Mobile Mentalism» Prototypes Archives – MobileMentalism

LG Exo – the world’s first curved phone

Mike Evans — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 23:46:03 +0000

If you’re the jaded type, who thinks that even the very latest all-singing all-dancing superphone is just a boring update of what came before (really? Things must be bad!), then take a look at this. It’s the LG Exo, a phone with features that are very similar to other superphones (e.g. 1GHz CPU, 5 megapixel camera, 3.8″ OLED display, etc.), but with one crucial difference – it’s curved.

In fact, it’s the world’s first curved phone, which can apparently withstand any kind of damage.

LG Exo overview

Sounds too good to be true doesnt it? Well, it is. It’s just a concept, designed by Benjamin Lotte. As concepts go, it’s quite a good one, although obviously you should take the specs with a pinch of salt, as the great thing abotu concepts is you can invent pretty much whatever spec you like.

I’m not entirely sure I like the curved nature of the phone, though. Although it would certainly be a talking point, I can’t see it fitting in your pocket too well.

[Source: TechFresh]

Video: Unbelievable 3D Maps on Android

admin — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 23:24:15 +0000

Ericsson’s R&D labs have been working on something super-tasty – 3D maps for Android phones. They’ve create a set of APIs that push 3D map data to Android phones, which let you rotate the maps, zoom in and out, and even zoom into things like buildings.

Well, not quite zoom into, but see the video for yourself (after the jump), and you’ll see if feels like you can fly into someone’s bedroom window!

It’s only a work in progress at the moment, so the mapping data is only available for Stockholm. It clearly works though, so it shouldn’t be too long before mobile mapping looks this good on every phone!

[Source: Ericsson Labs, via Mobile Crunch]

Video of Synaptics Fuse, the first squeezable haptic phone

Mike Evans — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 22:33:02 +0000

If you think touchscreens are old fashioned and accelerometers are so last year, then Synaptics have go the phone for you – the Synaptics Fuse, a new prototype phone with working technology that was shown off at CES 2010 this week.

The Fuse features more capacitive touchscreens in one phone than in the entire range of Nokia devices! The front display in obviously a capacitive touchscreen, but so too is the back…and the sides as well!

OK, so they’re not screens exactly, but they are capacitive and they do respond to touch to produce a responsive interactive interface unlike any ohter phone on the market today.

More details and video after the jump.

One of the most impressive features of the Synaptics Fuse is that the sides aren’t just touch-sensitive, they’re squeeze sensitive too – they can sense the amount of pressure you apply, and an application can react accordingly.

In the video below, squeezing the sides of the phone generates bubbles, as if you were squeezing a washing up liquid bottle. Moving your fingers along the back of the device attracts the bubbles, while the front touchscreen repels them.

The back touch interface is locally haptic, too – that is, rather than the whole phone vibrating when you hit something (like a bubble in this case, or, more likely, a key in a real phone!), only the area directly under the finger that triggered the event vibrates.

Altogether, this adds a completely new dimension to mobile phone interfaces, and one that’s itching to be used on the new range of superphones that are being launched this year.

The Synaptics Fuse is still just a prototype at the moment, but it’s working technology and the company wil have a working mobile phone interface on show at MWC next month. It’s not unrealistic to see this technology released on a phone later this year, or next year at the very latest.

[Source: Engadget]

Video of Asus Waveface concept phone

admin — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 01:48:40 +0000

Asus have a tradition of showing off odd-looking concept phones at CES, and CES 2010 is no different. They’ve gone one better this year, though. They’ve come up with a whole range of concept gadgets, each given the WaveFace name, and all of which jump on as many bandwagons as Asus could think of!

The concepts aren’t exactly new. Wearable smartphones, information pushed to you whenever you need it, info available form all sources at all times, yada yada!

The only difference is that the concepts are being demoed at an electronics show where the gadgets are actually doing exactly what Asus reckons the devices of the future will be doing!

Other than the bendy smartphone, everything else you see in the video after the jump is pretty much here now – just check out the latest gadgets at CES 2010 to see for yourself!

[Source: Pocket-lint]

Android phones get huge speed boost thanks to Intel

Mike Evans — Thu, 07 May 2009 17:37:25 +0000

Researchers at Intel are working on a new way of speeding up smartphones such as Android and the iPhone using the concept of Cloud Computing. Called CloneCloud, Intel’s research literally creates a clone of a smartphone on a server. When the smartphone needs to perform CPU-intensive tasks or tasks that drain the battery, it connects to its clone on the server, and lets the clone do the heavy lifting. All the smartphone has to do is to wait for the results to be returned.

The advantage of this is obvious. Servers are orders of magnitude faster than smartphones, and they don’t rely on batteries either! Not only does the CloneCloud concept speed up execution, therefore, it should also lead to significantly longer battery life as well as enabling the use of much more complex applications such as face recognition.

More details after the jump.

What type of performance improvement can we expect? Well, according to ReadWriteWeb, researchers Byung-Gon Chun and Petros Maniatis, their prototype Android app improved the performance of a face recognition from 100 seconds to just 1 second!

There’s obviously the problem of latency – establishing a connection, sending data to the clone and waiting for the result all takes time. But as you can see, that pales into insignificance compared to the performance gains achieved by running CPU-intensive apps on the server.

This is hugely impressive stuff, but also incredibly complex, so don’t expect a commercial service to be operational in the near future. However, Chun and Maniaitis will be showing off a prototype at the HotOS XII conference in Switzerland later this month

Tiny super-usable smartphones with the power of a server – welcome to the future!

[Source: Intel Research via ReadWriteWeb]

Nokia Research gadget in stealth mode at CES

Mike Evans — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 00:06:19 +0000

Now here’s something that didn’t get much attention at CES, yet has the potential to radically change the way you live your life. Nokia were showing off a new gadget in what can only be described as stealth mode – stealth, simply because although it was on show, nobody seemed to spot it!

The gadget in question is straight from the Nokia Research Center, and is called the Locate Sensor (with a name like that, you can tell it’s from their research arm rather than their marketing department!). All it is,simply, is a little gizmo that you can attach to things, and that interacts with your phone according to the distance it is away from you.

Why is this so important?…

Well, just think of its uses. Attach it to your keys, and your phone will beep when you’re about to leave the house but your keys are still in the lounge. Lose you keys, and Locate Sensor will find them for you. That alone will seriously change the way I live my life, shaving hours off every day, but there are other things this nifty gadget can do as well.

Attach a sensor to yourself, and the phone can be programmed to disable itself if it’s more than say 5m away from you – in other words, only you can use your phone (or a, quite literally, really close friend!)

The Locate Sensor doesn’t use GPS – rather, it operates using a simple low power signal, so it doesn’t chew up the batteries. In fact, it can last up to 18 months on one battery!

The Locate Sensor is such a superbly simple idea, that Nokia would be mad not to bring it into full production. I’d saves weeks of my life each year with this thing – come on Nokia, do us all a favour and out it on sale!

[Source: ElectricPig]

Intel working on battery-free mobile phones

Mike Evans — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:50:06 +0000

Interesting news reaches us from sister-site MediaMentalism of new technology being developed by Intel that could lead to the development of mobile phones and other mobile and portable gadgets that don’t need batteries. Intel are working on a series of sensors that can capture energy from the environment.

The sun is an obvious example of where this energy comes from, but other examples that Intel are looking at include the motion of a trackball on a mobile phone and even the energy from a mobile phone basestation.

More info over at MediaMentalism.

Gorgeous Nokia concept phone just adds water

Mike Evans — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 19:37:56 +0000

This gorgeous new concept phone design adds a new twist to the touchscreen craze that’s been sweeping the mobile phone world ever since the launch of the iPhone last year. Touchscreens are great when using gestures to control your user interface, but one of the key problems is, well, the lack of keys when entering text.

Unless there’s some kind of tactile feedback (such as that provided by Samsung’s haptic touchscreen phones), it’s difficult to determine whether you’ve selected a virtual key or not, thus slowing down text entry.

The new Nokia concept phone, designed by Rune Larsen, fixes that by introducing water. Specifically, the touchscreen contains a membrane-like keypad that can inflate and deflate according to whether the user wants the touchscreen to be completely flat or not.

For example,when you want to use the keypad, water is pumped into the keys, which inflate to give a physical key to press. When you want to use the touchscreen, the water is pumped out, making the screen completely flat. Not sure where the water goes though!

Like all good concept phones, this is just that – a concept, and it’s doubtful that it’ll ever see the light of day. What’s beyond doubt, though, is just how stunning this phone looks. If Nokia could produce a phone that looked this good, irrespective of whether it contains water or not, they’d really be able to give the iPhone a run for its money.

[Source: YankoDesign]

Projector phones and mobile HD displays on their way

Mike Evans — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 23:25:12 +0000

A number of prototype mobile phone display technologies have been demoed at this year’s CEATEC 2008 exhibition in Japan. In addition to KDDI’s 3D mobile phone displays, there were a number of mobile phone projectors as well, which project the image from your phone’s screen onto a wall at sizes up to 50″.

This technology has been previewed before by other companies, but never in devices as small as a mobile phone. Previous attempts used separate boxes and shrinking the components was always a challenge. Now, it seems, having tiny devices with massive displays is becoming closer and closer, with companies such as KDDI and DoCoMo showing off units that genuinely are small enough for a mobile phone.

Samsung were also showing off a new OLED display that can display at resolutions of up to 240 x 800 with 16.7 million colours at a contrast ratio of 100,000:1, with a contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1 predicted for the near future. Such displays are rock solid, enabling text and images to be produced in much finer details, with superb clarity and picture quality approaching that of HD.

With 3D displays and projector technology, the phone is mutating into an all in one entertainment. In the not too distant future the term “phone” will seem as archaic as “horseless carriage” does now as these devices continue to evolve into so much more than just a communications device.

[Source: ITMedia]

World’s first 3D mobile phone screen

Mike Evans — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 23:20:09 +0000

KDDI have been showing off a new prototype LCD display screen destined for mobile phones that’s capable of showing 3D images. Obviously you don’t get the full effect in the picture here, but that’s because you’re not just seeing one image: you’re seeing two, projected and interlaced by two separate LCD displays, one of which outputs images for the left eye, and the other for the right eye.

With each image subtly different in position, the technique uses these stereoscopic LCD displays to fools the eye into thinking it’s a real 3D image that’ being perceived. KDDI were demonstrating a prototype with a resolution of 480 x 800 pixels, and both still images and video could be viewed in 3D.

[Source: ITMedia]