Top 10 most beautiful smartphone concepts
Manufacturers like Samsung and LG are constantly trying to reinvent the mobile phone with new designs. Clearly, though, they’re not trying as hard as the creatives behind these 10 weird and wonderful smartphone concepts.
The recently-announced, and beautifully designed Samsung Galaxy S7 and LG G5 highlight how serious the big manufacturers are about aesthetics.
Saying that, though, we’ve yet to really see one of the big guns try something completely off-key, and produce a mobile phone that truly stands out from the crowd.
After you take a look through these 10 beautiful smartphone concepts, you’ll see exactly what we mean…
Kyocera EOS
We’ll start with a concept from 6 years ago, the flexible, foldable Kyocera EOS, a concept that looked kinda nice, and that used shape-memory alloys to bend its body into the most useful shape for whatever task you were doing. It never got made, of course (perhaps because no-one’s figured out how to actually do what Kyocera wanted to do), but they dared to dream!
Nokia 888
Quite a lot of people dared to dream of folding phones, in fact, and one of the groups that did (in fact, they beat Kyocera to the punch by about 4 years) was Nokia. Back before smartwatches became a thing, they imagined the Nokia 888, a bendy phone that was so flexible, you could wrap it round your wrist.
Nokia Morph
Nokia kept on dreaming about bendy phones, as it happens, because they then went on to come up with one of the most famous concept phones ever, the Nokia Morph. Again, it was flexible and bendable, but what really set it apart was the tech Nokia envisaged for its construction.
Yep, we’re talking nanotechnology, so that the Nokia Morph was conceived to have a bendable body, transparent electronics so that the whole thing was see-through, and a self-cleaning surface that used “nanograss” to charge itself using solar energy.
Needless to say, we’re not quite there yet…
Packet Phone
Some people envisaged a different use for folding technology, however. One such person was Emir Rafat, who in 2008 came up with a design called the Packet Phone. Where other concepts used flexible tech to make a bendable phone, this one involves a phone with, effectively, 5 screens, which folds up into a diddy wee package only 5cm x 5cm, for the ultimate in pocketability.
Blackberry Empathy
Next up, we have the result of what happens when you ask art students to design a phone, the Blackberry Empathy. What’s really of note, however, is not the faceted, jewel-like design. No, what’s really notable is the evidence that this was designed by art college students.
Basically, it comes with a mood ring…
Modia
We could talk about the fact that the Modai (designed by Julius Tarng) is modular, allowing you to upgrade components when new parts are developed, but we’re not going to. What’s really cool about this concept is the “peelstand”, a flexible backplate that can sort of pull away from the body of the phone.
Just imagine it: a phone that can stand up when your alarm goes off in the morning (and probably display a frowny face if you push it back down to have another 5 minutes), or that can jab you in the leg when you get a text message, so you never miss a message again!
Kambala
Next up, we have a phone that takes two disparate concepts and fuses them into one slightly weird, but damnably cool, concept. Designed by Ilshat Garipov, the Kambala has a flexible body, and when you squeeze it, out pops a little flexible headset for you to wear.
Oh, and the body of both the phone and the headset? Yeah, it’s got chameleonic skin, so what we have here is the only stealth-phone on this list…
Tron Phone
Next up, we come to a phone designed by Andrew D. Morgan, and, well, let;s not beat about the bush; it’s a Tron phone. It’s styled after the movie Tron Legacy, so it’s got glowy lines and everything!
It’s just a shame that it will never be made into a real phone (because, y’know, there’s no screen on it), but maybe we’ll see a production phone look like this one day, because if there’s one thing every bit of scifi ever has taught us, it’s that glowy lines are the future.
EmoPulse
We move from a phone that’s never going to happen to one that actually is! It’s called the EmoPulse, and the cool thing here is that it’s actually going into production. We’re not sure how functional it will be (we’d have to get our mitts on one to fiddle about with it, for that), but it certainly looks the part.
In fact, this author firmly states that it’s what smartwatches should always have been like, because unlike all other smartwatches, this is an actual, fully-functioning smartphone that you wear on your wrist.
Project Ara
Finally, we come to something else that’s happening for real, although in this case, no-one’s quite sure when it will come to fruition. It is, of course, Google’s Project Ara, the fully modular smartphone that lets you swap out bits for other, more advanced bits, whenever the mood takes you. While the overall look might not be to everyone’s tastes (the modular nature makes it look a bit segmented, like a sort of… Phone Centipede… yeah, best not to dwell on that image too long), the potential functionality is mind-boggling.
Could be a game-changer, that!
And there we have it, a brief look at our favourite concept phones over the years. Thought of any particular favourites that we’ve missed? Leave us a comment, and share them with the world!
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