The first Galaxy Note is described as some as a phablet, finding an odd middle ground between phones and tablets. Then, you have devices like the Sony Tablet P, which folds up into a phone-sized device when not in use, but can fold open to reveal a full tablet experience. The thing is neither of this is particularly ideal for people who want both a true smartphone and a true tablet experience.

Turning to designer Patrik Eriksson, we find what he calls the Pocket Tablet Concept. It’s meant to be “a happy marriage between a smartphone and… a tablet.” The key here is the utilization of flexible OLED technology. In closed form, the Pocket Tablet concept will look like most other Android smartphones these days, except the display is virtually edge-to-edge. However, you can unravel the device to reveal about double the screen real estate for a tablet experience.

Based on these conceptual drawings, it looks like the second “half” of the display is constantly exposed as the back of the device, since it looks like the Pocket Tablet Concept folds onto itself like how you would fold back a paperback book. This initially left me wondering about the rear camera, but you’ll notice that the front plate seems to be slightly taller than the back plate. Presumably, the camera could fit in that spot.

Of course, the bigger challenge is figuring out how to get flexible OLED displays to this level where they are able to be completely folded over and still remain fully operational. It’s only a matter of time, I suppose, as we move toward more 7-inch tablets and more 5-inch phones, finding that “happy marriage” will hopefully come sooner rather than later.

[Source]

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Modern advances in science have helped many people overcome their disabilities. If your sense of hearing is going, a hearing aid can help. If you’re near-sighted, you can get glasses, contact lenses, or laser eye surgery. But what if you are completely blind? Is there a solution for that? Designer Xu Guang-suo sure thinks so and that’s how he came up with the Navigation Glasses for the Blind.

In a sense, it allows people who are blind to “literally visualize their surroundings.” This doesn’t mean that they’ll be able to see in the conventional sense, however. Instead, the Navigation Glasses are outfitted with sensors that pick up elements in the environment and then this information is fed back in the form of auditory cues to the user.

You could say that it is like a form of sonar, allowing the user to interpret the world around them in the form of reflected sound. The range appears to be beyond 180-degrees, offering a good sense of peripheral “vision.” The problem is that Xu Guang-suo hasn’t indicated at all how this would really work and how the person would be able to understand the auditory signals. One day, perhaps. One day.

[Source]

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Have you ever wanted to have your own private tropical island, but you couldn’t be bothered to buy the land? What if you want to be eco-friendly while on your sunny vacation too? Apparently, you can with this floating island.

To be fair, it’s not really an island. It’s probably more appropriate to call it an island-shaped boat that’ll work as a self-enclosed resort. Designed by Michele Puzzolante, the Solar Floating Resort (SFR) concept is large enough to accommodate six people with plenty of room to spare. There’s a Jacuzzi on deck and you can go underneath for an underwater observation room.

The biggest feature, though, is the use of a photovoltaic thin-film skin all along the round roof. These solar panels can collect sunlight throughout the day, generating enough clean electricity to power you through the night. And inside, the same photovoltaic skin is used to capture power from your artificial interior lights.

Aside from the obvious hurdles associated with manufacturing such a seafaring mobile resort, there’s one other issue: there doesn’t appear to be any closets. Where are you going to put your eco clothing? That’s not very luxurious at all.

[Source]

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And that appears to be the idea behind the Floater ePhone concept by designer Jeong Jaewan. What you get is a device with a standard 4.6-inch smartphone display, but this can be “unfolded” to give a 6-inch experience similar to the Kindle. The designer uses the word unfolded, but it looks more like the secondary display fits into a slot in the main unit. I’d worry that this makes the main device far too thick by today’s standards.

He also says that these are LCDs, but the concept images look a lot more like the e-ink displays that you see on eReaders like the Kindle or Kobo. Whatever the case, it looks a little too clunky for my tastes and it certainly doesn’t help that it’s called the Floater. Some things just don’t translate well.

[Source]

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Sometimes, you just can’t decide. Do you want a smooth and comfortable ride for cruising around the city doing errands? Or do you want a more aggressive bike so you can rip through the mountain pass and around the track? The idea with the Shavit electric motorcycle is that you can have both.

This concept by Eyal Melnik is being dubbed a “morphing” e-bike. The handlebars, footpads, and seat height are all independently adjustable. You can angle the seat upwards, nudge the footpads a little further back and push the handlebars down, giving you that race stance around the track. When you’re in town, you move those back and you’re sitting upright again.

It’s an interesting idea, to be sure. Considering that all cars have some level of adjustability, particularly for the seat and the steering wheel, I can’t see why motorcycles should be all that different. The Shavit just takes it a little further. You’ll also notice the lack of a conventional gas tank. This is an e-bike, after all, so I’m not so sure that it’d be a really fast sports bike as much as it would be a fun sporty bike. Check out how it would morph in the video.

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You know how that Acer Iconia tablet does the dual touchscreen thing? This Fujitsu laptop concept takes that idea to another level, because the top display would be constructed with a flexible material, allowing you to bend and flex it to your heart’s desire.

Naturally, the concept is not officially endorsed by the folks at Fujitsu and it just comes by way of Yanko Design. Even so, the idea of having bendable AMOLED screens is moving closer toward the realm of commercial viability. This is just an idea, but it means that you can curve the screen when you want to view it at certain angles, for example.

Another example that the designer uses is to hold the notebook like a book. You then “flip” through the various pages of an e-book or a folder, thumbing it through it as if it had physical pages. I’m not sold on this as a concept, but it would certainly make for quite the novel form factor. And I think that’s just the thing: it’d be novel. I’m not sure it would be useful enough for anyone to actually want it. But hey, innovation is always a good thing.

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Yes, we have all had this problem – the battery charger was just a couple of inches too short for us to put the phone on the desk so we had to leave it on desk’s corner. And then you know what happend next. Yuchen Liu is a designer who apparently got so annoyed by short cords that he decided to invent a ball-of-yarn battery charger. This way, users will never fear that the cord will run short. The wonder-cord, which has been codenamed Woll Ball Charger really looks like a ball of yarn. Users can wrap it into itself and then just unwrap it easily when they need more cord. Some users may be surprised at first by Woll Ball Charger’s appearance, but they will soon realize that its design is very useful. And I think the cat agrees with me on this one.

[Yanko Design]

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Innovation is important. It really is. But when inventors start trying to reinvent the mudflap to erase any and all tiny inconveniences from everyday human life, it can really get a bit redundant.

As an example, see the Double USB from Yanko Design. Based on the idea that having to flip the USB plug every now and again to take a second stab at plugging in your USB-powered heated coaster is genuinely a problem, the tip of the Double USB plug is essentially exactly the same as the plugs of today, only there are two of those little white bits of connector plastic instead of one, and they’re spring-loaded. The one in the equivalent position to being upside down simply pushes back out of the way, allowing the other to complete the connection.

Sure, that may be a plus if you’re scrambling to plug in your iPod to your friend’s computer during a night of heroic drinking while they’re away, allowing you to replace their seemingly endless list of country music with more bearable tunes of your own. One stab and you’re in. But as with anything that contains moving parts and springs, it’ll wear down quickly and eventually break, leaving you without a cord, doomed to death-by-Q-tip when you can’t impose heavy music on your wimpy friends at their parties.

This is one design, Yanko, that I’m going to pass on. But show me a magical invention to stop me from plugging my headphones into the USB port when I’m not looking again and I’m there.

[Yanko Design via Wired]

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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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From Yanko Design comes another surprisingly creative concept smartphone, the Flip. And, true to its name, it is a flip phone… but not in the sense you would imagine.

The Flip has three full-sized Super AMOLED touchscreens and a full QWERTY keyboard on three panels attached by steel mesh hinges. This allows for a book-like view across two of the screens; a texting or writing view with the keyboard, camera and one touch screen exposed; or a triangle prism view.

It’s the prism view that really makes the phone unique in the purest sense of the word. It’s shown in the video used as a Rolodex-like way to scroll through lists, by two people on opposite sides of a table watching video on two of the screens, and as a make-shift vase. It’s a never-before-seen concept of form for potential smartphones.

And it’s absolutely as cutting-edge functional as it is gorgeous, with a custom Android OS used in inventive ways that you have to see to truly appreciate.

If no cell phone manufacturers pick up on this this concept, we now know exactly what we’re missing out on.

[Yanko Design]

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