New concept phone: is it an egg?

Pantech's Softy Lofty concept
Pantech's Softy Lofty concept

Pantech, the Korean mobile phone manufacturer, has enjoyed some worldwide success over the last year, winning contracts in the US with AT&T, but it still has kept an eye on its roots be showing off a slew of new concept phones.

The ideas were dreamt up by the Pantech Design Community, which allows 20 college students to let their mobile minds wander (not in an out of body sense, just in terms of phone design).

Vague glow

The craziest of the lot is the Softy Lofty, which seems to be a twisty egg on a plate rather than a handset. It's designed "to offer as much visual and emotional comfort as possible", and emit a vague glow when charged. What's a vague glow?

Other handsets include the Easter Moia, which has a wave touchscreen LCD and loads of keys on the side, as well as a weird dock that makes it look like a microphone.

The Coralliform Water (you've got to love these names) is what you'd call a 'proper' concept phone, with the lime green keys that Nokia loves to plonk on all its futuristic designs.

It's a slider that looks like a budding flower, probably designed to appeal to the Asian female markets, though men around the world could obviously use it too if they so wished...

Check out Unwired View's gallery of all the handsets and decide for yourself whether these should be made into things we put in our pockets in real life.

Gareth Beavis
Formerly Global Editor in Chief

Gareth has been part of the consumer technology world in a career spanning three decades. He started life as a staff writer on the fledgling TechRadar, and has grown with the site (primarily as phones, tablets and wearables editor) until becoming Global Editor in Chief in 2018. Gareth has written over 4,000 articles for TechRadar, has contributed expert insight to a number of other publications, chaired panels on zeitgeist technologies, presented at the Gadget Show Live as well as representing the brand on TV and radio for multiple channels including Sky, BBC, ITV and Al-Jazeera. Passionate about fitness, he can bore anyone rigid about stress management, sleep tracking, heart rate variance as well as bemoaning something about the latest iPhone, Galaxy or OLED TV.