Will iPhone Alternatives Hit the Market Soon?

I've written about the MyOrigo Mydevice a couple of times in the past: It was a unique and fascinating cell phone, released in late 2003, by a Finnish company trying to make inroads into the marketplace. But the Mydevice, despite great reviews, never took off. It never found an audience nor did any carrier sell an "official," subsidized version of the device, which is crucial for the long-term survival of a cell phone hardware company. MyOrigo closed up shop in 2004 and vanished from the planet... or so I thought.

Last week I heard from a company called F-Origin. Based in the U.S., F-Origin purchased the assets of MyOrigo and has been quietly poking around to finally bring MyOrigo's technologies to market. Their plan: License the technology to other manufacturers who are better able to integrate it into their existing and upcoming hardware products.

Why would a company want to do this? Put simply, because F-Origin's technology would let just about anyone produce a sophisticated Apple iPhone competitor in short order. MobileBurn's extensive review of the origin Mydevice is essential reading if you'd like to see how the technology works, but F-Origin dropped off a couple of handsets for me to play with that raise the stakes a bit.

First was an original Mydevice, unchanged from its 2003 incarnation. If not for its sizable thickness and outdated camera, the Mydevice would still be a standout cell phone if it was released today. All the features are still impressive: The screen automatically reorients between portrait and landscape based on how you hold the device (just like Jobs demonstrated a few weeks ago with the iPhone). When viewing photos you can hold a single button to pan around within the photo by simply tilting the device, an amazing effect.

And of course, there are no buttons aside from a power switch. The entire face of the phone is a touchscreen. Underneath the screen there's a small haptics vibration system. When you push a button, the unit buzzes, letting you know your key press has registered, an essential way of dealing with the loss of tactile feedback through removing the buttons. Since a lot of this is hard to explain, I made a quick video of the Mydevice in use. The quality isn't as good as I'd like, but it should give you an idea of what the Mydevice is really like in use.

Cool stuff, but F-Origin also showed me a quick and dirty hack of what the Mydevice can be capable of. On the second phone, F-Origin had whipped up a version of the iPod interface, complete with working click wheel and familiar data screen. Turn the phone on its side and it takes you to a widescreen video player (while the music continues to play). Nothing insane, really, but it does show you that Apple doesn't have a monopoly on interesting user interfaces. Here's a video of the "fPodder" interface on a Mydevice phone.

F-Origin says that, since the iPhone was announced, its discussions with a variety of cell phone manufacturers have become quite a bit more heated and urgent, and the company is hopeful that we'll see this technology in products before the end of the year... and possibly before even Apple gets to market itself. Naturally, a 2007 phone from Motorola or Samsung with this technology built in would look far different than the 2003 Mydevice... but what should we expect in the end? Watch this space for details.

Also, here's a Flickr gallery of screenshots of both MyOrigo devices.