If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse

—Henry Ford
Seems Nokia is asking it’s customers to help it build a faster horse. They’ve set up a Design By Community website that is, “… is capturing the collective thoughts of Conversations readers to define the ultimate concept mobile device.”
On the site you use sliders to customize the attributes of the phone. There’s going to be several rounds that focus on different parts of a mobile device like: Display and UI, Size and Shape, Materials, Operating System, Connectivity, Camera and Enhancements. The scale for the sliders ranges from ‘Not Ambitious Enough” to ‘Way to Out There’. If your customization is ‘Way to Out There’ it won’t let you submit it for consideration.
?
Talk about a recipe for mediocrity.
I’m not sure what amazing insights Nokia expects to glean from this experiment, but whatever it’s going to be, it’s not going to be innovative. The only output I see coming from this is some sort of mutant mobile device who’s DNA resides in the iPhone and the competitors it inspired like all the Android Devices, the Palm Pre and the Blackberry Storm.