Wildseed Readies Chameleon Cell Phones

[Kris Kumar]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.wildseed.com' target='_blank'>http://www.wildseed.com</a><br /><br /></div>"Ever get bored with the way your cell phone looks, feels, and sounds? Wildseed's youth-oriented Identity phone acquires a whole new personality by simply switching its plastic shell.<br /><br />"The shell, called a SmartSkin, slides on and off a curved base unit. But unlike the plain plastic covers you can buy for other handsets, SmartSkins have an embedded chip that communicates with the phone's electronics. The chip dictates the phone's screens, ring tones, and even access to online content such as mobile blogs."<br /><br />Smartphones are highly customizable, but not as user friendly as they should be. Ideas like these can make personalization an easy 1-2-3 process. Not to mention the carriers would love it, because it will be sold through the retail stores.<br /><br />I would like to take this concept a step further. :idea: Why not have the keypad on the SmartSkin. Then you can go from numeric keypad to QWERTY keypad to gaming keypad. That is what I want. This way cell phone manufacturers can have two or more variations of the same model. One for regular phone users and one geared for heavy data users.

[Ben]

I had the same idea :idea: described here. If someone out there wants to use it, I think it is worth a fortune: it came to me when playing Splinter Cell. Cellular phones should be "modular" like the assault rifle in the game, where you can attach different parts for different situations. My design was a clam-shell where the bottom could be switched out for a qwerty, numeric pad, or game/music player pad, and the top could be switched out for a simple screen, a digital camera, a GPS system, and so forth. A device with everything integrated may be a little bulky, but with a modular cell phone, you just take the pieces you want on any given occassion.

[rbrome]

I actually spent over an hour interviewing Eric Engstrom, the CEO of this company (Wildseed), at 3GSM in February. Believe me, they are way ahead of you... :wink:

SmartSkins can and will include extra hardware. The first one will be a gaming sking (a Mortal Kobmat game - they announced it last week at E3) that includes a joystick and extra game-specific keys. Additional skins will add features like push-to-talk and a megapixel camera. It's a very slick concept. There are actually two smartcard connectors that connect the phone to the skin - one for software and content, and another just for hardware features.

Here's more info from my interview:

http://www.phonescoop.com/articles/3gsm_2004/index.php?p=wi

Also, I can tell you that the next version of this product will specifically address the text-input problem. They wouldn't tell me what it was, but they claim to have invented something different and better than all the other small keyboard/thumboard solutions out there today.

Interesting side-note: Eric Engstom used to work for Microsoft, where he was instrumental in creating DirectX. You can read more about him in the book "Renegades of the Empire".

[Kris Kumar]

I actually spent over an hour interviewing Eric Engstrom, the CEO of this company (Wildseed), at 3GSM in February. Believe me, they are way ahead of you... :wink:

Just when I thought I had an idea worth patenting :-(

Thanks for the scoop, rbrome. Looking forward to those SmartSkins. Hopefully they will license the concept to the Smartphone world or Smartphone vendors might innovate and come out with there own Hi-Tech Skins.