Flashback: the phones that weren’t, part 5: rectangles are bad
Look at your phone – it’s a rectangle with rounded corners, right? Although this was early established as the predominant form, there were those who knew in their hearts that there were better, more natural forms.
In 2015, Monohm introduced the Runcible – described as a “legacy smart pocket device”, it was also a smartphone, not a smartphone. And its circular shape could not escape your attention.
Runcible Babbage • Runcible Lovelace
The Runcible had a round screen and a smoothly curved back, mimicking natural objects like a smooth pebble. The theme of nature is supported by the choice of materials – from plastic obtained from the ocean to sustainable wood (Madrone, Black Acacia or Sinker Redwood). The backs were user-replaceable and the company planned to use different materials so you could customize your Runcible to your taste.
Renewed and sustainable materials for Runcible
This was small for a phone, but too big to be part of the emerging smartwatch market. Instead, it’s described as a “pocket watch” and with some of the accessories the design team has planned, you can wear it like a watch.
Back in 2015, the Monohm team preached the importance of digital well-being, something that the big phone manufacturers have only recently embraced. Runcible is designed to reduce distractions and prevent addictive online networks.
Runcible in its natural habitat – nature
But this was a phone, too, and you could make calls – make calls via a Bluetooth headset (complete with a rotary dial, of course), send and receive texts, navigate to your destination (again using the round screen to display a compass), and take photos (round photos, of course).
Runcible had some really cool ideas for the interface. For example, the bezel around the screen was also touch sensitive, even the case could track your fingers. All this allowed you to scroll and drag without blocking the screen.
Speaking of which, it was a 2.5-inch display with a resolution of 640 x 640 pixels (256 dpi) with Gorilla Glass 3. It also had capacitive multi-touch, in fact, it was billed as the first round touch screen .
After the launch in 2015, the Monohm team turned around IndieGoGo in mid-2016 to finance the production of a non-smartphone. Explaining exactly what that means is integral to what this device was trying to be and (more importantly) what it has become.
The campaign ended up raising $294,052 from 695 backers. Here is a look at the prices. Note that the “Babbage” is a reclaimed plastic model, the “Lovelace” used Madrone wood, and the “Faraday” had a Sinker Redwood back instead.
Okay, now we can talk about smartphone things that aren’t smartphones. Initially, the team wanted to use Firefox OS. It fit well with their mission as they wanted Runcible to be different and the lack of apps (compared to Android) wasn’t a big concern as those were digital distractions anyway.
So the team went looking for a chipset that could run Firefox OS well – and they found it. Unfortunately, like Android Authority reported back in 2016, the chipmaker discontinued it just as the Runcible project was starting to stall. Then came the worst when Mozilla discontinued Firefox OS in late 2015. No chipset, no OS. What now?
Note that this all happened before the 2016 crowdfunding campaign, so the team found a way – despite initially avoiding it, they decided on Android. A highly customized version of Android called “BuniOS”.
BuniOS didn’t include the Google Play Store because the Android apps there couldn’t handle the round screen. It could run apps (and Monohm hired developers to build them), both native APKs and web-based apps. We’re not sure why Wear OS wasn’t an option, it natively supported round screens and had apps built for those screens.
It wasn’t so much the software that was the problem, anyway, building new hardware is hard – especially one as unique as Runcible. Ultimately, hardware manufacturers are working with much larger orders, so they put Runcible on the back burner. Monohm tried to secure additional funds, but nothing came of it.
The last update came in May 2019 and illustrates how difficult it is to make small-scale projects:
Our board manufacturer, in order to make less than 3,000 boards for us, insists on charging us almost double the listed price per board. It’s very close to the same price to make 3000 boards as it is to make 1000. However, we only budgeted for 1000 boards at the prices listed, and after trying several strategies, we can’t get them to budge.
There hasn’t been any news on Runcible since then and any hardware and software work would now be out of date, even for a non-smartphone. As with the original chipset, parts go out of production and need to be replaced, so the whole thing has to be redesigned – it’s not something you can return after 7 years.
What do you think of Runcible? Is a pocketable smartwatch/non-smartphone/digital heirloom something you’d like to have?
PS If you’re interested, we could continue the saga of round phones with Circle:
Summarize this content to 300 words
Look at your phone – it’s a rectangle with rounded corners, right? Although this was early established as the predominant form, there were those who knew in their hearts that there were better, more natural forms.
In 2015, Monohm introduced the Runcible – described as a “legacy smart pocket device”, it was also a smartphone, not a smartphone. And its circular shape could not escape your attention.
Runcible Babbage • Runcible Lovelace
The Runcible had a round screen and a smoothly curved back, mimicking natural objects like a smooth pebble. The theme of nature is supported by the choice of materials – from plastic obtained from the ocean to sustainable wood (Madrone, Black Acacia or Sinker Redwood). The backs were user-replaceable and the company planned to use different materials so you could customize your Runcible to your taste.
Renewed and sustainable materials for Runcible
This was small for a phone, but too big to be part of the emerging smartwatch market. Instead, it’s described as a “pocket watch” and with some of the accessories the design team has planned, you can wear it like a watch.
Back in 2015, the Monohm team preached the importance of digital well-being, something that the big phone manufacturers have only recently embraced. Runcible is designed to reduce distractions and prevent addictive online networks.
Runcible in its natural habitat – nature
But this was a phone, too, and you could make calls – make calls via a Bluetooth headset (complete with a rotary dial, of course), send and receive texts, navigate to your destination (again using the round screen to display a compass), and take photos (round photos, of course).
Runcible had some really cool ideas for the interface. For example, the bezel around the screen was also touch sensitive, even the case could track your fingers. All this allowed you to scroll and drag without blocking the screen.
Speaking of which, it was a 2.5-inch display with a resolution of 640 x 640 pixels (256 dpi) with Gorilla Glass 3. It also had capacitive multi-touch, in fact, it was billed as the first round touch screen .
After the launch in 2015, the Monohm team turned around IndieGoGo in mid-2016 to finance the production of a non-smartphone. Explaining exactly what that means is integral to what this device was trying to be and (more importantly) what it has become.
The campaign ended up raising $294,052 from 695 backers. Here is a look at the prices. Note that the “Babbage” is a reclaimed plastic model, the “Lovelace” used Madrone wood, and the “Faraday” had a Sinker Redwood back instead.
Okay, now we can talk about smartphone things that aren’t smartphones. Initially, the team wanted to use Firefox OS. It fit well with their mission as they wanted Runcible to be different and the lack of apps (compared to Android) wasn’t a big concern as those were digital distractions anyway.
So the team went looking for a chipset that could run Firefox OS well – and they found it. Unfortunately, like Android Authority reported back in 2016, the chipmaker discontinued it just as the Runcible project was starting to stall. Then came the worst when Mozilla discontinued Firefox OS in late 2015. No chipset, no OS. What now?
Note that this all happened before the 2016 crowdfunding campaign, so the team found a way – despite initially avoiding it, they decided on Android. A highly customized version of Android called “BuniOS”.
BuniOS didn’t include the Google Play Store because the Android apps there couldn’t handle the round screen. It could run apps (and Monohm hired developers to build them), both native APKs and web-based apps. We’re not sure why Wear OS wasn’t an option, it natively supported round screens and had apps built for those screens.
It wasn’t so much the software that was the problem, anyway, building new hardware is hard – especially one as unique as Runcible. Ultimately, hardware manufacturers are working with much larger orders, so they put Runcible on the back burner. Monohm tried to secure additional funds, but nothing came of it.
The last update came in May 2019 and illustrates how difficult it is to make small-scale projects:
Our board manufacturer, in order to make less than 3,000 boards for us, insists on charging us almost double the listed price per board. It’s very close to the same price to make 3000 boards as it is to make 1000. However, we only budgeted for 1000 boards at the prices listed, and after trying several strategies, we can’t get them to budge.
There hasn’t been any news on Runcible since then and any hardware and software work would now be out of date, even for a non-smartphone. As with the original chipset, parts go out of production and need to be replaced, so the whole thing has to be redesigned – it’s not something you can return after 7 years.
What do you think of Runcible? Is a pocketable smartwatch/non-smartphone/digital heirloom something you’d like to have?
PS If you’re interested, we could continue the saga of round phones with Circle:
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