Braille via SMS: Samsung's Touch Messenger

by Chris Ziegler, posted Jul 3rd 2006 at 4:11PM

The Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) has just announced their IDEA 2006 awards for excellence in design, and paddle-shaped phones appear to be all the rage this year -- Samsung has been tapped in the "Design Explorations" category with their oddball Touch Messenger device for the blind. Typically, SMS-capable devices for the blind have involved text to speech, which, as IDSA points out, is a bummer for privacy not to mention generally defeating the purpose of text messaging to begin with. No word on production prospects, but IDSA does mention that the Touch Messenger "gives blind users in China an affordable, user-friendly cell phone experience on par with sighted users," so it sounds like we can expect this or a similar device in the pipeline -- at least for China.

[Via Telecoms Korea]

Filed under: Handsets, Samsung

Tags: blind, braille, design explorations, DesignExplorations, idea, samsung, sms, text, touch messenger, TouchMessenger

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Neutral

Stephen Mortensen @ Jul 3rd 2006 4:36PM

I sure hope they're going to have more than two cells though because that's pretty pathetic and useless. also I hope it's a lot tinier than that picture implies because no blind person would like that except old people that are losing the sensitivity in their fingers, and they wouldn't be SMSing anyway :p

Neutral

Josh @ Jul 3rd 2006 5:28PM

im not blind, but this is really cool.

GO Samsung!!!

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