Posts filed under concept phone

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!

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.

Also demonstrating some fancy concept phones at CEATEC 2008 were DoCoMo. As well as a fantastic looking projector phone (above), which projected the phone’s screen onto a flat surface (technology that surely will become reality in the very near future), they also showed off the progress they were making with the latest version of 3G: 3GLTE.

Short for Long Term Evolution, 3GLTE is being touted as 3.9G – i.e. version 3.9 of the third generation of mobile network technology.

Despite appearances, this is a mobile phone and not a satellite phone. Maybe I should say it’s a mobile phone with satellite pretensions. Whatever, it’s the latest concept phone from Japanese company KDDI, and despite its ability to operate without a battery, it’s clearly not going to go on sale any time soon (at least,not in the UK, where our five days of sunshine a year would render it less than useless!)

KDDI also had several other odd-looking concept phones on display at this year’s CEATEC 2008 event, which you can see after the jump.

Remember the Yamaha Music Phones that I blogged about a few days ago? They’re a series of concept phones made by Yamaha for Japanese mobile operator KDDI, each of which combines the humble mobile phone with a musical instrument. There was the Trumpet Phone (or TrumPhone, as someone suggested!), drum phone, synth phone, and three others.

Interesting concept, I bet you were thinking, but these phones are just concepts – there’s no way you can produce any real music on them.

Oh really? Just check out the video taken by Akihabara News. I thought the sounds they made were going to be OK, but not much more than you get from an old 16-bit arcade machine.

Boy was I wrong!

Check out the video after the jump.

If you thought Sony Ericsson had the lead in music phones, think again, as Yamaha have developed several prototype music phones that don’t just play MP3s: they let you create your own tunes as well!

Yamaha are well known in the music trade for developing synthesizers and other musical instruments, so it seems only natural that the company,when asked by Japanese carrier KDDI to develop some phone prototypes, should come up with the synthesizer phone.

Come to think of it, it seems such a natural concept that I can’t believe no-one’s thought of it before! There are all manner of DJ and synth-box units you can use with an iPod, which, as the iPhone has proved, is just a mobile phone without the phone, so why not extend the concept and let your phone help you create music ?

More details of Yamaha’s concept music phones after the jump.

If there’s one thing I love about concept phones, it’s the fact that they’re completely unconstrained by the laws of economics, business, marketing, or even in some cases, the laws of physics!

A concept phone is just that – a concept, showing what could be done if the phone were left solely to a designer without a care for whether or not it could actually be built, much less whether it could be built for a reasonable price.

Mind you, although some are undoubtedly stunning pieces of design, not all of them are what you might call attractive. You can see what I mean after the jump…

Mention the words ‘NVIDIA’ and ‘concept phone’ in the same sentence, and you’ll always cause a stir, and as these video clips show below, with just cause. These are clips taken of NVIDIA’s concept phone on display at MWC 2008. The phone itself is just a mock-up – like Google Android phones on display at MWC 2008, it’s not the phone’s form that’s the main attraction, it’s the user interface and the mobile CPU powering it.

And good gods, what a user interface! NVIDIA are world famous for their stunning GPUs and graphics abilities, but this mobile UI looks liike something straight out of Minority Report!