Perhaps the only mobile phone review I’d consider essential reading includes “Roland Barthes” among its tags and this choice paragraph:
Each mobile phone handset is not a mere product, perhaps like the other products that have traditionally adorned the pages of this magazine—as a chair is, or a lighting fixture is. Instead, each handset is a play in a wider global contest, a node in logistics networks of immense scale and complexity, a platform for an ecosystem of applications, an exemplar of the internet of things, a window onto the daily interactions of billions of users, of their ever-changing personalities and cultures, a product that consumers traditionally consider the most important in their possession, after the keys to their home.
“Portable Cathedrals” by Dan Hill for Domus
So much of it is quotable that it’s difficult to tease out one singular paragraph around which to blog. Its focus on the nature of mobile-phone-ness is unabating. Hill also admirably keeps the phones aesthetic and technical qualities within scope while forgoing descriptions of the device as technoassemblage (the prevailing editorial voice of Cnet, Gizmodo, Engadget, and even The Verge).
I, for one, am taking notes.
(via Small Surfaces)