A look at the future of mobile phone design

He Mobile World Congress (MWC) is the main exhibition of the year dedicated to everything intellectual. While there are sure to be big headlines, some of the most exciting announcements from this massive spectacle aren’t phones and other devices, but rather more subtle reveals. This is exactly what happens with concept materials from Tecno Mobile.

Tecno Mobile is one of the largest phone makers in emerging markets such as India, Africa and the Middle East, and while Western audiences may not have heard of the company or seen its devices, with $1 billion in revenue in 2020, it has always It’s worth keeping an eye on what Tecno plans for the future.

Tecno arrived at MWC 2024 with a series of different announcements (including a robot dog with artificial intelligence), but some of the most interesting may have gone unnoticed, although they may ultimately shape the future. While these announcements are just concepts at the moment and we don’t have a release date for any of them, they do provide an exciting glimpse of what the future may hold for smartphones.

Game-changing color screens and 3D effects

At the moment, 3D effects are not something we have seen on smartphones (except for the RED Hydrogen One). Tecno is taking steps to change this by working on a new way to display 3D images on smartphones. But stop dreaming about holograms, because it won’t be a 3D projection coming from the screen, but a 3D effect for the rear window. If you’ve used one of these tilted moving images, you know what to expect, as the depth of field, color, and hanging elements change as you move the phone.

A display technology called “chameleon coloring technology” was also mentioned. This name doesn’t say much, but it may come as more of a shock than anything else mentioned in this ad. An industry first, this display technology offers a full color spectrum with particularly fast millisecond response times. Tecno also claims that it will have a long lifespan and very low power consumption.

A new generation of strength and style

Tecno also announced that it is working on next-generation material designs for phones and cases.

First on the list is laminated fiberglass. It is lighter than glass of the same thickness, but stronger and more resistant to bending, which provides significant strength advantages over ordinary glass. Of course, it won’t have the same shine as glass, but Tecno is working on adding an optical coating that will give it a metallic sheen, which also has the added benefit of being anti-fingerprint.

However, glass is not completely out of place as Tecno is developing new colored and textured glass for phone bodies. Created by mixing different molten glasses, the result is a glass back with a jewel-like sheen or hard effect, simulating ceramic without the weight and thickness of real ceramic.

Several new leathers were also released. Fragrant leather is exactly what it sounds like. Micro-fragrance capsules are added to the faux leather during creation, imparting the final product with the scent of your choice. They will fade in about a year if not exposed to too much sunlight, high temperatures or “rough friction”.

Other advances aim to make vegan leather more environmentally friendly. Current artificial leather, although safe for animals, is a disaster for the environment because it is made from plastic. Organosilicate leather is designed to completely replace artificial leather, using a synthetic organosilicate coating instead of polyurethane (PU), while providing a durable and easy-to-clean surface. The same line also includes a fiber phone case, which is made not from leather, but from recycled plastic bottles, which can then be recycled again after you’re done protecting your phone.

The final product to be shown included a new process for mixing standard leather colors. Currently, leather cases are content with simple, limited designs because the technology that can significantly improve the leather surface simply does not exist. Tecno hopes its new process will add the ability to add much more complex designs to leather cases, and based on these concept images, it will lead to some impressive cases if they succeed.

Tecno has already impressed us with its design skills on existing phones, namely the Tecno Phantom X2 Pro and Tecno Phantom V Fold, so it’s good to see that the company is planning to take it one step further with these material concepts.