Top 5 Futuristic Mobile Phone Design Concepts
October 6th, 2010 | by Mobile Data Group |The now ubiquitous mobile phone has progressed by leaps and bounds, from the bricks-with-battery-packs of the 1980s to the sleek touchscreen devices of today.
But what will the next 30 years of mobile phone design bring? Intrigued by what we might be making calls on in 2015 and beyond, we’ve taken a look at some futuristic concept phone designs.
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Encompassing designs from fans to multi-company collaborations, each one of the concepts we’ve chosen to feature offers something special, and most exciting of all, each one is totally plausible.
Mozilla Seabird
Developed with feedback from the wider community, the Seabird is the evolution of Mozilla Labs community member Billy May’s concept of what an “Open Web” mobile phone could look like.
The two stand-out features from May’s vision are the integrated Bluetooth (Bluetooth) headset that doubles as a remote control and the dual pico projectors that can project a virtual keyboard as well as video or imagery.
Nokia Kinetic
In addition to those curvaceous looks, the Kinetic offers the rather unusual ability of “standing up” when a call or text is received by “converting digital information into kinetic movement”.
Under the hood, the “visual clue” of the phone standing up would be carried out by an electromagnet shifting a weight, while the same position could be employed for a video call or even watching media.
Kinneir Dufort Revive
The concept is simple: many of us are tired of the excessive energy used and waste produced during the never-ending product cycles of the consumer electronics industry.
The idea is that instead of trading in your old handset for a new one, you upgrade elements of your phone as they wear down (e.g. the battery) or as better parts become available (e.g. the camera).
This way, says Kinneir Dufort, the system would allow “electronic products to keep pace with technological developments as well as consumer expectations’”.
HTC 1
What both elements have in common is a fantastic simplicity, with a smooth, seamless phone design complimented by a much more minimal “mono edition” of HTC’s existing Sense UI.
The wow factor for HTC 1’s design comes in with the simple, yet brilliant idea of offering a twist out kickstand across the entire bottom of the phone, which doesn’t ruin the device’s clean lines when not in use, and provides a useful way to stand the phone up, either for watching media or to set the phone on your nightstand as an alarm clock.
Synaptic Fuse
The Synaptics “Fuse” concept is remarkable if for nothing else than for how many companies were involved in its design.
TheAlloy provided product design efforts, the UI was from both TheAlloy and TAT, which also enabled the 3D environment, Immersion added the tactile feedback, and the phone — that exists as a real-life prototype (unlike others on this list) — is powered by Texas Instrument’s OMAP 3630 processor.