Mobile Phone Reviews - GSM MAG

As 2008 ended, we should look back at the cell phone concepts that were born last year. It’s very difficult to keep up with all that’s new on this field but lets try to make a selection of the most interesting concepts that wowed mobile phone savvy and filled us with the hope that maybe someday, why not this year, the industry of cell phones will change the world.

1. Nokia Aeon

2. Steampunk Cell Phone – with a 19th century design, with no display, no 3G, data plan, games or dial pad. The calls can be made thanks to binary-coded punch cards, steampunk. It offers an earpiece, gauges, visible screws and a spinning number-counter.

3. Art Lebedev Cell Phone. The design of this phone is more than a concept as Art Lebedev, the company behind the Optimus Keyboard, is joining forces with Russia’s Scartel. It’s simple, functional and quite elegant and it has a headphone jack and a complete touch-based interface. It will be equipped with WiMax radio, tri-band GSM, micro SD, dual cameras for video-conferencing, an A/V plug, WiFi, and a gigantic 850 x 480 screen.

4. RKS’S Mimique Cell Phone is eye-catching, playful and engaging and it looks like nothing else you’ve ever seen. It will allow you to download features and “skins” that will let you change the graphic interface so that you won’t need to buy a new phone in order to get the features you want. This will greatly extend the lifespan of the phone itself, because the features are never locked into the design. With the Mimique, you’ll always have the newest, coolest phone on the block, because it’s the one phone designed to be everything you want and nothing you don’t.

5. Wooden Maple Cell Phone that has been designed by Hyun Jin Yoon and Eun Hak Lee. The display is hidden inside the wood case made up of African Blackwood and has some of the latest features you’d find in any cell phone to date. An MP3 player, digital camera and the basic functions like calling and SMS.

6. Sony Ericsson’s Biodegradable Cell Phone. The famous cell phones manufacturer launched a concept of an eco-friendly cell phone made up of bio-plastic, recycled plastic and equipped with HTML docs instead of printed ones, and a zero charger with 3.5mW of standby power. This is the type of phone that you could just throw away, once you got tired of it.

7. The Glass iPhone designed by Mac Funamizu looks like it came out of the future as it’s made mostly out of glass. This concept challenges the idea of a traditional handset and probably it won’t see the light of day anytime soon.

8. Ply Concept Phone from KDDI is a very good-looking piece as it’s made up of multiple layers. Each layer has its own very distinct function: a printer, projector, gamepad and sliding downward, a dial pad. If you want to see photos of the Ply you should visit KDDI’s web site.

9. E-Paper&E-Ink Cell Phones. Anthony Reed designed the E-Ink concept phone around a central theme. He used a grid like design to emphasize the grayscale use of the screen. Moreover, E-paper is a display technology that was designed to copy the way that ordinary ink looks on paper. Unlike other types of displays, which usually use a backlight to illuminate its pixels, e-paper reflects light just like ordinary paper. E-paper is capable of holding text and images indefinitely without drawing power.

10. Fold-Away Phones. Thanks to OLED, a new technology that will be widely available soon and to the evolution of E-Ink type displays, Mac Funamizu explored the concept of fold-away phones, which he got from Samsung’s Flexible OLED.