Some devices defy logic. Others seem to have been pulled from a low-budget science fiction movie. And then there are those designs that (probably) were inspired by Homer's car. The Telson TWC-1150 manages to be and do all of this at once. This 'phone' dates back to 2004, which presents several problems when it comes to finding original information and high-definition images, but one thing is for sure: fortunately, the mobile phone world decided not to go in that direction.
Without repeating and without cheating, mention all the mobile phones that failed in the market that you can remember. First of all, I think it's hard to forget the Nokia N-Gage. The Finnish manufacturer had come to the conclusion that it was a good idea to merge a mobile phone with a portable games console, but the problem is they did it very badly.
Then there's the case of the Microsoft Kin. After two years of development and a billion dollars later, the "super social phone" from Redmond lived barely 48 days, and ended up being liquidated with massive discounts. The Palm Pre and Pixi phones weren't extraordinary either, Amazon had a horrible time with its Fire Phone, and returning to Microsoft, let's say they didn't hesitate to sacrifice their Lumia line, after talking about "burning platforms" and other strange metaphors. However, history teaches us that the market offered worse phones than those. One of them was the Telson TWC-1150.
Telson TWC-1150: Horror Made Into a Watch
I must apologize for the scarcity of high-definition images. The Telson TWC-1150 began making its rounds in 2004, and that means most of what I found so far is "stamp-sized". Apparently, this was not Telson's first hybrid model.
An old Polish article from 2003 talks about the Telson F88 with a 256-color screen and 300,000 pixels, 120 minutes of battery autonomy, voice recognition and recording, and a camera that attaches on top as a secondary module. The Telson TWC-1150 followed a similar line, including infrared transmission, an LCD screen "with sapphire crystal", video calls, a ring-microphone, wireless earphones, and support for RUIM cards, which extend the advantages of the GSM platform to CDMA networks. Sending messages was not very comfortable because of its keyboard, and if we think about it for a moment, some organizers did it better.
The only companies that apparently made a greater effort to distribute the Telson TWC-1150 were CEC in China and Reliance in India, but at $350, the future wrist-phone-camera that never came stayed floating in the water, dead. Maybe part of the market wants a wrist phone (after all, some turned watches into televisions and compact computers)… just not like that.
