Seen in Tel Aviv:

Here’s the current leader in my files for Worst Exterior Elevator Signage. How long does it take for you to figure out how to get to the office you are visiting?

The irony is that there is a very good user interface design company here… I guess the building management didn’t hire them.

Seen at John F. Kennedy Airport, New York:

I collect elevator interfaces (especially bad ones), but this elevator at JFK wins the international prize for most confusing interior elevator buttons.

Jan asks:

Other ways that people tweak time? The relatively common practice of trying to ‘buy time’ by setting one’s watch or alarm clock a few minutes ahead of the actual time; inter-city drivers trying to talk up the time it takes to travel between two points to talk up an all inclusive fare; setting meeting’s ahead of time to account for late arriver’s.

In real life, our office tweaks time by just trying to keep it from jumping unpredictably.

When I travel (monthly), I do not adjust my computer or my cell phone clocks to the new time zone, nor do I allow my devices to automatically update their time settings from the network. If I do, all of my appointments will be out of whack.

When I enter an event into my calendar, I’m usually in Israel (GMT +2). The meeting is at 9.00am? I enter it for 9.00am on my calendar. When I get to Japan (GMT +9), my 9.00am meeting doesn’t show up until 6.00pm… hard to explain to the person you’ve come thousands of miles to meet. So the times stay set on Israeli time, and my friends and family are left to puzzle as best as they can at the oddball hours at which they are hearing from me. (Or not. In the midst of jet lag or work overload, my communication times appear to be perfectly normal when viewed from many timezones away.)

Why not set the appointment for the appropriate time zone in the first place? I’m sure many programs support that feature (as far as I can tell, iCal for Macintosh does not support timezone definitions for events on an event-by-event basis, although that’s hard to believe). But who has time to mess around and find out if the Macintosh solution matches my Nokia phone, or my Blackberry? If something in that loop doesn’t work, and the “synchronization” process ends up unsynchronizing my life… I’m in deep trouble.

Seen in Jerusalem this week:

[That’s Teddy Kollek wearing the black hat.] 

If operator hardware sales behavior started to threaten a device manufacturer’s own revenue stream, would the manufacturer continue to be cautious about not offending carrier sensibilities? Or would they throw the first punch by offering service themselves?

It’s not so farfetched, is it?

Related and perhaps illuminating business cases:

• Helio / SK Telecom
• Vertu / Nokia / Ovi / Nokia-Siemens Network
• iPhone / iTouch / iTunes /.Mac
• Google / Android / YouTube / Flickr

The Nintendo Wii launched in 2006. Today, at the gateway to 2008, it is still in short supply.

Consider that consumers get bored with devices really quickly. Consider that people are always looking for the next thing. Now consider a little statistical anecdote:

DVICE is asking readers to vote for “the best gadget of 2007″, as part of a sweepstakes. What appears on that list? Wii — a 2006 product. Which device (at the time of this writing) had the most votes for coolest? Wii — outscoring even the iPhone.

It’s a stunning testament to the resonance of the product.

Some useful [?] terms, if you’re visiting Israel:

kochavit: lit.: little star; the asterisk/star key

sulamit: lit.: little ladder; the pound key

shtrudel: lit.: pastry roll; the @ symbol

jemsbond: lit.: James Bond; colloquially, an attache case

Have you got some favorite examples? I’d love to see them in the Comments!

I remember the kids in my first-grade class talking about what the star and pound keys were for: automatic redial. It sounded so wonderfully futuristic!

And when the telephone switching system in our area was upgraded (when I was in seventh grade), it took some time to get used to the instant connection created by the touch-tone dial. Previously, you dialled (even with push-buttons) and heard clicking rotary sounds, followed by a pause of two seconds while the connection was found and created. With the new system, the phone on the other end started ringing as soon as you pushed the seventh digit (sometimes the phone was picked up even before the caller heard a ring tone!). It was unsettling to lose the brief pause during which we had been accustomed to mentally preparing ourselves to greet the other party.

Seven digits… those were the days before the Los Angeles area was divided up into 213, 818, 323 and 310 area codes. Now, dialling an area code is mandatory, even when the number being called is in your same code.

They say that fashions always come back around. Thin ties, thick ties; hemlines up, hemlines down; thick-frame glasses, thin-frame glasses. So why shouldn’t old product designs cycle back around, too?

Phil Baker already pointed out the Centro/Speak-and-Spell similarity. Here’s another for the files:

Gesturetek’s GestPoint (2007), left, and Motorola’s original “Brick” cellular phone (1983)

I just asked: “So why shouldn’t old product designs cycle back around, too?” I think I’ve just answered that question.

(An excellent retrospective on cell phone design, including the brick, appears here.)

Oh, boy! Just what I’ve always wanted… a joystick hack for my beloved USB Missile Launcher. Every girl’s dream.

[via Hacked Gadgets]