Sonar hopes to power social featurephones, we get a demo
By Chris Ziegler 
posted Feb 19th 2009 1:59PM
posted Feb 19th 2009 1:59PM
If startup Sonar has its way, that's where its new platform comes in. The idea was to fundamentally rethink the way average consumers -- you know, the ones who are plugged into three, four, or fourteen social networks and don't know a G1 from a P1i -- use a phone to communicate, and they're ready to show off their efforts for the first time here at MWC. We had an opportunity to sit down with Sonar's founders this week for a tour of the system, and we're pretty stoked about what we saw. Read on.
Behind the scenes, there's a boatload of magic keeping everything humming along, but on the front end, the user's presented with a ridiculously simple phone interface paired with a web portal accessed by any computer. From the portal, you configure the email accounts and social networks you're using, the Sonar apps (they call them widgets) you want on your phone, your contacts, your photos, and device settings like ringtones (in a production environment, the portal would likely be carrier- or manufacturer-branded, but for now, it's simply Sonar).
Sonar takes care of reconciling contacts and photos from all of your social networks and presenting them as a unified contact list, and that's the "oh, I get it" moment -- you can almost think of it as Palm's Synergy for dumbphones (in fact, Sonar has a ton of respect for what Palm's doing right now). You can manage and see statuses from Facebook, see latest tweets, populate your contact's caller ID photos automagically, send emails to addresses that have been added for you, and more. The phone's interface is optimized to allow easy access to all of this using a d-pad like you'd find on a lower-end device, and it works really well: dedicated Calls, Contacts, and Messages icons along the bottom of the screen can either be pulled up in half-height (so the home screen's still visible) or full-height modes depending on the button you press, and everything else gets shuffled into the Widgets icon on the far right. As the company explains, the kinds of customers they're targeting are spending the overwhelming majority of their phone time communicating with friends and keeping tabs on their updates through a jungle of social networks, so Sonar breaks them out.
Sonar seems to have a good pulse on the kinds of users it's going after, and the widgets they've implemented thus far clearly reflect that -- besides basics like weather and news, they also have Twitter, Wikipedia, and mapping widgets ready to go. The system supports location-based services, and it also allows widgets to write information directly to their display names (so, for example, you might see "73 Cloudy" in place of "Weather") and to the home screen.
Much of Sonar's development has revolved around its push infrastructure, which is wicked fast. Seriously -- if you update a contact from your portal, a friend's Facebook status changes, you add a widget, or reskin the interface (did we mention it has comprehensive support for themes?), the phone updates in a matter of seconds, all allegedly without much impact on battery life. The ability for users to add apps with this drop-dead simplicity and speed is a big win, and naturally, they can be removed just as easily.
Betting on Google's success, the company has chosen to develop its technology on top of Android but says that it could easily be adapted to Symbian or just about any other platform a manufacturer or carrier desires in just a few weeks' time. That explains why they're demoing on a G1 -- it's just about the only Android phone readily available at the moment -- but a commercial deployment would likely be on a phone designed with Sonar's basic specifications in mind: four-way directional pad, back and OK buttons, a numeric keypad, and that's it. Simplicity reigns supreme here.
Sonar says that it's hoping to have a live, commercially available system deployed about this time next year, though the carriers and manufacturers involved are anybody's guess -- and given what we've seen, we'd be pretty shocked if it didn't get picked up by a few players. The bottom line is that we loved what we saw, and while it may not be for us or the typical Engadget reader, we can totally see this in the hands of someone who values... you know, actual humans over technology. (Imagine that.)
like the dark knight?
"" -- most people don't know the model of their own phone, after all, and have no interest in learning how to download and install an app, let alone learn an entire mobile operating system. ""
Imagine that ........ Using a phone to make a call, or recieving one.
That will never catch on.
You're mad, MAD I tell you!
looks cool
I appreciate their work so much because i also think that the very large portion of (almost everyone around) mobile phone buyers don't interested in downloading new apps to their phones even don't know where its calculator is. So it's only a trend why iphone is sold that so much. The problem is, how to start a trend that hit all over the world? Sonar's work is a great start which can be adapted both linux based devices (when google's phones would commonly be used by "GOOGLE" trend") and nokia can also pay for it to use it on their symbian. Every passing year people become lazier and lazier... (well me too of course) so these automatic transfers and updates should be existed in future world.
i want it to power my latop!
i wonder if anyone read this and actually looked up a p1i because they didnt get it. i liked that little tid bit
Hehe, I was about to come in and say how stoked I was to see the P1i mentioned :P
Brilliant phone. I miss you UIQ :(
Here's hoping Symbian Foundation does you justice!
somebody needs to give this dude a LOT of money.
Very nice demo and tech, but the business model is flawed.
I expect an acquisition of Sonar from one of the big guys in the future.
I hope it does get acquired if that's what it will take to take this product to market. While I enjoy the Swiss Army knife-like approach to smartphones, I really don't want to be carrying one after business hours. In addition, I see the word "beautiful" used in this article. If it's as pretty as Engadget claims it to be, consider me a future user.
Looks cool! Feature-wise, maybe the Sonar will give the iPhone and Blackberry Storm a run for their money. Unfortunately, I'm a little iffy about using T-Mobile's network.
Ooooh, this Sonar promises to be pretty nifty. I'm a very happy user of the iPhone, but my main frustration with it -- other than AT&T's dropped calls -- is the iffy push technology and the inability to cobble all those contacts spread across different social networks. (There are apps, for sure, but with varying degrees of success, and they're not very successful at all.) That web portal looks quite nice, and I'm a fan of simple interfaces as well.
(And yes, I had to Google "P1i".)
Does anyone who are behind them? The founders and possible VCs?
/gordini
The promise of a simpler UI to pull together ever more complex networks and data sources is appealing. Using a web-based interface to perform tasks too difficult on a phone is a stroke of--well, not quite genius, but certainly an unexpected insight. It already demos very well two of the things I use most: Gmail and Facebook. If it delivers in final form what it promises in the video, I'll put my future purchase of Nokia N97 on hold and place my money towards whichever phone (provided it's on GSM network) uses this platform/OS/UI.
This interface looks like a work of art. My wife's Verizon phone requires about 75 trial and error moves to find out how to do anything you want. The web control and ultra concise and simple but elegant interface is much needed. The carrier neutrality looks huge too, considering AT&T is a piece of trash that doesn't work (I use them and get a dropped call at least daily). Get this thing to market ASAP!
So many smartphones, so little money :)