Future(?) Design of Mobile Phones

Sad Loser writes "The future of the mobile phone is here, or at least a bunch of Nokia-sponsored industrial design students' take on the problem. The BBC also has more pictures." Most of these designs are quite silly (a necklace with squeezable beads for an address book?) but at least amusing.

Re:As usual

[markild]

Seems more like an art-college for the artistically challenged.

That's why they make concept designs. So that we feel better about their regular designs.

New Yorker Cartoon

[gEvil (beta)]

I'm reminded of a cartoon that came up on my New Yorker daily desk calendar last week (the cartoon now has a permanent spot on my fridge):

Man talking to a clerk in a cell phone store: "Do you have one of those phones you can talk to people on?"

Re:New Yorker Cartoon

[ateves]

Answer: No, but if you get one of this series, you can download and downgrade the firmware which enables the talking mode again, but normally it`s obsolete.

Re:2015?

[Rob T Firefly]

2015? [bttf.com] We'll all be too busy with our flying cars, fusion generators, dehydrated pizza, levitating skateboards, and holographic sharks to worry about what our phones do.

Re:if this is the future...

[SatanicPuppy]

Please. I'm holding out for the artificial molar that allows perfect sound reproduction through bone conduction [wikipedia.org], and removes one of the last visual cues that distinguish me from a raving lunatic: a visible phone.

I'll walk down the street talking to myself, and smacking myself in the face whenever I lose signal, and (this is the good bit) I'll never get panhandled again.

Re:if this is the future...

[MrSquirrel]

Screw that, if this is what the future holds -- I'm going to enroll in whatever program they're in and design a cellphone that is also a baseball bat. That way, when future-people are talking on their annoying cellphone anal-beads or whatever, I can take out my cellphone and have the satisfaction of bludgeoning them to death.

Re:As usual

[andphi]

Given that the BBC's intended audience is the Queen's Commonwealth, shouldn't it be Joe Sixpint?

Re:if this is the future...

[tehcyder]

I feel quite nostalgic for the days of phones styled after military field radios with car-battery sized fuel packs, when men were men and sheep were worried.
Er...sorry, lost it there for a sec.

Re:As usual

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you saying "smell transmission" is impossible?!

Just let me point out two things:
1. Farting into your smell-transmitting phone while the opposite party is, say, in a room full of people would be INCREDIBLE
2. The professor did it in Futurama with the "smelloscope," so clearly, it is rather possible.