From the category archives:
Spotted on the Yanko Design blog comes this innovative concept device called the What You See Is What You Get.
The phone has a transparent section around the camera lens so you can see exactly what you are taking a photo of without needing to look on the LCD viewfinder.
This seems to be a bit of a backwards step to me, I much prefer to see the picture on the screen rather than looking through a viewfinder. We would love to see transparent phones though.
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According to a press release published on Akihabara News NEC has developed a new 3.5 inch LCD screen using System-On-Glass technology offering a very high level of visibility in indoor/outdoor environments with high ambient light.
Masaaki Hiroshima, Product Planning Department Manager at NEC LCD Technologies, commented:
Recently, the market has seen a rapid increase in the upgrading and diversification of functions for portable devices, creating demand for more information display on screens.
However, increased information display must be achieved in sync with vivid color expression and improved visibility under direct sunlight to truly fulfill customer needs and expand the market.
We are confident that our new system-on-glass LCD module will completely fulfill these needs through a combination of our proprietary SR-NLT and Value Integrated TFT-LCD technologies,
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A student on the Product Design Forums has come up with a cool concept phone that is a camera first and foremost but also has the features of a mobile phone.
The handset is probably a bit big thanks to the large battery. Its interesting from a consumers point of view to see what the process of designing a phone actually is.
Here is what the designer had to say:
I wound up with a very very feasible product (I purposely built it a LITTLE big just for the sake of detail) that does not require any future voodoo technology. Given the large volume of the battery pack, it should have fantastic battery life, and I left plenty of room for the camera lense and mechanism, so that’s doable also.
I dislike the Motorola ROKR microSD storage solution, regular SD cards are pretty dang small anyway, and they’re getting pretty great storage capacities now. There’d probably even be room for two cards, but that’d be weird. I dislike camera phones because they’re primarily cell phones with a camera tacked onto them. They’re getting better, but the lack of real camera capabilities makes them a joke to me, I don’t see the point in them. They take ass pictures that you can’t print, and the res is so bad it looks horrid on your computer.
So, I first and foremost set out to think the other way…. start with a camera, and how could i make it into a phone. Flipping it around worked great. If it were to go into production one side would have small magnets inside it that would make it pleasantly ’stick’ to the otherside, so it wouldn’t be all floppy/willy nilly.
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The Dark Label Retroxis is just a concept phone at the moment but it is causing quite a stir this week.
Its designers have used clean, minimalist lines and simple controls and functions to create a retro handset that looks very appealing.
The case is highly polished polycarbonate which is tough, has a stunning finish and lightweight. As is the fashion with concept phones the Retroxis also includes an Organic LED which silently slides away when not in use.
Via Yanko Design
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Organic LED’s are going to be appearing on a whole lot more handsets in the future and designers like Chris Kujawski are busy creating some interesting concept phones that showcase the remarkable properties of OLED’s.
The BLANK is based on the idea that most people want to customise their phones. In the past this involved interchangeable covers but with the advent of large touchscreens phones of the future will be personalised by simply changing the background image.
In this concept device the screen covers the whole front of the phone and downloadable moving or static skins make your phone look just how you want it to.
The full coverage OLED has a number of
other benefits over traditional phone
screens as well, such as a much lower
power consumption compared to LCD’s, a
higher contrast ratio and the ability to
customize the interface and eliminate
unneeded functions from sight. When you
want to text, bring up a full QWERTY
keypad, when you’re dialing, only numbers
appear on screen. The removal of a
dedicated keypad also allows you to watch
media in true widescreen format.
BLANK also features a camera shutter
button that is ergonomically placed on the
back of the phone. The chrome strip that
surrounds it makes taking self portraits even
easier too.
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After the Zune Phone and the iPhone certain bloggers are predicting a Creative Zen phone today after a Creative document apparently showed a Zen phone like device.
epiZENter.net and even engadget are reporting on the Zen Phone but it just looks like a Nokia flip phone to me.
Anybody care to guess what it is?
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A new Helio branded slider phone has been seen on the FCC website this week.
Provisionally called the pantech PN 810 the Helio phone features an innovative 3 layer design with the top layer holding the main screen and function buttons.
Slide open the top and you reveal a standard keypad and on the bottom layer you will find a qwerty keyboard for emails and messaging.
The keyboard has a dedicated emoticon key and the phone includes an EV-DO radio, Bluetooth, 2.1 megapixel camera with flash and 260k screen.
Spotted on Phone Scoop
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Designer Peter Norberg has designed an innovative mobile phone that splits up into different modules depending what parts you need.
The keyboard, screen, phone, MP3 player, GPS and camera can be removed if you don’t need them. Strangely the parts seem to just button back together and the phone magically detects which parts are attached and ready for use.
Don’t expect this in the shops any time soon.
Found via Yanko Design
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Some interesting pictures have emerged today apparently showing a replacement for the Sony Ericsson M600i.
According to the forums the new concept is codenamed the Lizy and has the “Sony Ericsson 123″ model number on the front just like all the Sony Ericsson concept phones.
We know the M600i needs an upgrade to compete with some of this years new smartphones but the main reason would be to add a digital camera, which the Lizy doesn’t have. Other features missing from the M600i were EDGE and HSDPA which might be on the Lizy but its impossible to say at this stage.
Our guess would be that this is just going to be a new model rather than another version of the M600i.
The speculation points to the LIzy being unveiled at CeBit in March.
Via SE-NSE and SE-world.info
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A nice new TV phone has emerged from China this weekend complete with OLED lights embedded into the casing, LG Chocolate style.
Unlike some other TV phones the ZTE F908 has the good looks required to actually appeal to the masses and might help encourage mobile TV adoption.
Specifications and features include DVB-H for the TV signal as well as a pivoting display and 3.6Mbps HSDPA data transfer.
The F908 will be released in China soon but don’t expect to see it anywhere else, unfortunately.
Via engadget
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