Design: Holger Hoehn, and Larry Koo
Project lead: Larry Koo
The M9 Monolith was designed to be the top-of-the-line model in the Philips Premium Design series. Besides complementing the beauty of the modern urban lifestyle, it aimed to exude confidence. The proposition was crafted to appeal to a more mature audience seeking aesthetic sophistication in every object and detail of their lives. The advancement of DECT cordless phone technology had matured, making the harnessing of strong design elements and usability features a priority to deliver an all-rounded successful result.
The Philips Monolith was a phone that breathed confidence. The handset was crafted from premium materials ingeniously to accentuate the beauty of a single volume. As part of the Premium Design range of phones, the Monolith was inspired by modern metropolitan living. It was designed to be an elegant and desirable phone, luxurious in its volume but simple in its execution. Unlike the conventional design approach of many cordless phones, the Monolith was never meant to blend or vanish into the home environment. It was intended to be a bold statement. It became a piece of modern, iconic, and tasteful design to join homes, adding its own identity to balance a collection of tasteful modern decorations.
The substantial weight of the die-cast metal body made the handset feel premium. Two strips of high-gloss edge treatment around the metal body bezel were the signature detail that showed off the precision engineering technique. The placement of the mic, display lens, buttons, and speaker on the front face were well balanced and placed precisely on a single piece of gridded surface.
Every detail mattered. All four sidewalls on the cordless phone base were designed to be engineered with zero drafts to match vertically aligned with the metal bezel on the handset. When the phone was docked, it read precisely as a single block of object with the base that was sculpted from stone.