Nineteen years
between two phones.

In September 2006 a small Swiss company called Zenum Technologies announced the Opus Operis. Nobody had heard of the maker. By May 2007 CNET was holding one: “Overall we’re quite impressed with this offering from such a small company.” Engadget wrote that “the once-vaporous Opus Operis from Swiss newcomers Zenum has finally crystalized.” CrunchGear called it “the sexiest Windows Mobile phone we’ve seen yet.”

The Opus ran Windows Mobile 6 Professional on a 2.5-inch touchscreen with a full QWERTY keypad, a 2-megapixel camera behind a sliding silver cover, and a silver border that, in CNET’s words, “differentiates it from many of the all-in-black handsets out there.” It was designed with the industrial designer Jaren Goh and priced as a premium object: 800 euros unsubsidised.

The Opus disrupted the market of its time. It arrived when phones were commodities in blister packs, and it treated the phone as a designed object from the box outward. In the years that followed, every company started to design its packaging, and the premium phone market became real. ZENUM was there first.

Over the following nineteen years ZENUM advised other technology companies on design, product placement and product launch. What that work taught us is on every page of this site: what a product is has to be said in one sentence, and the sentence has to be true.

Nineteen years after the Opus, ZENUM is ready to launch its second disruption: the ZENUM 1:1, a phone designed around one intelligence, RUBEN, trained for one person. Our own models, trained on MareNostrum 5 at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center with the support of the BSC AI Factory in Lisbon: 150,000+ GPU hours, 50,000 hours of development. The research behind it is published with open DOIs on our Research page.

RUBEN was built to the EU AI Act and the GDPR from the first line of code, and the rules are in the weights, not in a prompt: RUBEN tells you it is an AI, every word it speaks carries a machine-readable watermark, and its behaviour was tested against the Act’s prohibited practices before it met a single user. The details are on the AI Act & data protection page.

• September 2006 — Zenum Technologies SA, Switzerland, announces the Opus Operis.
• May 2007 — CNET and Engadget publish hands-on coverage of the production unit, now called Opus.
• 2007–2026 — design, product placement and launch consulting for other technology companies.
• February–August 2026 — four research papers published on Zenodo.
• 2026 — ZENUM 1:1 with RUBEN inside.

ZENUM is operated by KULTR Unipessoal Lda, a company registered in Portugal with its seat in Alverca do Ribatejo and a member of the NVIDIA Inception programme, together with ZEKNEO Ai Ltd, a company registered in the United Kingdom. Founder: Emidio Do Sacramento. Registered details are on the Legal notice.

Press quoted: CNET, “Photos: Hands-on with the Zenum Opus”, 23 May 2007; Engadget, “Zenum’s Opus taken for a spin”, 23 May 2007; CrunchGear, 20 September 2006. The company’s site of the period, zenum.ch, and the phone market before and after the Opus are preserved on the Internet Archive (web.archive.org) for anyone who wants to check.