She pushed down hard on the rectangular phone and, like a slap bracelet, it cinched around her wrist. The audience gasped; the internet went wild.
CNET tries on Lenovo’s bendy CPlus concept phone.
This articulated wraparound phone — known as the CPlus — was a concept device Lenovo used to wow the crowd as part of a larger launch last June that included the modular Moto Z and Phab 2 Pro (the first phone using Google’s Tango software for augmented reality). The CPlus may have only been a prototype, but it might as well have been a fireworks show for the imagination it ignited about the future of truly flexible phones that can bend and even fold.
As powerful as today’s phones are, their rectangular reliability has become a boring and invisible necessity that we hardly see at all. And that’s why handsets that bend, twist, snap and fold will electrify and energize the industry, even if these newfangled future devices limp and lag at first.
Flexing, folding handsets are visually and intellectually cool because rigid electronic pieces usually don’t bend, at least not without a hinge. But is there an actual use for them beyond pushing the boundaries of what designers and scientists can do?
Actually, there are a few. Folding a device gives you a smaller, more portable package to carry around — it can essentially double the size of your screen.
In addition, devices like these “will be able to be produced like newsprint,” said Roel Vertegaal, who directs the Human Media Lab at Canada’s Queens University and works on prototype models. Producing some phone parts this way could eventually make the phones cheaper to build, he added.
Shapely devices that give you more of a shifting 3D work surface (rather than a constantly flat screen) also have the power to change how people carry and even use them, like navigating in new ways while playing a game, or using the way you bend a device to trigger an action, like during gameplay or for creating sound (see video above).
