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.
F-Circle
This phone, from designer Yuji Ito, is probably the most pragmatic of the CEATAC designs that we have seen. It's also the reason why it caught Fujitsu's attention. The phone combines a rectangular keypad with a round screen. In some ways, it is reminiscent of the Aura, a $2000 luxury phone that Motorola offered last year.
Fold-a-phone
Inspired by Origami, designers Hanna Sahlen and Sachiko Munakata created the concept of a phone that can be folded and unfolded for use. Interesting as the idea is, this is one concept we don't expect to see anytime in the near future: Manufacturers can just barely make a flexible e-ink display, let alone an entire phone that folds up like paper.
Touch Wood
Apart from Fujitsu, NTT DoCoMo also showed off a cool concept device: This one, built out of wood from trees culled during forest thinning. The wood is treated with a coating that makes it resistant to insects and mildew. The device, called Touch Wood, has a body made of cypress wood. NTT DoCoMo used a three-dimensional compression-molding technique developed by Olympus to create the body of the phone. Every handset made using this technique has its own distinctive grain pattern and natural coloring.
Eco-veneers have already been a big hit among PC makers. For instance, bamboo has been especially popular because of its natural look and the ease with which it can be molded. If Dell and Asus can offer bamboo-coated notebooks, there's no reason why NTT DoCoMo can't take the idea a step forward with a wooden phone.
Joystick phone
KDDI also had a concept phone at CEATAC -- with a small twist. It showed a camera-based controller or a "joystick" for phones -- effectively a small plastic tube that would attach itself to the back of a phone with help from a magnet. The joystick is so positioned that the phone's camera can look into it. The phone also has custom software to make this setup work. At the end of the joystick are two squares, red and blue, that the camera focuses on. The software tracks the movement of these squares and interprets it as motion to get a camera-based controller. Yes, this sounds like a hack -- and according to reports, it doesn't work very well yet either.
Photo: F-Circle phone (Pink Tentacle), KDDI controller (Ubergizmo)
