LG Japan hosted a Mobile Design Contest and with the winners announced the phones were put on display at a Tokyo Designers Week event. Although the phones are only concepts and may never actually become products, its always interesting to see the designs and concepts that come out of these competitions.
The winning design was “Planet Phone”, the circular smooth phone takes inspiration from our planet and the people on it to develop this unique clam shell mobile. The top of the phone has LED lights embedded in it. The lights represent the users friends and the frequency of contact between them. The more you keep in touch with your friends the more the lights stay in the center, but as your communication drops the LEDs retreat to the outskirts of the phone.
Our second favorite design is the Temprature Phone concept. Similar to the Planet Phone concept it aims to raise awareness of your friends. The back of the phone has a number of tiles which can be removed from the phone and shared with friends. You can give your friends a tile with your name on it and vise versa, this provides a unique design for every cell phone. The Temperature phone also has LED lights behind the name tiles which glow according to the temprature of the place your friend is. While the tile thing seems like something that tweens would find ‘totally awsome’, the temprature thing although neat is a little less usefull/commercial.
