Nokia Medallion

 First of all, the Nokia Medallion’s primary function

is style and self expression. It doesn’t make phone calls or take pictures

or keep track of your schedule. It’s a beautiful futuristic necklace

with a color screen for showing off personalized images. While you’re

wearing it, the backlight fades it’s intensity in and out at random

intervals. You can beam any images you desire to the necklace from an

infrared compatible device such as certain camera phones and PDAs.

  

Since the Medallion I doesn’t really go with any of my outfits, we loaned

this prototype to our fashion maven friend, Paris Hampton, to wear to

the Grammy Awards February 8th (even though she’d be missing a few NYC

Fashion week parties). The necklace garnered much attention as

many people asked what it was.  Even at the after party, our fashion

maven was monopolized by members of Matchbox 20.  I’m not sure

if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but Paris definitely thought

that the integration of technology and fashion design was an exciting

concept. She said that the Medallion was "super cool", and

numerous others seem to share this sentiment.

ATURES

    This choker style necklace is made with

a steel body, plastic, matte rubber, and a steel chain. It’s got

an infrared port which will let you transfer images to or from other

infrared capable devices such as camera phones and personal digital

assistants. The color screen displays 4096 colors and has a square 96

x 96 pixel resolution.  The production version will have a 80 mAh

rechargeable lithium-ion that should last up to 15 hours. I was told

that this prototype did not have nearly as much battery life as the

final version will have. During our tests with this version, the battery

lasted throughout the Grammy awards show and after party, however, the

battery life seems to be reduced drastically if you are beaming images

back and forth via infrared.

   

The Medallion features a number of low-profile buttons on the sides

and top of the device.  The above diagram shows where the buttons

are located along with the infrared port.  Holding down Button

3 for over a second toggles the power on/off state of the device. 

Pressing it briefly once will show an analog-style clock on screen along

with the battery indicator.

    

Pressing Button 1 will toggle the display between the other images stored

in memory, while pressing it briefly will turn the backlight on. Button

2 activates the infrared sending and receiving capabilities of the necklace.

The following

table illustrates the meanings of the icons displayed by the Medallion

when interacting with it’s software.