Interview from Libby Henderson from Big Purple Phone on the Big Purple Phone Silver Fox
Hi and welcome to another interview for Talking Tech (for iSee) on Vision Australia Radio. And today, as people might have noticed, I did do a bit of a podcast a couple of days ago on the Big Purple Phone, but I thought it was much nicer to get people actually who manufacture/sell the phone in Australia to come on the program and have a chat about it. So I'm joined by Libby Henderson, Commercial Sales Director from Big Purple Phone. So hi Libby and welcome to the program. Thank you David, it's great to be here. So let's just get the name out of the way first and describe briefly what it is. So what is the Big Purple Phone? Yeah, the Big Purple Phone, it's a phone that we designed for a scenario we had in my family. So my mother during COVID had a stroke and couldn't remember how to use her phone and she was isolated from us. We had such a terrible journey with her trying to get hold of her. And we were looking for a phone for her that would suit her and couldn't find anything really that was simple enough for her that you could learn quickly and use without us there to help her. And so that sent us on this journey when they say, "Ask myself and my husband James on this journey to create a phone." And as it turns out, my background is digital design with a little bit of accessibility from my time with the Commonwealth Bank. And my husband James was with Telstra for 25 years. So between us, we had this amazing complementary skill set that we pulled together and designed the Big Purple Phone. So it's a larger phone. It's a taller phone. So it's about as wide as a regular mobile phone. But the screen real estate we get from the extra height is where we sort of get that bigger screen real estate from. It's sort of a 20 by 9 proportion. So it's quite tall as a phone. But you can still sort of hold it comfortably in hand because the width is kind of good. So it's bigger. It's purple. It has high contrast, bigger, brighter and easier to use. How many icons would be on the main what we tend to do in particular and call the home screen? How many icons would you be talking about on the screen? So as standard, there's about 10. You can add more in. You can add more buttons in. But generally, they're just the standard buttons. There's phone, text message, camera, photo gallery. There's a brightness button, torch, weather, video calling, radio. That's kind of the standard buttons. OK, now how big would the icons be? Because I know sometimes when people say, oh, it's big, mate, come and go, yeah, it's really not that big. The icons are not really that big. Are these sort of big, big icons? Yeah. So there's two settings. So you can set it to be I'm actually just pulling a ruler out and measuring it for you because I know in pixels, but that's not good to you. No. It's about four centimetres. You can set it to even larger. So you can take it out six, six centimetres. Oh, goodness. But could you still fit all the icons on the screen? Yeah. So when it's at the smaller size, you get sort of two to three icons on the screen as you're scrolling down. And it's a little bit like a poker machine, the way you sort of navigate it. You sort of it sort of scrolls around, if you like. When you've got it set to that six centimetre size, then you get one big one and half of the next one. OK, but you can easily scroll around. So when you start scrolling around and you're dragging your finger, are you doing other gestures or what are you doing? Starting with your finger at the bottom of the screen and you're swiping up and that kind of makes it roll around. If you know, swiping like that. The buttons, there are also buttons at the top and at the bottom. A lot of the phone was initially designed for people who are older. So it has sort of ability to tap up and down. You don't have to scroll. You can tap swiping is hard for some people. And I believe it also comes with a stylus. It does. That makes it a lot
