A groundbreaking app-less phone is on its way
For a long time, you’ve needed apps for almost everything. There’s an app for streaming music and your favorite TV shows, reading e-books, hailing a car ride, and ordering food. But Deutsche Telekom sees that as a problem. There are just too many of them that it’s confusing and time-consuming.
The German telecommunications company has proposed a phone model without all the distractions and will reveal it at the Mobile World Congress (MWC2024) in Barcelona. The event will happen from the 26th to 29th of February. Brain.ai and Qualcomm Technologies Inc. will be major partners, and it’s already looking good.
Brain.ai is the genius behind the world’s first consumer generative interface (Natural AI). It launched in 2020 and could execute intent when you speak it. Over time, it can learn and adapt from how you use it. Then there’s Qualcomm, with its strong leadership in smartphone chipsets. It’s powering many phones, from flagships to the budget ranges, including the king of Androids, the Galaxy S24 Ultra. Their combined efforts with Germany’s largest telecom operator and its expertise lay a strong foundation for the project’s success.
How will a phone without apps work?
You probably imagine a blank phone like the Rabbit R1 with your animated AI companion bouncing on the screen. Deutsche Telekom says its app-free prototype will virtually have an assistant, like you’re already familiar with in Google, Siri, and Samsung’s Bixby. This assistant is expected to be advanced and can do everything, from setting up appointments to booking flights — you need to say the word.
It will combine predictive and generative capabilities, examining your past interactions, current context, and voice commands to understand what you might want to do next. So if you say “book a flight”, the AI understands automatically that you want to travel and predicts your next action might be choosing a destination or date. Likewise, if you say “call mom”, it may check if you’ve previously saved her contact information, mentioned her in texts to understand your intent and offer direct calling options.
The AI will exist in the clouds, shaking off the performance strain on your phone’s processor and battery. It also means your device doesn’t have to be top-of-the-line or require a major OS upgrade to use it.
When will the app-less phone hit the market?
Deutsche Telekom’s app-free phone is only a concept for now and won’t be available for sale anytime soon. However, the company will give us a live demonstration with Brain.ai’s generative interface integrated into the T Phone. Remember that it’s solely for the live preview and may not be publicly available yet. We’ll also see another AI smartphone powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip model and other innovations under development.
