Wireless News

Charting the future of cell phone technology, Kyocera recently unveiled a kinetic energy-powered phone.

The phone is is capable of folding up like a wallet. Designed by industrial designer Susan McKinney, the EOS phone consists of a soft, semi-rigid polymer skin surrounding a flexible low-energy OLED display. Shape memory allows the phone’s keys to pop up when in use and blend in with the surface during downtime.

Although the EOS is still in the early design stage, the Kyocera EOS can be used in its folded-up shape for simple phone calls, unfolds to reveal a wide screen, and we were excited to hear that the it derives its energy from human interaction. The more you use the phone, the more kinetic energy is turned into an electric charge through an array of tiny piezoelectric generators. In other words, you’ll never have to worry about leaving the house with a semi-charged cell phone again.

If, for whatever reason, a Tony Hawk-branded Sidekick LX just isn’t your bag, how’s about this limited edition alternative? Aside from actually being more than a figment of someone’s imagination, Kyocera’s $99.99 Virgin Mobile Festival Special Edition Wild Card is definitely in the running for longest mobile name of all time. You’ll also find a few musical touches added in, like the 50 free eMusic song downloads (enthralling, we know), graffiti-style Festival graphics, exclusive wallpapers and a one-year subscription to SPIN magazine. Interested consumers can look exclusively at Best Buy for this one until July 31st (unless the 15,000 are snapped up earlier), and make sure you bring it to the Baltimore Festival for gratis access to the Virgin Mobile Guest Lounge — sure to be stacked wall-to-wall with nerds just like you. One more shot after the jump.

While the guts of the Kyocera Willcom WX331K Honey Bee might not be of interest to anybody outside of Japan – since they use the PHS (Personal Handyphone System) network – the design is quirky enough to make me wish Kyocera would re-engineer it as a GSM handset.

The WX331K has a 2-inch QVGA display, Opera 7.1 browser, IrDA and is available in five colours. It weighs a mere 73g and measures 42 x 120 x 9.9mm.