How many of you own a 3D printer yet? For the one who does, here's a cool do it yourself project for you. Nokia, with Nokia's 3D printing community project, is releasing a 3D printing Development Kit, "or 3DK for short," for people who really want to customize their Lumia 820 phones themselves.
Nokia's Lumia 820 has a removable shell, by factory design, which owners have been able to swap out with store bought Nokia approved shells. It's a nice little perk to owning a Lumia 820, which recalls the old Nokia "brick phones" with their interchangeable faceplates: Change your phone's colors depending on your mood, swap in special rugged shells for that hiking trip that you're heading out on, or add in a shell with wireless charging capabilities.
And now you (assuming you're one of the tiny percentage of people with access to a 3D printer) can create a custom shell for the Lumia 820 and fabricate it yourself.
Sound like a gimmick? Well, it may be for now, but it does signal interesting. At least at this stage, Nokia is one of the first consumer-geared companies to try to engage the 3D fabrication community and interact with that emerging technology.
The reason this is important is because 3D printing has long been thought of as a disruptive technology, especially to the consumer products industry. Just think, if you could download the specifications for free or at cost and print out your very own physical copy of that object (with, eventually, as little expertise as it requires to print out a photo right now), why would you ever go to the store to buy a manufactured version of that object?
Nokia is getting ahead of the ball with their 3D printing initiative (and yes, also generating some publicity). We'll have to see how successful they are, and how it affects Nokia's unimpressive smartphone sales figures.
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