The last post we ran on concept phones was in April of this year, and we ran only a short piece about one item. Today, we’re expanding the … ahem … concept of concept phones and bringing you different applications of a few different design ideas. Whether these will evolve into wide-scale development, we have no idea, but we do know that some aspect of at least one concept has already been adopted in mobile phones – transparency.
Transparent Mobile Phones
The Korean manufacturer, LG, was the first to market a mobile phone that incorporated transparency in its design beyond the display screen itself. The LG GD900 Crystal was introduced in 2009 with a sliding, transparent keyboard that supplemented and expanded the touchscreen input of the opaque smartphone.
The functionality of the transparent slide-out was multi-fold: You can use it for handwriting input, enhance or adjust zooms, rewinds and more while not interrupting what you’re doing or seeing on the main display screen. Definitely a brilliant idea.
But the LG smartphone model doesn’t take the transparency concept nearly as far as other concept phones. Designer Max Funamizu presented his very innovative concept in mobile phones that are fully or mostly transparent, depending on the exact model.
He invented a sliding, dual-face transparent mobile phone, a flip phone and a few other conceptual uses of transparency in mobile communications. One of our favourites he calls “Glassy Glass.” This particular model is a single-level smartphone that not only enables all or most of “the usual” features in mobile phones but also a neat weather correlation: Its display changes to match the weather. Clear, sunny days present a clear appearance; rainy days present a water-borne appearance, and snowy days present a slightly opaque appearance – all those snow flakes, you understand.
Very cool. Very neat. Very avant guarde.
But transparent mobile phones don’t stop there quite yet. The Samsung Aqua is a water-based mobile phone that uses a liquid battery to continue the transparency theme in the mobile phone. The South Korean inventor, Bon Seop Ku, stated he was inspired by playing with a small pool of water – running his finger through it and drawing.
Very sleek and simple, the Samsung Aqua sports an AMOLED display, and the user can erase the icons simply by rubbing the device gently between the hands. Whether the icons can be recreated is unknown, so be careful.
See anything you like? Or should that be, don’t see anything you like?