Future Phones Dazzle With Design

Concept devices go where most product designers fear to tread. They are dream gadgets that hint at possibilities beyond what current technology can support — or what current fashion can accept.

And that’s just why we like them. They may be fantasies, but concept designs point at a future that today’s designers aspire towards.

Some interesting new concept phones made an appearance this week at CEATEC, the Japanese equivalent of the Consumer Electronics Show. These included a chameleon-like phone that could change its skin depending on its surroundings, a phone whose casing is made of wood and a phone with a flexible screen that can assume different configurations (shown above).

A major source of the concept phones this year has been Fujitsu, which ran a mobile-phone–design contest. But other companies such as NTT DoCoMo and KDDI also offered their futuristic phone ideas.

Of course, these phones aren’t real. Some of them aren’t even in the prototype stage.  Yet they are interesting because they provide a glimpse of what lies ahead — even if it’s still only on paper.

Chamelephone

Designer Hiroyuki Tabuchi created this concept with the idea that the mobile phone’s body can mimic and take on the texture of the surface that it is placed on. It’s a neat idea, but there’s no word on how that might be possible. Current material science doesn’t support this, so it would have to be done with some kind of display technology, like e-ink or OLED. As pretty as the concepts look, we won’t count on seeing these phones for a few years — at least.