Zilta Phone: A Smartphone Inspired By Baby Boomer Parents

Zilta Ltd, a new player in the Smartphone market has launched a pre-order campaign for its age-friendly Smartphone that allows people of all ages benefit from modern technology. The Zilta Smartphone is built around the concept of simplicity – it focuses on the most popular Smartphone activities, like calls, messages, emails and web searches and leaves all the less frequently used applications in the background.

Supported by the Irish National Digital Research Center’s accelerator program, Zilta has been making fast progress since the summer of 2013 when its co-founders, Lari Numminen and Jukka Kekäläinen, first started working on the project. Their work began with the app development, which was initially featured on Google Play as a beta version. Over 10,000 users tried it and gave their feedback, further proving the concept validity. After further testing, Zilta decided to launch its own phone. It is now currently available at a special pre-order price of €139 (RRP€189).

The inspiration for Zilta came when the founders own baby boomer parents bought new Android smartphones. “We noticed that many things were made unnecessarily complicated. There were too many visible apps to start with while even basic things like managing your own contacts list proved difficult” says Numminen. “Android also provided the solution. It is relatively easy to customise the look and feel and we decided to design our own simpler user interface. We got a fantastic response from early testers and feature requests from around the World.”

Zilta began designing their own smartphone after they couldn’t find a reasonably priced entry-level smartphone. “When talking to first time buyers, we noticed that either people were buying really expensive top-of-the-range devices or ones that had some really big faults, such as too little RAM memory. Through international contacts, we were able to custom design our own sensibly priced but powerful device. It runs on 1.3 GHz quad-core CPU with 1GB RAM and 4GB ROM with a dual-sim support. We’ve been testing the device internally and it’s been working great” says Jukka Kekäläinen.