Comms: after bendy glasses and buses, here comes the bendy phone
We are getting closer to the truly wearable computer as Nokia shows its flexible phone.
You can bend it, shape it anyway you want it - well, kind of. We've had flexible keyboards for a while, but the concept of a flexible mobile phone seems - well - wrong, somehow.
But Nokia thinks otherwise and, let's face it, except for Motorola's flip phone idea, almost every innovation in mobile phone design for the past ten years has come from Nokia.
The Banana Phone - yeah, right. Except that even today manufacturers are crowing that they have a sliding front on their phones. The Nokia Communicator - who would want one of those? Just look at the people on the train and in the plane who would die without their Blackberry or O2 or any one of the host of cross-over devices that populate the market now.
The "Morph" is a long way from production and probably won't make it at all in its present guise - but the tech inside it - it adopts widespread use of nanotechnology - is not far away from deployment in a number of devices, driven primarily by the medical industry.
If it works, the tech will revolutionise all manner of things. A computer in your wrist watch - with the main board in the strap. An MP3 player that wraps around your ear in a soft-gel coating.
There have to be some hard bits - connectors and the like. But mostly the Nokia Morph - which Nokia says will find its way into products within seven years is a concept that one would be very unwise to dismiss.
pic credit: Nokia.
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