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Many a time we’ve found ourselves gazing sullenly at our smart phones, wishing they were just a little more bendy. But while every attempt we make at bending the Samsung Galaxy S2 ends in tears and a face full of Super AMOLED Plus shards, the Nokia Kinetic concept phone is actually designed to be twisted, bent and elsewise manipulated.
Showcased at Nokia World 2011, you control the bendy Kinetic concept phone by twisting it. A video on The Nokia Blog, embedded below, shows the oddity in action — holding the Kinetic in two hands, you yank down on one corner to scroll down, and twist the other edge to scroll up.
Bending the device up slightly zooms in on photos or acts as a ‘select’ input, while bending it backwards zooms out or cycles backward through menus.
We’re not sure it would be more useful than a standard touchscreen, and we don’t know how you’d use it with just one hand, but it’s an exciting concept nonetheless — this could be a rare glimpse at the future of mobile phones, and as the presenter mentions, it could come in handy if your hands are cold and you’re wearing gloves.
It reminds us of Nokia’s Morph concept — a dreamed-up transluscent tablet-style gadget that also bends around your wrist to use as a watch. It uses nanotechnology to clean itself, harvests solar power using ‘Nanograss’ and can analyse air pollution.
Nokia needs to stay in the game for a few more years to make the Morph a reality though — it’s put loads of stock in Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system, unveiling the Nokia Lumia 800 and Lumia 710, both of which run Windows Phone.
Will that be enough to keep Nokia afloat? Or is it doomed to fail at the hands of Android and Apple? Let us know in the comments section below, or on our Facebook wall.
Image credit: The Nokia Blog
