5. Jackets: Standard and Nightlife

The modu classic jacket, on the left, has the largest screen of the first set of jackets, a 3 megapixel camera and a simple icon-based interface for the Nucleus operating system. The night jacket has a completely different user interface with controls to match. It’s designed for taking out at night with you, so it’s smaller to fit in and pocket, you can set off flashing lights for the dance floor and the camera has a night photography mode. Adding these kind of special-purpose features to a standard phone would put the price up and they’re a waste if you don't need them; the idea of modu is that if you don't need phone features designed for a nightclub, you don't buy the jacket designed for a nightclub. 

The first third-party jacket is from JBL; a music jacket with stereo speakers that delivers what CEO Dov Moran calls “dynamic sound” He claims “we put an emphasis on the high quality of music audio in the modu and in the jacket the quality of the audio is unheard of”. 

A difficult financial year saw partners like Magellan get bought out before launching their jackets, but Moran says modu is the ideal way forward for consumer electronics companies, so you can expect many more jackets. “For a company today who is not doing a phone to do a phone is expensive; it takes $20 million to do a phone. We provide a way for them to convert what they do into a phone. We provide them with the ability to develop a phone without developing a phone, just by integrating our modu into their devices.”