Mobile phones have now been around us for a while, yet in 2005 it is still impossible for my grandparents to own one. It’s not that they live in a lost place without coverage or that they cannot afford it, there are just no phones simple enough for them. Worse, I don’t know any phone that gets even close to it. At their age, over 80, they are not going to learn new tricks, so it just has to work like a plain old phone.

Think at it, even requiring entering a PIN code is too complicated. Let’s even don’t think at sending text messages. Even I have some tough times with the predictive text input of my Siemens S65 (it gets very unintuitive when entering a word not in the dictionary).

But here is some home and maybe someone at Vodafone has finally visited again his grandparents, because apparently they are going to launch a phone called Vodafone Simply targeted at older people.

And yet I think they are not there yet. The phone will apparently support receiving and sending text messages, which means having a screen and probably already too many buttons. As someone commented on Engadget post:

Press Dial, get a tone, enter the numbers and wait for the ringing. Just like Alexander Bell intended. It also needs a big simple cradle charger, so it can be left on the hall table to charge, without fiddling with little plugs and wall warts.

I would get such a phone for my grandparents. In France, the national operator France Telecom charges about 15 Euros (it has been raising lately) just for having a fixed phone line. For 15 Euros, an operator could offer a monthly plan with some minutes and make some money.

Update: Here is a picture of it:

This entry was posted on Friday, May 20th, 2005 at 10:44 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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