Skip to main content

Nokia Kinetic "Bendy" phone prototype - NanoTechnology getting closer to market

At Nokia World last week Nokia showed and wrote about a hands-on prototype of their new Nokia Kinetic "bendy" phone, a phone that users control by bending it. It's incredible that they talked so much about controling the phone by bending it that it's easy to overlook how amazing it is that a phone could simply bend without breaking!

Nokia didn't talk much about the technology underlying the Kinetic, but one Nokia article made it clear that the Kinetic is an outgrowth of Nokia's Morph vision and NanoTechnology research.  Nokia has researched heavily the use of porous graphene, silicon rubber and evaporated gold for flexible devices, ZNO nanowires, Silicon Carbide nanoflowers,, and more.

Grizzly Analytics has an 83-page report available that gives details of Nokia's NanoTechnology research, including research in bendable electronics, interfacing with a device by bending or reshaping it, sensing device bending and deforming, flexible touchscreens, flexible batteries, thin and flexible speakers, sensors for sensing the environment, and much more.

Nokia now says that the Kinetic is "as little as three years" from market.  In our report we predicted that bendable devices were five years away from market.  Either way, if Nokia can be first to market with a truly flexible phone, they may get back some of the innovator momentum that they've lost in recent years.

Nokia's nanotechnology research is also about more than bendable phones.  They's working on thin and flexible solar energy panels and energy harvesting, device materials that repel water, sensors, nano-thin speakers, and much more.

If you're competing with Nokia and need to get into the race to flexible devices, or if you have related technology and want to get a full picture of Nokia's research, our 83 page report on Nokia's NanoTechnology Research is a must-read. Find out more and order your copy by clicking here, or e-mail us at info@grizzlyanalytics.com. 

In case you haven't seen it, here's Nokia's new demonstration of the Kinetic "bendy" phone:





Addendum:   Nokia also released a new vision of bendable phones based on their nanotechnology research.  This appears to be an update to their more far-out Morph vision from a few years ago.  The new vision is dubbed "HumanForm."  Here's the video of their new vision:

Popular posts from this blog

Intel demos indoor location technology in new Wi-Fi chips at MWC 2015

Intel made several announcements at MWC 2015, including a new chipset for wireless connectivity (Wi-Fi) in mobile devices. This new chipset, the 8270, include in-chip support for indoor location positioning. Below we explain their technology and show a video of it in action. With this announcement, Intel joins Broadcom, Qualcomm and other chip makers in moving broad indoor location positioning into mobile device hardware.

The transition of indoor location positioning into chips is a trend identified in the newest Grizzly Analytics report on Indoor Location Positioning Technologies, released the week before MWC 2015. By moving indoor location positioning from software into hardware, chips such as Intel's enable location positioning to run continuously and universally, without using device CPU, and with less power consumption.

Intel's technology delivers 1-3 meter accuracy, using a technique called multilateration, generating a new location estimate every second. While 1-3 meter …
Read more

Seeing Quuppa's indoor location technology at MWC 2015

I first met Fabio and Kimmo from Quuppa in 2012, before Quuppa existed, when they had spent years researching indoor location positioning technologies at Nokia Research Center. Less than a year after that they formed Quuppa, independent of Nokia, to bring their technology to market. At the time I called Quuppa "the newest and oldest in indoor location positioning."

Fast forward two and a half years. Their technology has reached market, it can now track both smartphones and BLE devices, and it's accurate to within 20-50cm. Before reading more about their technology, take a look at a video of their demo in action:



Grizzly Analytics has analyzed indoor location technologies by over 150 companies, and virtually all of the radio-based technologies operate by measuring the distance between the device being tracked and other radio devices, and using these distance measurements for either multilateration or fingerprinting. For example, the well known BLE beacons measure a device…
Read more

Robot Camera Foreshadows an Era of Location-Aware Electronics

A French company called Move 'N See produces a line of camera robots. Their devices act as a smart tripod, holding a video camera and automatically moving and zooming the camera as people of interest move around a site.

The idea is simple but amazingly innovative. Photo selfies are easy to take, but video selfies are next to impossible. How can I video myself playing football or doing gymnastics, without setting the camera so far back as to be useless? Do spectators want to spend an entire sporting event carefully videoing their friend or relative moving around the field?
Enter Move 'N See's "personal robot cameramen." Their devices aim, pan and zoom a video camera as one or more people move around an area. The people of interest wear armbands whose locations are tracked, enabling the camera controller to know where to aim the camera. The camera controller also includes enough smarts to adjust the camera smoothly and to capture multiple people evenly. The armband…
Read more