Are rotary dial phones the future?

The Gadget Show  Friday 22 October 2010

Dial back to the future with the Samsung Jot

Go on, admit it: secretly you miss the tactile satisfaction of those old-school rotary dial phones from years gone by. And even if you’re not, Samsung clearly is.

After all, why else would you develop a concept product – visually interpreted by designer Raymond Bessemer in a choice of five colours – with clearly just one overriding goal in mind – to find a way of fitting a rotary dial on a modern smartphone.

And the Samsung Jot concept somehow manages to pull its primary mandate off with a fair bit of style, too, with the dialling ring protruding off the top of the device like an oversized keyring.

When you’re not twiddling away the dial just because it’s there, there’s also a capacitive OLED display to keep you occupied, along with a removable stylus. Samsung says the Jot is designed for the year 2015, by which time hopefully it will have come up with a few more features for us to talk about.