How would you design a smartphone for Neanderthals?

If you have been in the software industry for a while, it is likely that you know about famous questions that are supposedly asked in Microsoft Interviews. Questions like ‘How would you move Mount Fuji?’ or ‘how would you design Mr. Bill Gates’ bathroom?’ are so publicized that there are popular books that are written entirely on Microsoft interview questions. Imagine yourself sitting in one such interview and the interviewer throws the question nonchalantly to you. Now that Microsoft is seriously investing to establish itself as serious Mobile Operating System player [marketing campaign for Windows 8 in so advance shows how serious they are!], you better be prepared to expect such questions.

Smartphone for Neanderthals, a species that got extinct 30,000 years ago?? What would a species that barely might have learnt to speak [even that is debatable], do with an advanced communication device like smartphone in a world where the most advanced technology perhaps was about making a stone axe!

While they may be perfectly legitimate questions, you also know that, putting them across is not an option. It is the interviewer who gets to ask questions and only right that is given to you as an interviewee is to answer them sincerely.

Since the interviewer did only ask about handset device, you assume that interviewer already has some kind of teleporting technology and also the right to erect wireless towers going 30,000 years back in time. Your job at present is to decide about the form-factor and necessary functionality that would be useful to Neanderthals.

So you start jotting down few artefacts that you know about Neanderthals.

1.  Neanderthals are not Gorillas, they are almost like us, so they can learn faster.
2.  Neanderthals had no script, which means no SMS.
3.  Would they know numbers?  Very unlikely so no number keypad is needed, in fact no keypad is needed.
4.  How would they identify each other? Visual cue should work, so the contact book would simply have images of different people.

Wow, that is good progress and in just a matter of minutes! You mentally pat yourself. In fact you now have started enjoying the exercise. 

Those artefacts tell you that your form factor design should be very simple and mostly visual. That means you need two powerful cameras: one for watching the caller and the other for capturing the environment. Will it be confusing to use two cameras? You take a mental note that you will revisit that later. Next, you need a large LED display, may be a AMOLED, that gives bright pictures but also is more flexible and sturdy. It also will double up as touch screen where any visual cue can be treated as a clickable object. Each visual object will have a sound profile so that communication is closer to their senses. Poor Neanderthals do not have alphabets or numbers, right?  So the device will look like a large rectangular tablet so that it is easy to hold in hand. Powerful microphone and speakers should be fixed on that.
What about battery recharge. Since neanderthals would not have any electrical charging facility of their own [except those that would be installed by the interviewer], you decide that you will equip the device with high-density thin solar-frame on the back and side faces of the tablet.
Now that you have decided on the form factor, you realise that two digital cameras, preferably with a wide-angle and auto-zoom lens, would be useful, one at the front and the other at the back of the display. Both would capture and transmit the feeds simultaneously, so no control is needed. It would in fact be a videophone. Caller will see the feeds coming from the receiver while the receiver will see the feeds from the caller.

Okay, good so far! Wait a minute, didn’t the interviewer mention, ‘smart’? He definitely did but what does it entail to make this device smart?

Your geek friend’s face flashed in your mind. With a few exceptions like when is sleeping or is in toilet, he spends almost all his time with his Android smartphone. His facebook updates (accompanied with photos and video captured in his smartphone camera) come almost every 30 minutes and updates include the most mundane things like how his pet dog licked his face in the morning or what he is taking for breakfast or how he showed his affection to his girlfriend in the café last evening to more esoteric stuff like how he realized that he is a genius. His phone is practically his all-weather companion, a kind of surrogate for a living friend who listens to him all the times without talking back and fills his personal space which otherwise is almost devoid of any human touch. You felt you have hit a streak of discovery. Neanderthals inhabited a world that was psychologically similar to your friend’s world: cold, isolated, paranoid. That tells you that they would have similar need for exhibitionism and emotional warmth, although they would not have internet or facebook.

So you deduce that smartness for a communication device in this world would necessarily entail a capability to communicate emotionally; the device must not only be 'always on and connected’ it also must be able provide a sense of emotional presence. It should be able to sense his mood and reciprocate with empathy e.g. when he is emotionally down, the device automatically would pick the video of his most pleasant experiences in the past and play them for him, or when he is afraid, it should assess the situation and suggest him possible choices and/or play some visual cues which can help him regain his courage. Based on his physiological condition and weather condition, suggest him to take shelters, pick certain herbs or wear clothes. All these are in fact technologically possible, they require few more sensors like temperature, humidity, around a terabyte of space for data storage, an application that maps facial experession and voice cues to emotional artefacts and a sophisticated analytics engine which will sift through past and present data feeds in real time.
Once such a phone is built, it will also become the smartphone for the facebook+ generations. This capability will convert the existing smartphone into a really intelligent personal companion gadget in addition to its present use for mobile communication, entertainment and online gaming.
However, it is more likely that data storage and large part of the analytics will transition to a computing cloud infrastructure maintained by the Operating System provider. This strategy, for example, is already adopted byApple for its iPhones with Siri and other apps.

You confidently finish your exposition. Your eyes did not miss the appreciative smile of the interviewer. So, you ask, “If I may ask, why Neanderthals?”

The interviewer magnanimously obliges, “Could any other way drive the point better?”

You acknowledge that he has a point there. Genesis of technology for future lies in understanding the basic human needs that remained unchanged through cycles of evolution for almost a million years.