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 easier. I think as you get older, your skin gets drier and that touch sensitivity goes in many cases. So, yes, you can use the stylus in that case. 

 

OK. And what does the phone feel like in your hand? I mean, I know it's based on Nokia, but does it feel like a sort of a good solid phone when you're holding your hand? It's not too slippery or it's not too big to hold in your hand and that sort of stuff. 

 

Yeah, that's a good question. It's it's comes with a bumper case. So it has like a clear jelly bumper case that comes. We put it on. You can take that off and then it's got more of a grip. So that kind of it's sort of it's a matte kind of feeling to the case. It's 190 grams. So that's not considering it's a bigger phone. It's not all that heavy. It's sort of on the heavier side, but it's certainly not as heavy as iPhone plus. 

 

And for people that use Bluetooth hearing aids, will it connect with Bluetooth hearing aids? 

 

Yeah, it will. The only thing is that if your hearing aid needs an app to set the settings up, then it doesn't have the app. So you can connect it, but it's going to be literally just a Bluetooth connection. 

 

Let's say you wanted to add more icons. So you mentioned you could actually remove or add the different icons on the screen depending on how many you want to use. Can a support person or family member do that? And is there any other ways of actually doing it remotely? So rather than the poor person going, what are you doing to my phone? Give it back to me. You can also do it remotely. So I'm assuming there's a couple of ways you can set up the phone without disturbing the user too much. 

 

That's right. Yeah. So when you first get the phone, there's a registration sequence. So you tell the phone, are you going to have a carer or are you going to do this yourself? So that's the first thing. If you set it up so that you have a carer, that carer gets sent a text message with a link. And then they can sign in and they can access via a web browser the settings for the phone. So you might decide that you want to be the person that manages the phone for yourself, in which case we send you a text message and you can log on. You can log on via the phone or you might choose that you want to log on via a web browser, so whichever you prefer. It's great because it's separate from the phone. So you don't have lots of -- we talk about the phone being no fandangle, meaning there are not a lot of little settings that you can get lost in and rabbit holes to go down. And so you can go onto a web browser and you can make those buttons larger. You can move them from the 4cm to the 6cm, as we discussed before. You can set it so that it adds a speakerphone. You can disable buttons. You can add more apps. So yeah, there's a lot that you can do to sort of customize the phone. There's also an SOS button on the phone, which is great for some people, but for others, they just don't need it. So you can disable it. 

 

If you've got the phone and you couldn't use the remote system, can a family or support person still get the settings of the phone by some, you know, weirder and wonderful gesture? 

 

Yeah, it's actually a button. It's a button. Yeah, it's super easy. So if you decide that you want to just have the phone manage -- you manage the phone on the phone itself and give it to someone to fix or set up for you or you want to do it yourself, then when you go through that registration at the beginning, it says, "Do you have a carer or are you going to use this yourself?" And you say, "I'm going to use this myself." And then when you get to the home screen, there's a purple "manage" button down the bottom of that menu that I talked about before. And you tap on that, and then that will take you through to the settings. 

 

Okay. And is that what you say to your grandmother or your granddad for goodness sake? Do you not need to worry about that button on the screen? That's my button. 

 

Yeah, so we can disable that button. So if you've got a carer, that button, you can enable it or disable it. So you can basically make it super, super, super simple. We have some people that just have the phone and the message button, and that's all they have on it. 

 

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, because that's all you want to announce. It's back to the weird days of, "Hey, people might just want to talk on the phone and text each other." 

 

Yeah, right. Exactly. 

 

So with talking about texting each other, do you put contacts in, so just in text, or is it sort of picture-based? So you tap on Uncle Tom, and you can dial Uncle Tom by just the picture. 

 

Yeah, it's the picture. So in every circumstance. So the usability is this. You've got the home screen, and you've got your phone button, and then you scroll down, and there's your messages button. You tap on the messages button, and that takes you through to all the faces of the people who are contacts on the phone. You tap on the face of the phone, and then you have the choice to speak a message or type a message, and then you do either. 

 

if people wanted more information about hearing aids and other stuff that they can use, if they have the phone itself, what's the best contact details that people can use? So the phone's available through Vision Australia Stores, and we have staff from the Vision Australia Stores. There's also FAQs on the Big Purple phone website, and you've got to find number as well that we can support. The phone actually has a help button which goes through to our call centre as well, so we can help that way. 

 

Okay, and is that a video call one? or is that a... 

 

It's a phone call. We can actually initiate a video call, but nobody wants to do that.

 

All right, excellent. All right, well, thank you for coming on Talking Tech, and it'll be interesting to see how the phone's taken up by the low-vision  community. 

 

Yeah, thank you. It's my pleasure, David, and thank you for your time today. 

 

That's okay, my pleasure.