the Zumbaphone’s USP is that it is fully voice activated. And if we’re to believe their claims is the most accurate voice recognition system yet created. Owners will be able to speak texts into the phone and have messages they receive read back at them.
And if that wasn’t innovation enough for one day, the Zumbaphone is apparently also the world’s first ‘back-up replacement mobile”. This means that instead of information being stored on internal memory, instead it is kept on a remote server. Thus should the phone ever get purloined by sticky-fingered imps, all your gen is safe.
Top marks for innovation, IA Technology. And doubly so making said device look so brilliantly otherworldly. Unfortunately, it’s hard to see the Zumbaphone being anything other than a niche product. One obvious market is dyslexic phone users, who’ll appreciate being freed of the tyrannies of spelling. But apart from that minority, who else was crying for a fully voice-activated phone. In fact, voice-activated services seem to be one of the least used functions on phones, so basing a handset entirely on this seems something of a folly. Ultimately, the Zumbaphone looks like joining the lineage of Great British Tech failures like the Sinclair C5 or Colin Pilger’s ill-fated intergalactic lunar mission. It’s a tradition that I for one am inversely hugely proud of.
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