The transparent CPT002 Aston Martin Concept Phone from Mobiado

British car maker Aston Martin is looking to leverage its luxury brand into the world of consumer electronics by teaming up with Canadian mobile phone manufacturer Mobiado to produce a line of high-end handsets to be launched in May of this year. Until then, the company has provided a tantalizing peek at possible future designs with the CPT002 Aston Martin Concept Phone that takes the ‘slab of glass’ design of many current smartphones to the next level. With a solid sapphire crystal capacitive touchscreen, the CPT002 is completely transparent.

To allow the screen of the CPT002 to be transparent, Mobiado has incorporated the battery, electronics and SIM card into the sides of the device, which are crafted from platinum. The only things blocking the view when looking through the phone when it’s in standby are the Aston Martin and Mobiado logos, what appear to be battery and signal strength indicators along the top and a series of dots along the bottom that appear similar to the dots on the iPhone that let you know which screen you’re on – although it’s not ‘clear’ whether that’s actually what they are.

A transparent touchscreen has already popped up on LG’s GD900 mobile phone, but only in the form of a touchpad that displays the phone’s number pad. Unfortunately, we’re going to have to wait a bit longer for a phone with a transparent full touchscreen display with Mobiado’s upcoming range not sporting a phone with such a design. However, other features of the CPT002 Concept Phone that are designed to integrate with an Aston Martin vehicle are more of a possibility.

Firstly, the phone would act as a key for your Aston Martin, automatically unlocking the doors as you approach and connecting directly to the car display without the need to pull it from your pocket. The phone also uses the vehicle’s GPS to show your current location on FourSquare, with the car’s display also showing the location of friends and venues of interest.

The social networking features continue with the ability to set cameras integrated into the vehicle to periodically take happy snaps and video that can be uploaded with information about passing cities and landmarks to Twitter and FaceBook – perfect for making your friends green with envy over the exotic locales you’re visiting in your luxury automobile.

Mobiado also makes use of the CPT002′s accelerometer in an innovative way. In the event of an accident, accelerometer information from the phone sitting in the driver’s pocket is transmitted to the car to provide information about the driver’s movement from within the car seat to allow for more effective deployment of safety features such as airbag sequence, timing and seatbelt stiffening.

Whether any of these features will appear in Mobiado’s upcoming Aston Martin range or whether the collaboration will simply result in phones with the usual feature set with an Aston Martin logo emblazoned across them remains to be seen. All will be revealed in May when Mobiado launches its Aston Martin range.

The trend

In recent past, social networking has emerged as a popular medium, especially among gen-next, to interact with friends and associates and discuss their day-to-day or business activities. Making the most out of the new trend, designers are working on different portable gadgets that promises a better platform for social networking not only within the our walls but on the move as well. The “Blackberry Empathy” by designer Daniel Yoon is an identical phone concept that apart from regular verbal communication also enables the user to go through the activities and updates of their friends, while reading the emotional state, using a biometric ring, of the wearer.

The Inspiration

Communication technologies may allow interaction on an entirely new level; still users feel cramped to communicate their true feelings on certain occasions. Intended to integrate the concept of social networking with human emotions, the new cellphone employs biometric technology to sense and share the true feelings to ensure a better communication among users.

What makes it so special?

Based on the idea of a mood ring, the futuristic cellphone allows quick status updates to help you know who is ready for a conversation and who is busy and cannot be disturbed. Connecting the user straightaway to popular sites like Facebook and MySpace for quick and enhanced messaging, the Empathy includes proximity sensors that let you sense the emotions of the occupants when you enter the room, as the emotion chart converts the feelings into a visual timeline. The concept phone also features movable keys, translucent tactile keyboard and flexible OLED screen, together with heads up display (HUD), double sided screen (clamshell) and slide-out split keypad to enhance the experience of the user.

Reflecting the deeply divided paradox of human nature and emotions with its asymmetric form, the Empathy integrates a keypad that changes color according to the emotional state, sensed from messages and phone calls, as the biometric ring transmits the body signals of wearer and sends data to the main device for interpretation.

What’s in it for me?

With Empathy Phone, now you will be able to sense and respond to the real feelings of your friends, associates and family members, through popular social networking sites, in a better way. The new Blackberry phone is easy to operate, as one can easily adapt to it. All you need to do is just pick the phone, wear the biometric ring and then log on to any social networking site to sense the feelings of your friend. In case, you don’t wanna share your deep emotion with others, you may avoid it by simply removing the biometric ring.

What’s next?

The concept of Social networking through portable devices is already popular among the masses, but the biometric technology will just take it to another level. And with latest innovations in technology, the day isn’t too far when you would be able to do live video chats using your mobile handset on the go.

Nokia’s range of high end smartphones might feature great hardware, but when it comes to software and operating system, the Finnish company has started to lose ground to upstarts like the iOS and Android platforms. Well, that doesn’t mean they are just going to sit there and get steamrolled over by the competition, eh? No sir, the company has already started work on a kind of stretchable electronic skin which are flexible, relying on evaporated gold as a conductor to deliver an electronic touchpad which can be stretched like a rubber band without sacrificing functionality. So far, tests have shown that it can be stretched by up to 20 per cent of its original length without suffering from any drop in performance. We can’t wait to see real world applications of such an electronic skin arrive, that’s for sure.

Designed for Samsung, the “AQUA” by South Korean designer Bon Seop Ku is a cellphone concept, inspired by drawing on the table with water, which features a progressive design to attract next-gen customers. Presenting a transparent body together with graphical user interface (GUI), the futuristic mobile handset comes with AMOLED display to enhance the experience of the user. The source of the interface is a water-based touchscreen. Users can delete the icons of the interface by simply rubbing the display with their hands. The cellphone runs on liquid type battery that apart from being eco-friendly supports the transparency of the screen as well.

Modern technology has created some thorny problems (Can a particle accelerator open up a cataclysmic black hole that will destroy the Earth? What the hell should we do with all of these nuclear weapons anyhow?), but perhaps none is so persistent as a (predominantly) female problem known as the little black dress conundrum. As in, "where will I keep my cell phone if I wear this incredibly form-fitting, irresistibly sexy but pocket-less little black dress?" High-tech high-fashion purveyors CuteCircuit have finally found the solution: a dress that IS a cell phone.

The M-dress is a wearable cell phone with a sim card and antenna integrated into the fabric, and while it’s not necessarily perfect, it does make carrying a cell phone around a non-issue. But it also might turn some heads — and not necessarily in a good way. To answer an incoming call, the wearer lifts her hand to her ear like an imaginary telephone and speaks into her imaginary receiver (we’re presuming the receiver tech is actually built into the cuff).

There’s no screen and no other interface of any kind, so you won’t know who’s calling. What’s more, you don’t have a way to dial out, so you can only pre-program a single number. We suggest you make that number the operator, who can patch you through to any number you like. Then you’ll just need to make sure you keep your cell phone with you so you have all your contact info.

Problem solved.

When you think about it, it’s ridiculous to spend the effort lugging around spare batteries, hand-cranked chargers, piezoelectric gadgets, and all the other half-baked solutions we depend on to resuscitate a dead phone. There’s a potent supply of free power just waiting to be tapped, right above our heads. No, not the sun — overhead power lines.

The Bat Hook is as simple as any plug-in charger, but it’s great for on-the-go. It’s just a weighted hook with a razor blade in it, strung on the end of a cord: you toss it over the nearest power line. Its blade pierces the live wire, neatly and safely conducting electric current down to you, for convenient charging of gadgets, jumpstarting cars, or powering your roadside business. It even works in the rain!

The explanatory video from the Department of Defense says something about how it’s only for trained Special Operations soldiers, and "you should never throw something over power lines," but that is clearly just marketing hype, calculated to give the Bat Hook an air of exclusivity. The video says it’s for use in jungles too, and everyone knows there aren’t power lines overhead in jungles.

Of late, wearable gadgets have become a hot trend that apart from being portable and functional also gives a style statement to the wearer. Inspired by sci-fi movies, designer Mac Funamizu has come up with a cellphone concept that the user can wear on his/her wrist like a watch or a bracelet. Entitled the “Dew,” the futuristic mobile device displays content in 3D hologram and features a ball in the middle that works as a controller. You can slide the ball in different directions, which changes colors to indicate different modes.

We were already stoked about the Chevy Volt, but now GM tells us about even more cellphone linkage on the way. If you’re running the OnStar app, you’ll be able to enter or speak a location into your cellphone, and then the car’s GPS will be ready to show you how to get there as soon as you start the car. Since GM’s OnStar system knows where your car is located, if you forget where you parked, you’ll be able to easily find your car in even the most gigantic of parking lots.

GM says this particular whiz-bang stuff won’t be available when the Volt launches, but it’s planned for version 2.0 of the Volt mobile app that will feature lots of interaction with Google Maps. GM’s talking about demoing these new features first on Google Android, but adds, "What we’re talking about today is only the beginning." We’re hoping these features will be available on all smartphone platforms when version 2.0 is launched. We asked GM reps about that, and their reply: "The Google specific parts of the app will run only on Android as of right now. GM is currently evaluating the feasibility to translate to other systems including the iPhone."

In addition to these features announced today, there were lots of groundbreaking capabilities announced at CES 2010 for the Chevy Volt OnStar app on Android, BlackBerry and iPhone apps. Our faves included the ability to designate when to charge the battery, display miles per gallon, and even remotely start the vehicle if you want to, say, pre-cool the AC on a hot day.

Here’s a video showing the new version 2.0 stuff:

Today Sharp announced plans that could turn your cellphone into a 3-D-shooting mini film studio as early as next year. The company today unveiled a mobile-phone 3-D camera capable of shooting in high def.

The module captures 720p stereoscopic (two-eyed) video and is only about two inches wide. To put that in perspective: Fuji’s 3-D camera uses much larger, heavier sensors and only records standard-def video.

The camera on its own, though, needs help to produce a 3-D image. As with a 3-D TV or Blu-ray player, there needs to be an integrated circuit capable of decoding the stereoscopic signal, converting file formats, and then sending the information to a 3-D-ready display. Oh, yeah, Sharp has one of those, too: the glasses-less kind. In March, the company announced a small-format screen consisting of two stacked LCD screens; the screen on top only displays thin vertical black lines, which block half of the image at a time, so that your right and left eyes only see their own angles. The meshing of the two images is your brain’s job.

It’s been rumored for a while now that Sharp’s screen will be what makes Mario pop on the forthcoming 3-D Nintendo DS, so it’s only natural to intuit that maybe (just maybe) the DS will both display and capture in three dimensions. For the time being, though, it’s all just conjecture — especially considering that these camera modules won’t go into production for several more months, and Nintendo’s still mum on when the 3DS rollout might start.

We’ll be keeping our eyes peeled.