Softphone Loves To Be Squeezed, Opened, Touched

What’s with all this hard plastic and cold metal? Designer Qian Jiang has come up with a cell phone concept that is a heck of a lot more pliable and gushy than anything on the market. Dubbed the SoftPhone, the handset is amazingly lightweight, because the main body appears to be built out of a cotton-like material. The idea is that the SoftPhone is comprised of “a series of discs with electronic fabric stretched in between.”

In its idle state, you get a small circle with a standard numeric keypad. If you get the outer ring a squeeze, you hang up on your current call. Strangely, the level of squeezing can also bring about different functions, so be careful about tossing this in your backpack where you might start dialing without knowing it. Gaining access to full QWERTY is even stranger, because you can open the Softphone much like a windshield sunshade.

Most of the actual electronics — antenna, battery, camera, etc. — are “contained inside a tiny clip which itself is made of soft, squeezable, stress-reducing silica.” Yup, the Softphone is a stress ball too. Weird…