Samsung Jot: the rotary phone designed for 2015

What it was

The Jot was a communication device drawn by industrial designer Raymond Bessemer, who studied at California State University, Long Beach. He posted it to his Coroflot portfolio in April 2010, and design blogs picked it up that October. It carried the Samsung name and was pitched as a phone for the year 2015. We found no sign that Samsung commissioned it.

The renders show a slim black bar with a ring at one end. The ring was a physical rotary dial with numbered finger holes around an open center, and it replaced the keypad for placing calls. The bar held a capacitive OLED display and a menu button for saved contacts. A removable stylus handled text: you wrote a message by hand instead of typing with your thumbs. The name came from jotting things down.

Samsung built both halves of the Jot by the concept’s target year and never put them in the same device.

Where the idea went

Samsung got to the pen first. In 2011 it unveiled the Galaxy Note at IFA in Berlin, a 5.3-inch phone with a stylus called the S Pen. By the Jot’s target year the feature had come close to the concept’s name. The Galaxy Note 5, released in August 2015, added Screen off memo: pull the pen from a sleeping phone and it wakes straight to a note screen.

The dial arrived the same year on a different product. At IFA 2015 Samsung unveiled the Gear S2, a round smartwatch controlled by a rotating bezel. Its designers said the ring let people work the interface without covering the small screen with their fingers. Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 8 Classic of 2025 still has one.

A real rotary cellphone came from outside the industry. In 2020, Justine Haupt, who builds instruments at Brookhaven National Laboratory, showed one she had made around the dial of an old Trimline phone and published the design files. In January 2021 her company, Sky’s Edge, opened pre-orders for a kit version, the Rotary Un-Smartphone.

What it means now

The Jot was less about dialing than about touch. It argued that some jobs feel better with a physical control and a pen than on a flat sheet of glass. Samsung reached the same conclusion twice, and both times it kept the touchscreen and set the object beside it.

What did not survive is the combination. We could not find a phone on sale that puts a dial and a pen on the same body. The dial went to the wrist, where a small screen needs the help. The pen stayed in the phone as an option. The rotary phone itself became a statement by people who want their phone to do less.