To some people, the idea of luxury for a cell phone is to riddle it up with diamonds and gemstones. That’s just unnecessarily gaudy. Aston Martin has a different idea when it comes to understated classiness and that’s demonstrated by the luxury car company’s upcoming smartphone concept. It’s clear.

Aston Martin is partnering up with Canada’s Mobiado to produce “a line of high-end handsets to be launched in May of this year.” The most impressive of the bunch is the CPT002, because it is constructed for a single slab of solid sapphire crystal, resulting in a completely transparent capacitive touchscreen.

Yes, you can see right through the phone… aside from the Mobiado and Aston Martin marques. What about the components, you might ask? Well, they’ve hidden the battery, SIM card, and other electronic doodahs into the platinum sides of the phone. That’s crazy and it really puts something like the Atrix or iPhone to shame.

Too bad the Aston Martin CPT002 is just a concept. It’d go really well with my DB9.

[GizMag, Mobiado]

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What if you could maintain the exact same outward appearance for your phone while completely upgrading its internals? Rogue designer Antoine Brieux is exploring precisely this idea with his HTC Tube smartphone concept.

The phone itself is split into an outside shell and an inside “cartridge.” The real guts of the phone are found in the cartridge, which would effectively upgrade the processor, storage capacity, camera, and other necessary bits. The magnesium alloy shell then provides a 4.65-inch Super AMOLED display, HDMI port, and so on.

Brieux is envisioning three different cartridge levels. The Starter Edition gets an 800MHz Snapdragon CPU, Android 2.2 with HTC Sense, 8GB Flash, and a 3.2MP cam. The Smart Edition gets bumped to a 1GHz CPU, Windows Phone 7, 16GB Flash memory, and a 5.0MP cam with 720p video.

The granddaddy of them all, though, is the Ultimate Edition cartridge. It gets a 1.5GHz dual core Snapdragon with 64GB Flash, 12MP cam, 1080p video, and a dual boot Android 2.2 + Windows Phone 7 operating environment. Yeah, dual boot. I’m sure that’ll fly with HTC, Google, and Microsoft.

While the whole cartridge mechanism for the HTC Tube is certainly different, I very much doubt that we’ll be seeing anything commercially available with this kind of form factor any time soon.

[Yanko via Antoine Brieux]

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Nokia Kinetic concept prototype

After a while, you start to wonder what other innovations can possibly come into the mobile phone industry. And then, you are treated to devices like the Nokia Kinetic concept phone. Here it’s shown in prototype form. It’s not an official Nokia concept, so don’t get your hopes up just yet. The Nokia Kinetic comes from university student Jeremy Innes-Hopkins, but it does prove to have a very interesting idea. You see, there’s an electromagnet in its base. When a call comes in (or any number of other events), the phone can stand up. You can then push it back down to reject the call.

The Nokia Kinetic certainly has a stranger form factor, with its bulbous base and slim top, but that almost adds to its unique appeal. It also helps that Innes-Hopkins worked on the project with former Nokia designer Silas Grant. He was the one that worked on phones like the Nokia 8800 Scirocco.

[T3 via Jeremy Innes-Hopkins]

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