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Designers can go crazy with concepts, after all, it’s just a concept, but the Box To Play cell phone by Japanese outfit KDDI AU is not so much crazy as crazy cool.

The cell phone concept transforms at the touch of a button into a music box speaker that pumps your tunes whilst displaying a graphic interface, much like the graphics you see on an equalizer display.

The Box To Play comes with all the usual features of a cell phone plus additional touches such as a turntable (yes folks, a mini-turntable on your cell phone) that allows you to scratch your tunes as you play.

Whether the KDDI AU ’s Box To Play concept phone is too far fetched to become a reality who knows, but after all the concept phones GadgetHeat has seen from the Siemens Leaf to the cell phone projector, one of then has to make it eventually, don’t they?

BOX TO PLAY

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Every phone wants to be an iPhone. Most get over this fixation quickly and are satisfied with being mere also-rans but the OpenPeak’s OpenFrame IP home phone to the iPhone style and functionality and ran with it.

Announced way back at the beginning of the the year the OpenFrame is nearing release sometime in Q1 2009. The OpenFrame is a IP home phone with much of its features looking and feeling like the usability you would get from an iPhone. That’s no bad thing and as they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

OpenPeak’s OpenFrame home phone acts as an information media centre for your home with all the apps you would expect to find on a cell phone such as calender, weather, news etc. It also doubles as a digital picture frame and allows you to listen to internet radio through it’s interface.

Price-wise you’re looking at $200 - $300 mark which means that it’s more pricey than the current iPhone (now available for free on some tarrifs) and with more people relying on the cell phones for all their communication needs, the price of the OpenFrame IP home phone may be its only stumbling block.

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openpeak-openframe-phone

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Half the fun of having a cell phone or any gadget is that it looks cool and the Onyx Cell phone by Synaptic defiantly ticks that box big stylee. The Onyx is a concept cell phone design brought to us by Synaptic and design studio Pilotfish and boy are we glad they got together.

The Onyx comes packed with all the applications we demand from a cell phone these days (and we sure do demand a lot) including phone, GPS and entertainment all encased in Synaptic Clearpad technology. This is a super-thin touch screen technology that enables a high resolution picture-perfect screen.

There’s a lot of spiel on the Synaptic website talking about activity based experienced when the truth of it is that only 5% of cell phone users actually use more than 5% of their phone functions. Nevertheless Synaptic assure us that the Onyx is a revolution waiting to happen and from the looks of it, GadgetHeat hopes they are right…

Synaptics via source

The name of this cell phone by Eddie Goh is appropriate - Eclipse. This concept phone can be charged just by exposure to sunlight or even better, any kind of light. The boys at GadgetHeat have now ditched their iPhone savings account and switched it to the Eclipse Intuit Concept phone savings account in anticipation for one of the sweetest cell phones we’ve seen this year.

The Eclipse Intuit has chemical based solar panels in the front and the back but far from adding to the bulk of the phone, it uses a spray-on solution which allows the cell phone to remain super slim. All the usual features of a cell phone can be found here including 5 mega-pixel camera, slide out keyboard and touch screen technology making it a real challenger to the upcoming 3g iPhone if the Eclipse Intuit ever gets out of the concept design stage.

In this world of Eco-friendly everything, a solar powered mobile phone that can charge constantly without a accessing any other power source is a definite step in the right direction and we at GadgetHeat hope that some of the big cell phone designers pick up Eddie Goh and his Eclipse Intuit Concept phone.

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The buzz around upcoming flexible cell phones has been around for a while now with a few concepts from Motorola even floating about. GadgetHeat was going to wait it out until something more tangible was revealed but once we saw this concept we just had to let our readers in on it. It’s not just flexible, it’s foldable…

The cell phone (named Packet) is a foldable mobile phone designed by Emir Rifat. Whilst not yet in production, seeing as how the big cell phone makers are seriously looking into distinguishing their handsets by design and innovation, it won’t be long before this gets picked up by one of them.

The keypad looks a bit fidgety and will no doubt be refined once it goes into production but the rest of it looks incredible. When folded the Packet is simple an almost flat square shape on which you can see the time and any messages you’ve received.

Once you open it up the keyboard expands to either side of the square and a screen pops up on top. It looks like a gadget James Bond would be proud to hold. Keep your eyes on GadgetHeat and we’ll bring you news when this goes into production.

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The geeks (pot calling kettle..) over at gizmodo have confirmed what we all knew. The Apple 3G iPhone will be formally introduces to the masses at the WWDC keynote on June 9th. It was previously thought that the new iPhone would be available at the years end but it will be available immediately worldwide after the formal launch in June.

I’m personally 50/50 about iPhones. I think their too pricey for what they offer and tying you into a two year contract is not appreciated by the GadgetHeat staff. That being said, there will no doubt be added goodies to go with the 3G functionality that have yet to be revealed by Apple (they love to tease).

After the generally negative response to their sales practice last time round (i.e. tying you to a particular provider in order to get your iPhone, fixed price for handsets etc), Apple have revised their worldwide partnering policies and it looks like the new phone may be available on multiple networks or tariff options at the same time which is good for those of us who want to get one…

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The long awaited Rim BlackBerry Bold phone has just been confirmed. It’s a classy looking phone by any standards and especially by BlackBerry ones as they don’t have a reputation of being the prettiest on the market and it comes with all the usual BlackBerry cell phone goodness you would expect from a smart phone.

It comes with an improved, easier to use QWERTY keyboard with buttons which are large enough even for the klutz’s at GadgetHeat to use. You can also hookup the Rim BlackBerry Bold cell phone to almost anything as it comes with WiFi, Quad Band, HSDPA/UMTS, Bluetooth 2.0 and enhanced, assisted integrated GPS (that’s a pretty big list of connectivity!) Read the full story

Mobile TV is not a new thing and I remember when I had my Nokia N70 I signed up to a subscription service that allowed me to watch around about 15 channels (didn’t renew as the service wasn’t great or reliable).

AT&T have now launched what we hope will be a much better service for your cell phone and actually has some new episodes of half-decent shows like CSI:NY, CNN and our favourite here at GadgetHeat, Spongebob Square Pants. Read the full story

Looks like Nokia can’t stop innovating new phones and it’s latest babies the Nokia 5320 and Nokia 5220 are no different. The Handsets only requires the sweet sound of your voice to select a track and begin playback. If you whisper ‘ice Ice baby’ the handset will blast the classic poetic lines of that hip hop legend Vanilla Ice. The dedicated audio chip also means that the sounds will not be the usualy tinny crap that that you hear from 17 year olds on the back of buses up and down the country playing the mobile mp3’s for everyone to hear.

The ’say & play’ feature will work for any of the tracks you loaded onto the Nokia 5320 / 5220 and with 8gb of space, that’s about 2000 tracks at your disposal. This is where it gets tricky, out of 100 tracks asked for, the handset will get it right about 80% of the time. The other 20% it will question your dialect and ask you to enounciate (cheeky b*stard). Read the full story

nokia-n96

After the runaway success of the N95 it was only logical for Nokia to step things up a gear. The upcoming Nokia N96 is the logical next step for the N series mobile phone. This 3g Smartphone packs all the features of its predecessor but with a bigger punch and without the glitches (the N95 OS was excruciatingly slow to load on occasion) Read the full story