Innovation: The smartphone's shape-shifting future

The smartphone of the future might lose its sleek, solid shell to become soft and squeezable, able to alter its appearance to signal an alert. New Scientist reports.

Shwetak Patel, a computer science and engineering researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle, and colleagues have developed a squeezable cellphone – SqueezeBlock – using tiny motors built into the casing to mimic the behaviour of a spring.

... Shwetak's team isn't alone in exploring how a handset's physical attributes could communicate something about its state. Back in 2008, Fabian Hemmert, a researcher at Deutsche Telekom Laboratories in Berlin, Germany, breathed virtual life into a cellphone. His phone "inhales" and "exhales" at a steady rate, which can increase suddenly to indicate an incoming call, or ebb away as the battery dies.

Read full article.

Other squeezable cell phone concepts: -The soft phone concept by Qian

emily | 8:52 AM | Cell Phone Designs and Concepts |
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