The best Mobiles ever… designed by Royal College of Art

Students at the Royal College of Art were set a challenge to design a Mobile to “outperform, outsmart, and outmanoevure everything on the market”. The pic above, and the picture-fest after the jump, show you what they came up with….

One of the winners in the competition, which was sponsored by 3, was the Vase – the phone starts as an “empty vessel”, and gradually fills as the owner decides what they want:

Vase’s designers said that no instructions were needed as users would learn the functions of the phone as they added them.

Another winner, the Teiko, is a handset for children that contains games, parental controls, and GPS (for kid tracking). It also allows children to access info in areas of interest, and is shock-proof, with a retractable earphone (see below):

Finally, owners of the “Free key” decide the function of the 40 keys below a flexible LCD screen, meaning that each device is unique to it’s user, in addition to being intuitive, and hard to replace:

[Via: BBC News]

Commentary: I think these designs are an absolutely cracking good effort – whilst we might all have our opinions on what the best looking/functioning Mobile phone should be like, it’s great to see raw young talent used to design the most pervasive portable consumer device in the world. And 3 and the Royal College of Art should also be applauded for running the competition.

I am not reviewing the competition, but I am awarding 3 and the Royal College of Art a full 5 stars for innovation on Ben’s scoring system:

Good work 3 and the Royal College of Art!