Hands On With Nokia's Crazy Flexible Phone

LONDON—Bend it. Twist it. Nokia showed a concept phone at Nokia World with a flexible AMOLED screen that operates entirely by flexing—no touch necessary. I got a few minutes to flex it and it's definitely cool, but it didn't strike me as the phone of the future. Then again, it isn't intended to be.

The Nokia flexible concept phone is really a 5-inch tablet running demos of two apps, a photo viewer and a music player. The flexible phone demo is pretty basic right now; it's more about materials science than about any actual future shipping product. I've seen similar ideas from both  and Kyocera in the past. The idea is to make a phone into an even more natural, physical object.

So to select something on the screen, you flex the whole body of the phone in a convex direction; to move back, you flex it concave, and to select something, you twist. This could especially come in handy in wintry places like Finland where people have to wear gloves, and can't easily use capacitive touch screens, the demonstrator said.

It's intuitive and quick to use. We're physical beings, and after just a few flexes, you develop a sort of physical familiarity with the interface and it becomes effortless. It's designed to work along with a touch screen, of course, even though the gadget Nokia demoed doesn't have a touch screen.

Nokia also showed off a little leaf-shaped device that it called the "human phone" and which it said mimicked the shape of the first stone tools. The human phone was purely a design concept—it didn't work at all—but it was built to show how a smaller, totally flexible phone would be built. Inside a soft plastic shell, there are hard segments containing circuit boards connected by ribbon cables. The multi-segment structure lets the device flex while still including some inflexible parts.

There's definitely some appeal in adding more intuitive gestures to mobile interfaces, and flexible screens will let phone designers create shapes that go beyond the standard black slab. The device seemed to be at least somewhat rugged as well; it's less susceptible to cracking if it's dropped, that's for sure.

Looking back at that Kyocera concept, I'm also charged up by the idea of phones that can power themselves in part from kinetic energy, so they don't need to be plugged in as often.

But this is a far cry from a finished or retail product. It was years away from the market when Kyocera showed it in 2009, and it's still years away, Nokia confirmed.