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I love the transparent body.
All sorts of products are still made with that 90s translucent plastic aesthetic... for the prison market, because they're difficult to hide contraband inside. They're usually not sold outside of prison supply chains but surplus transparent TVs, laptops, etc sometimes show up on eBay.

The manufacturers are missing out by not dressing their prison tech up with 90s nostalgia marketing and selling it on Amazon.

Ah. So you can keep your phone while in the drunk tank.
Too bad my favorite local pub requires a smartphone to look at the beer list :_)
It's your favorite pub, but you don't know what you like to order yet? :-P
Some of us like variety.
Isn't that what bartender recommendations are for? (assuming it's not super busy)
They have around 30 different draft beers, and they rotate every month.
QR codes were a "contactless" covid era thing. I ask for a paper menu now.
That's how they got popular, but there are definitely local restaurants that are enjoying not having to print/maintain physical menus.
I just love ordering off the web beer list and then being told, "Sorry, we're out".
Probably enjoy the ease at which they can raise prices even more.
When there's somebody to ask. Sometimes it's nice to just walk up to an open table and order stuff directly to that table. I can meet the server when they show up with my drink.
They have it for food, but not for beer. They have a large variety and they change the selection often (that's why I like the pub). I would really prefer a physical menu, but I understand them to an extent.
Sad that they don't have a crappy printer somewhere in the back to do small runs of cheap paper menus. That's what the pubs around me do, at least.
Point at the tap
Do they not have a large chalkboard on the wall for daily specials and the beer rotation? Here in Maine it's normal to just stare at a giant list of available beers

Granted, we have an insane microbrew industry for some reason, so the wall is 37 garbage IPAs that all taste like a burnt eraser and 1 sour if you are lucky.

Nearly every pub/bar here has an entire wall display dedicated to which beers are available. They vary from the chalkboard to brass plaques!

I have seen it in many places but not in this one specifically. Always nice to see one!
Can someone tell me what it's showing? It won't let me enter, even if I turn off my VPN.
For some bizarre reason, Heineken is releasing an old-fashioned flip phone with a transparent case. Looks like it has texts, calling, and that's it.
I accidentally entered my birth year as 79xx, instead of 19xx, and it blocked me from reading the article. So that's cool.
People not yet born are too young.
People not yet born should cause a form validation error instead of the site using future data that is obviously wrong.
01/01/0001 didn’t work either. 01/01/1900 did.
I entered 1/1/<year> instead of 01/01/<year> and it wouldn't enable the ENTER button. So that's the stupidest UI I've seen today.
>I accidentally entered my birth year as 79xx, instead of 19xx, and it blocked me from reading the article. So that's cool.

I'm sorry, people from the future aren't cool enough to know about this phone.

Heineken seems to have created a concept phone that is a translucent flip-phone similar to what you would use circa 2007. Seems like it introduced typical t9 styled typing with a camera.

It’s unclear to me why a beer company paired up with a fashion company to make a smartphone, but the site doesn’t really explain much. I didn’t see a price, release date or specs. The site is behind an age wall and additionally an e-mail wall to receive any useful info. Overall, terrible execution on the marketing front IMO

The age gate is because it's hosted on heineken.com. boringphone.com is a different project with a similar concept.
why in the everloving hell do age gates make you enter an exact birthdate rather than a simple yes/no button.
Because you store that as well for "data science".
if a data scientist thinks that data is even remotely accurate they should not be a data scientist.
I'd be curious to see how the distribution compares between birth records and agegates.

I expect an oversaturation of dates like 1/1/80. Hell, I guess we can use 9/9/99 now too.

I seem to recall Steam publishing something like that a while back. A huge fraction of their user base was born on January 1st ;)
That may at least partially be because the year is the only part of the birth date you enter that's saved for the next time Steam shows you an age gate. I've tried to change it back to the correct month and day a few times over the years, but next time it will default back to year-01-01.
Drinking more Heineken and looking good while doing it are facilitated by a phone that encourages you to live in the moment.

Any businesses that succeed primarily because of direct social engagement would benefit from this, and given what seems like a growing sentiment among many overly-connected people that “I just wish I could go back to a feature phone”, it makes a lot of sense to me that we’d see investment in this space from the alcohol/fashion industries. If they’re thinking ahead, they’d be eager to address the growing desire for re-establishing IRL social structures and finding a way to unplug from this presently toxic iteration of social media.

The existing tech industry is not incentivized to actually create products like this. It’s intriguing to me that there’s big money interested in making this happen.

All other things aside, if a bunch of articles get written about the phone, a lot of people think of Heineken ;-). I'm far from a marketing expert, but I have definitely seen less effective marketing campaigns.
Why does Red Bull build race cars with Oracle?

Mostly beacuse someone at the company thought it would be fun and it's someone else's money they are spending.

The main question- does it have snake or not :)
One of the photos shows it does, woohoo
It's quite obvious Heineken is not a company that makes phones nor does it plan to become one.

The goal of this was accomplished the moment it was posted here and we are talking about it, as many other millions around the world are.

Great execution on the marketing front, they only had to put together a landing page and some prototype renders, they are even gathering a bunch of emails for free!

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I feel like this would be fun... if all of my friends used it too and it didn't feel like a "thing".
late April fools?
I wish apps and phones were more customisable so I could get rid of all the crap I don't want.

I very much vibe with this life and the idea behind the phone, however it still just isn't practice, I still want to have a great camera in my pocket. I still need maps sometimes or one or two apps.

Customizing apps needs a jailbreak but as for the phone itself

> Currently, there are 11 apps on the iPhone that you can’t delete. These apps are essential to the iPhone and deleting them could cause problems. However, you can still hide apps from the Home Screen.

The apps that your can’t delete are:

App Store Camera Clock Find My Health Messages Phone Photos Safari Settings Wallet

> Transparent body makes even a Boring Phone interesting.

You already screwed it up! How did you screw it up so fast?

I honestly can't remember if I spent any less time on my flip phone over a decade ago. I sent a lot of texts with it, used computer for social networking sites, email, etc., used iPod for music, used a digital camera for photos. Now you just get all of them in one smartphone. Add them together, it's probably about the same tbh... with less "device transition time" I suppose.
The difference for me (two decades ago) was presence in social moments.

Texts, with an ugly interface, are inherently less "sticky" in terms of attention than modern apps/notifications.

You still had people texting at parties, but phones generally stayed in pockets more, because they were... boring!

I would spend less time using a flip phone because I could type much faster. >smile<

T9 w/ physical buttons is so much nicer than a touch screen keyboard. I can also type w/o looking at the phone. I sent so many texts one-handed w/ my Nokia 1100 back in the early 2000s.

Here's a radical idea: cultivate some self-discipline when it comes to smartphone use.

Mine is a glorified iPod. I don't know where it is half the time.

Addiction is not a moral failure. Your experiences may not translate to others.
I don't think he was suggesting it's a moral failure, but I'd agree if he meant (and I think he did) that it's a personal failure. This idea that nothing is anybody's fault any more and nobody is to blame, logically leads to nobody being responsible, even for themselves.
It depends on of you care about outcomes or blame. It’s easy to say “you use your phone more than me, you should just use it less” which is completely ineffective at anything except making the person feel inadequate and hopeless.

Suggesting how to use a phone less would be far more constructive but also more difficult because it requires engagement rather than drive by commenting.

Telling someone “you should be more responsible” is an ineffective way to get them to act responsibly.

After becoming reliant on apps - for banking, for 2fa, for checking opening hours, navigation, public transport, etc - I doubt I could use a simpler phone today. I do still like the idea.
Fair, but this seems like tail wagging the dog.

Wouldn't the more logical approach be to expose these services (even in parallel!) in simpler form that could be interacted with in text form?

For all the apps you mentioned, I don't think of a fundamental UX reason they couldn't be.

They could be but it’s just as likely as html only web (most popular platforms require js / apps / tech used by the majority).
How do you even use 2fa from the phone, are you really eyeballing it and typing it in on the keyboard? My password manager does that (took me forever to realize it), so I've de-2-factored my stuff and I can log in directly with my laptop.
I press “ok” in a dedicated authenticator app required by a provider. It’s still annoying.
Like, that app is the only one you're allowed to use? Because it seems like most or all password manager apps provide the functionality.
Useful for people who primarily use their phone for phone calls.
Looks like marketing fluff with no specs, but I will be impressed if they actually figure out how to build a 4G LTE flip phone with a monochrome LCD.

Are there any monochrome LCD phones that work on a modern cell network?

How is this site maintaining state? It's age restricted, so if you enter an age less than 21 or 18 years or something, it'll block you and continue blocking you even if you clear cookies, cache, history, offline website data, and literally everything that Firefox allows you to clear. Interestingly, however, it'll let you try again if you quit and restart the browser.
First guess, based on IP with a short time limit
It's not it. I tested it. Waiting several minutes after clearing everything in Firefox doesn't make it forget. But shutting down the browser and restarting allows you to try again.
It fingerprinted you based on <canvas> profiling. Your browser updated during the restart. (Hope I'm wrong)
What about another browser or a private window?