Look at your phone – it’s a rectangle with rounded corners, isn’t it? While this has long been established as a popular shape, some people know deep down that there are better, more natural shapes.
Presented at 2016 Monohm Runcible – described as “heirloom smart Pocket device,” which is both a smartphone and not a smartphone. Its round shape is unlikely to escape your attention.
Runcible Babbage•Runcible Lovelace
The Runcible has a circular screen and a smoothly curved back that mimics natural objects such as smooth pebbles. The natural theme is supported by the choice of materials – from ocean-recycled plastic to sustainable wood (Madrone, Black Acacia or Shenk Rosewood). The back is user-swappable, and the company plans to use a variety of materials so you can customize the Runcible to your liking.
for Runcible recycling and Sustained material
This size is small for a mobile phone, but for the emerging smart watch market It’s too big. Instead, it’s described as a “pocket watch,” and with some accessories planned by the design team, you’ll be able to wear it just like you would wear it.
Even going back to 
The Monohm team preaches the importance of digital wellbeing, something that the major mobile phone makers have only recently realized. Runcible is designed to minimize distractions and avoid addictive online networking.
Runcible in its natural habitat – Natural
But it’s also a phone, and you can do what a phone does – make calls through a bluetooth headset (with a rotary dial of course), send and receive text messages, navigate to your destination (again, using circular display to show the compass) and take pictures (circular photos, naturally).
Runcible has some really cool interface ideas. For example, the bezels around the display are also touch-sensitive, and even the case can track your fingers. All of this lets you scroll and swipe without obscuring the screen.
Speaking of which, it’s a 2.5″ screen with 580 X 409px Resolution(105 dpi) and Gorilla Glass 3. It also has capacitive multi-touch, and in fact, it’s billed as the first circular touch display.
Introduced at 1000, the Monohm team moved to IndieGoGo in the mid-term 2015 to finance the production of non-smartphone smartphones. An explanation of what that actually means is an inherent part of what the device is trying to be, and (more importantly) what it has become.
The event ended up raising $ ,052 from695supporter. Here’s the pricing. Note that “Babbage” is a model that uses recycled plastic, “Lovelace” uses Madrone wood, and “Faraday” has a schenker mahogany back.
Okay, now we can talk about smartphones that are not smartphones. Initially, the team wanted to use Firefox OS. It’s very much in line with their mission, as they want the Runcible to be different, and the lack of apps (compared to Android) isn’t such a big deal, since those are digital distractions anyway.
So the team they started looking for a chipset that would run Firefox OS well – and they did. Unfortunately, as the Android Authority reports in 1200, the manufacturer of the chip has a Production of that chip stopped when the project stopped. off the ground. And to make matters worse, Mozilla discontinued Firefox OS at the end of No chipset, no operating system. What should we do now?
Note that this all happened before) crowdfunding campaign, so the team found a approach – although initially avoided, they ended up going with Android. The highly customized version of Android is called “BuniOS”.
BuniOS does not include the Google Play Store because the Android app in it cannot handle circular displays. It can run apps (Monohm has recruited developers to make them), including native APKs and web-based apps. We’re not sure why Wear OS isn’t an option, it supports circular displays natively and there are apps made for such displays.
The problem isn’t the software anyway, building new hardware is hard — especially something as unique as the Runcible. Eventually, hardware makers would handle larger orders, so they put Runcible on the back burner. Monohm tried to secure additional funding, but nothing came of it.
Last update was in 3000 May It states completion How difficult is it for small projects:
Our board manufacturer ordered for us to produce less than 3000 boards and insisted on charging us almost twice what we were quoted per board. The price of making boards is very close to the price of making boards. However, after trying several strategies, we only go by the quote for the 695 motherboard A budget was made and we couldn’t get them to budge.
No news on Runcible since that time, any hardware done on it and Software jobs are now obsolete, even for non-smartphones. As with the original chipset, the parts were discontinued, so they had to be replaced, so the whole device had to be redesigned – not something that can be brought back 7 years later.
What do you think of Runcible? Is a pocket smartwatch/non-smartphone/digital heirloom something you want to own?
PS. If you’re interested, we can continue the circular phone saga with the Cyrcle:
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