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Nokia Shows Off Futuristic Phone UIs with Morph Concept

By Wesley Fenlon

Someday, we'll look back on cell phone belt clips and laugh as we slap our flexible phones to our wrists.

Most of the exciting news in the mobile sector these days comes from companies working on iOS or Android--we don’t hear much from Nokia, but the cell phone giant is still out there making phones. In fact, they’re doing some pretty incredible research on futuristic phone technology, primarily with nanotech. It may be decades until we see consumer products taking advantage of Nokia’s research, but the elastic, wearable phone concept looks awesome to us. Alas, by the time something like this is actually possible, it probably won't even seem cool or cutting-edge anymore.


 

Nokia Morph

The Morph is Nokia’s big future-concept project, aimed at showing off most of its research projects in one super device. It’s sort of a phone--more like a flexible touchscreen display that can be molded into a variety of forms, like a flat touchscreen or a wristband. Even if the vague scientific backing of “using nanotechnology” makes this feel more like fiction than reality, we hope devices like this are possible in the future.
  
  

Closer to Reality

Surprisingly, quite a few of the concepts demonstrated in the Nokia Morph video already exist in working forms. Obviously none of them are quite so sophisticated, but they’re real. Researchers in Cambridge have been playing around with flexible silicone rubber, evaporated gold to serve as a conductor, and an extremely malleable elastic touchpad. Even stretched 20% beyond its original size, the touchpad works as designed.
  
  
Our future flexible phones may even be able to smell their surroundings, once again using nanotechnology. By placing nanowires on a chip, Nokia’s researchers have been able to mock up an extremely rudimentary sense of smell. Objects in close proximity with the chip influence the flow of current through the nanowire, which allows it to detect and accurately identify some substances.

The rest of Nokia’s research involves touch gestures and camera projection--in other words, stuff that’s not as futuristic or cool as Morph’s bigger ideas.