Monday, April 22, 2013

Nokia Medallion


 First of all, the Nokia Medallion’s primary function
is style and self expression. It doesn’t make phone calls or take pictures
or keep track of your schedule. It’s a beautiful futuristic necklace
with a color screen for showing off personalized images. While you’re
wearing it, the backlight fades it’s intensity in and out at random
intervals. You can beam any images you desire to the necklace from an
infrared compatible device such as certain camera phones and PDAs.

  
Since the Medallion I doesn’t really go with any of my outfits, we loaned
this prototype to our fashion maven friend, Paris Hampton, to wear to
the Grammy Awards February 8th (even though she’d be missing a few NYC
Fashion week parties). The necklace garnered much attention as
many people asked what it was.  Even at the after party, our fashion
maven was monopolized by members of Matchbox 20.  I’m not sure
if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but Paris definitely thought
that the integration of technology and fashion design was an exciting
concept. She said that the Medallion was "super cool", and
numerous others seem to share this sentiment.


ATURES
    This choker style necklace is made with
a steel body, plastic, matte rubber, and a steel chain. It’s got
an infrared port which will let you transfer images to or from other
infrared capable devices such as camera phones and personal digital
assistants. The color screen displays 4096 colors and has a square 96
x 96 pixel resolution.  The production version will have a 80 mAh
rechargeable lithium-ion that should last up to 15 hours. I was told
that this prototype did not have nearly as much battery life as the
final version will have. During our tests with this version, the battery
lasted throughout the Grammy awards show and after party, however, the
battery life seems to be reduced drastically if you are beaming images
back and forth via infrared.

   
The Medallion features a number of low-profile buttons on the sides
and top of the device.  The above diagram shows where the buttons
are located along with the infrared port.  Holding down Button
3 for over a second toggles the power on/off state of the device. 
Pressing it briefly once will show an analog-style clock on screen along
with the battery indicator.


    
Pressing Button 1 will toggle the display between the other images stored
in memory, while pressing it briefly will turn the backlight on. Button
2 activates the infrared sending and receiving capabilities of the necklace.


The following
table illustrates the meanings of the icons displayed by the Medallion
when interacting with it’s software.


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