What company is providing technology behind Sprint’s One Click? The answer: Aricent, both through its frog design business and communications and mobile device practice.
Aricent, which also produced Celltop for Alltel, says it partnered closely with Sprint to bring One Click to market in less than 10 months. One Click is designed to provide a consistent user experience across a range of Sprint’s feature phones.
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| Sprint unveiled One Click at CTIA’s fall trade show in San Francisco last September |
Sprint unveiled One Click at CTIA’s fall trade show in San Francisco last September and was awarded a best overall product designation. One Click initially is available on the Samsung Rant, Samsung Highnote, LG Lotus and Sanyo Eclipse.
Feature phones don’t have the processing power or memory of a smartphone, so the challenge was creating a solution that could work across multiple handset manufacturers and platforms and be affordable, said Deepak Mehrotra, vice president in the Communications Applications and Terminal Services division of Aricent.
One of the things designers wanted to incorporate was the ability to look across a room and immediately identify the UI as one from Sprint, according to Paul Pugh, creative director at frog design. One Click doesn’t use the exact light that Sprint shows in its TV commercials, but the colors are similar and represent the brand.
The UI also incorporates the concept of tiles. Each tile represents an area of interest or common task, like navigation or search.
One Click is embedded into handsets at the manufacturer level, but tiles can be updated over the air. It’s designed so that once a user installs an application, he or she doesn’t have to go searching for it on the phone.
What makes Aricent unique is the combination of frog design and the communication engineering expertise that’s required when you’re trying to get distribution through carriers and device makers, according to Keith Higgins, vice president of worldwide marketing. Aricent had teams working side by side with handset makers while One Click was in development.