Slab

Slab or SLAB may refer to:

Physical materials

Places

SLAB!

SLAB! are an industrial music/alternative rock band initially active between the mid-1980s and early 1990s. They reformed in 2009.

History

The band's first release was the "Mars on Ice" 12-inch single in 1986 on Dave Kitson's Ink Records (an offshoot of his Red Flame label). This received airplay from John Peel who invited them to record a session for his BBC Radio 1 show the same year. They followed this with "Parallax Avenue" in 1987 which saw them in the lower reaches of the UK Independent Chart, and in May that year their debut mini-LP Music From The Iron Lung was issued, reaching number 21 on the Independent Albums chart. "Smoke Rings" gave them their highest charting single, reaching number 31 on the indie chart in July 1987, and towards the end of the year the band's first long-playing album, Descension was issued. Second full-length LP album Sanity Allergy was issued in 1988, and that year they recorded their third and final Peel session. The band split up in 1991, with a 'best of' compilation, Ship of Fools, released the same year.

Form factor (mobile phones)

The form factor of a mobile phone is its size, shape, and style, as well as the layout and position of its major components. There are three major form factors – bar phones, flip phones, and sliders – as well as sub-categories of these forms and some atypical forms.

Bar

A bar (also known as a slab, block, candybar) phone takes the shape of a cuboid, usually with rounded corners and/or edges. The name is derived from the rough resemblance to a chocolate bar in size and shape. This form factor is widely used by a variety of manufacturers, such as Nokia and Sony Ericsson. Bar type mobile phones commonly have the screen and keypad on a single face. The Samsung SPH-M620 has a unique bar style, offering different devices on either side of the bar: a phone on one side, and a digital audio player on the other. Sony Ericsson also had a well-known 'MarsBar' phone model CM-H333.

Since mid 2010s, almost all the mobile phones come in bar form factor.

Brick

"Brick" is a slang term almost always used to refer to large, outdated bar-type phones, typically early mobile phones with large batteries and electronics. However, "brick" has more recently been applied to older phone models in general, including non-bar form factors (flip, slider, swivel, etc.), and even early touchscreen phones as well, due to their size and relative lack of functionality to newer models. Such early mobile phones, such as the Motorola DynaTAC, have been displaced by newer smaller models which offer greater portability thanks to smaller antennas and slimmer battery packs.