What will your mobile look like in 2015? Like a necklace, some specs, or a ring?
Those are just some of the ideas dreamt up by 26 design students from London's Central St Martins College of Art and Design, tasked by phone maker Nokia with coming up with the next must-have device for 2015's users.
As part of the union, Nokia set the designers a brief of creating a mass market mobile - with the winner seeing their design made up by the Finnish firm and receiving an internship with the company this summer.
Among the designs thought up by the students is a mobile phone for gamers which doubles as a pair of sunglasses, a device for the security conscious that can be worn around the finger like a ring, a necklace phone where each bead represents a contact and a folding aromatherapy phone. See the photos here.
According to course director Ben Hughes, students were asked to consider more than just nice-looking design.
He told silicon.com: "It was an area they were interested in and they were very happy to get involved. They looked at mobile phone technology and how it's going to evolve with what 4G and even 5G can offer in terms of bandwidth and memory. There were also cultural and socio-economic factors, how our lives are changing and [how] the mobile phone evolves to fit that."
The winning design was created by Daniel Meyer, for a candy bar device whose lower portion swivels to allow the phone to sit in a freestanding right angle and act as a picture frame. The sleek little handset also includes a trackball, enabling it to act like a mouse.
Meyer said: "What interested me was the human side of things. It's all about people - technology is made to serve us, not the other way around. Simplicity is beauty."
The devices are now on show at the Future of Mobile Design exhibition at London's Air Gallery.
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