Russell Beattie

I've been meaning to post about this for the past couple of weeks. While I was on hiatus in May, I received a nice email from one of my readers named Aaron Howell telling me he missed my posts, but also pointing out a very interesting application that he uses called TALKS. Aaron described himself "a blind Nokia 6600 user using Talks which gives the phone a spoken interface."

Very, very cool! I had never thought about an app like that before!

I think this is a really compelling use of a smart phone, and one that shouldn't be lightly dismissed. Unlike other phones like the cool K700, a mobile phone with an operating system can provide services like this for users who may need special access. I can imagine other applications as well - say blowing up the size of the text for those users who may not be blind, but with visual impairment of some sort. But even just sticking with voice, SMS is suddenly accessible, as is email and WAP pages. In the near future, location services could help the user navigate around town with spoken directions and more - I have no idea what it would be like to visually disabled, but I'm sure there are times when something like that would be quite handy. It's really quite amazing, if you think about it.

Thanks for the heads up Aaron, it confirms again how cool Series 60 and other smart phones really are.

-Russ