Royal College of Art students were set an industrial design challenge by 3 Mobile; they had to design the handset of the future. While some of the prototype designs weren't quite enough to have Apple nervous, others were elegant designs that suggested clever use of likely future technologies. I picked out my favourites as we pottered around, but you can check out these and other design projects at the RCA from today.
Pictured here is the Auxo, an organic design concept for a phone which downloads your personal profile and is forever customised just to you. It would ripple to confirm the download as you picked it up.
Following on from that theme was the Vase, which reminded me of a particular episode of Friends... It has no face, but that would leave you free to completely customise the appearance of your phone from top to bottom, with just this slim, narrow, unobtrusive touchscreen as your canvas. That includes the features, too, so for me it was probably the best mixture of internal and external personalisation; perhaps predictably the handset that featured the least specific design was the most appealing.
All about the internal customisation, the Mü is not a new dessert but a totally social networking focussed phone. When used it would display all your networks as a globe and then allow you to easily update your virtual world by having you constantly logged in. The FaceFone (below) expanded that concept into real life, with an idea for a mobile that encourages you to meet face-to-face by tagging your friends according to their proximity.
I saw the Mu advertised on jitterbug.com last week, looks really cool but im wary about any phone advertised on a female run website with the name shiny shiny. As if we didnt know all girls love money and shiny things.