Five Insane Ideas for Futuristic Smartphones That Look Nothing Like Your iPhone

When you get down to it, most of today’s rectangular, 4- to 5-inch touchscreen smartphones look pretty similar to one another. 

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Some designers out there have much different ideas about what smartphones can look like. 

In an attempt to completely melt your mind—or at least make you see past the black rectangle—we’ve rounded up some of the craziest smartphone design concepts we could find. In fact, the looks and functions of these gizmos are so innovative, they’re actually from the future (in other words, they haven’t been made yet).

So check it out: ideas for smartphones that will put your beloved iPhone to shame.

Philips Fluid

(Image: crunchwear.com)

Sure, there’s a lot of hype surrounding the smartwatch right now. But most smartwatches have been mere companion pieces for the smartphone in your pocket.

But what if your smartphone was your smartwatch…and vice versa? Even better, right?

Enter Fluid, a device concept by Brazilian designer Dinard da Mata. This smartwatch/smartphone reminds us of a slap bracelet from the 1990s. But with a flexible touchscreen, the gadget would certainly serve as more than just a hip fashion statement.

(Image: crunchwear.com)

Mock-ups of Fluid show it being used to do everything from making calls to playing video games. Meanwhile, the whole device is thin enough to wrap around your wrist. Seems like the time is right for a smartphone like this to hit the market. Now if only the technology existed. 

Paddle

(Image: YouTube/Raf Ramakers)

Think of Paddle as the sort of Rubik’s Cube of smartphone designs. Created by a group at Hasselt University in Belgium, the project imagines a device without a distinctive shape, a “highly deformable” smartphone that can also take the form of a tablet, a ring, or other offbeat shapes.

Paddle’s concept video was made with the help of projectors, but the ambition is to one day build touchscreens into the device that would allow for and react to the folding functions demonstrated. A realized Paddle prototype would allow for unfolding the device to view things like maps, and folding it up to single-hand phone size for making calls, for example.

Project Ara

It used to be commonplace to upgrade your PC, piece by piece, making it easy to hang onto the same machine for years. That’s the thought behind Project Ara.

Called a “modular” smartphone, Ara would allow owners to swap out their device’s camera for a newer one, upgrade memory capacity, or even add new processors, making it all as simple as connecting Lego blocks. That’s the idea, anyhow.

Ara began as something called Phonebloks, which was really nothing more than a concept video and a humble request for support. That support eventually came by way of a partnership with Motorola and Google, and now the modular smartphone concept is actually coming to life.

Stay tuned for more info on Project Ara in the coming months.
Nokia Morph

Nokia’s wild smartphone idea is probably the closest of the bunch to honest-to-goodness science fiction. It’s called Morph, and the name basically says it all.
Morph would be made with a special nanotechnology that allows for shape shifting, or morphing. The transistors in this nanotechnology would be so small that 10,000 could fit on the single hair of a fly, according to the device presentation video.

The goal would be to create a smartphone that could also potentially shift into the form of a tablet, an earpiece, or a watch. And on top of that, it would be self-cleaning and solar powered. Sign us up, right?

The bad news is that Nokia first teased us with this concept in 2008. And although we all know that Rome wasn’t built in a day, we sure haven’t seen anything that would lead us to believe that a gadget like Morph is any closer to becoming reality. Maybe we’ll hear something after six more years.

iPhone with projection screens

The physical design of this iPhone 6 concept may appear familiar, but the function is pretty far out there. Developed by SET Solution, this proposed version of Apple’s smartphone would pack projectors, providing for essentially three touchscreens when the device is placed on a table surface, as well as some really cool (and slightly unbelievable) 3D interaction with the main screen. 

The projection trick is definitely this mock-up gadget’s show-stopping feature, but it also sports a small notification screen inside the phone’s home button, which sure seems like a simple but useful idea for an add-on to today’s iPhone.