Buried amongst the piles of Newer! Bigger! Better! TVs, pico projectors and paper-thin, flapping OLED screens at FPD in Japan was an absolute gem: a folding OLED phone concept from Samsung. This isn't some half-assed, flat-to-sightly-bowed demo either: this thing folds over on itself completely. In its folded mode it looks quite similar to the D900, but the phone opens like a book to reveal a massive, bright OLED screen, creased down the middle. While we've got this luscious, luscious video, we don't have much in the way of specs, and it goes without saying that this stuff is probably a long way from making it to market. [OLED Display]

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Rainer Brockerhoff's studied dissection of the new MacBook's design—how certain design choices intersect with the realities of components to produce real notebooks—perfectly explains how they are not simply a wishlist of parts and features that magically come together. There are always compromises.

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At first you see buildings of tomorrow, set on bleak plots of land against bleak skies. But then you notice the coffee pots. And the bathroom scales. And the meat grinders, the electric razors, the cake tins, the cheese graters and, well, you tell me. This is not a Photoshop contest, these are actual sculptures wittily erected by artist David Trautrimas for an exhibit entitled Habitat Machines opening next week at Toronto's Le Gallery. There's another haunting image below, and a few more over at Dezeen. Now I gotta go hack open my Kitchen-Aid stand mixer, to see if I can't just show the world Wilsonberg 2028. [Dezeen]

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Apart from their Spinn 70s-retro analogue goodness, iRiver had two beautiful concept products in their IFA 2008 stand which had a design that looked further into the past, as far as the beginning of the 20th century. As you can see in the video, both their Clix speaker--inspired by the shape of cathode ray tubes--and their pipe music player--which you can blow to mute (insert joke here), and connect it to a speaker resembling a phonograph horn--look both intriguing and beautiful. [More IFA 2008 Coverage]

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