So you thought your iPhone 4 or Galaxy S II was pretty… um… pretty? Well, for lack of a better cliché, you ain’t seen nothing yet! (Or maybe you have. Some of these are rather old. Maybe I’ll give that last line a bit more thought.)
Concept designs are always tricky. Watching a designer with free conceptual rein is like watching a kid muck around in the garden. Every crooked stick is a laser-beam. So as you can imagine, there is a lot of ridiculous crap out there. But there are also some gems.
Here are six of my favourite conceptual cellphone designs, all for different reason, all incomparably rad.
LG Folding Phone
Ok, so this one is the oldest of the lot and hence first on the list, but what a great idea: a cellphone that becomes headphones. I don’t know if it gets any simpler than that. Also, because this concept is little more than a sketch in a notebook, you can pretty much imbue it with whatever tech you like. Mine percolates unicorn blood and comes preinstalled with Milla Jovovich’s home number on speed-dial. What does yours do?
Benq-Siemens Snaked
A slick, snakelike, sporting cell design for women. It has a heart-rate monitor and all the other whatnots to keep your lady in shape, which is important, considering what it’s likely to cost and how unlikely it is that this thing comes in a ‘one-size-fits-all’.
NEC Tag Phone
Snap-bangles! Seriously, who doesn’t love snap-bangles!
LINC Green
It’s pretty. I mean it’s really pretty. If this phone were a hooker, you’d need your house as a down payment.
They mention some mumbo-jumbo about how it’s not a phone, but a service. The user essentially rents the phone. Whenever new hardware comes out, it gets mailed to the user. The new phone is automatically updated with the user’s info and his or her account is transferred wirelessly.
All of this is like telling us that Keira Knightly can do long division in her head. None of us care.
‘bio’
Kill it with fire or give it a hug. You decide. This phone has got to be one of the weirdest and simultaneously awesome designs ever. The top cover is made up elastomer, inserted with actuators, which are essentially miniature, artificial muscles. When you receive a call or an email, the cover will lift a corner, revealing the name of the person calling, and, if necessary, open itself entirely!
The underside of the cover is also touch sensitive, with light-up buttons that appear when the cover is folded backwards, making online and media browsing a breeze.
In the words of the designers, the idea behind the ‘bio’ is “a notebook [that] whispers to you as if it [has] been brought to life.”
That’s right, the whole point of this cellphone is to trick you into thinking it’s alive.
The Flip phone
Three flexible, AMOLED touchscreens, the latest in Android tech and more awesome than I can cram into words.
Honestly, I’m just going to let the video do the rest of the talking for this one.
What is being creative? from Kristian Ulrich Larsen on Vimeo.
You can see a bunch more pics here.
If you feel like checking out a bunch more designs, peruse this list of 45 here. They vary wildly between pretty rad and fucking retarded, but hell, that’s what the internet’s here for, right?
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