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Newest iPhone 5 Concepts Show Striking Design, Amusing Foresight

Newest iPhone 5 Concepts Show Striking Design, Amusing Foresight

July 1, 2011
By now, you're probably all familiar with and intrigued by Yanko Design's radical take on the upcoming iPhone's potential new form. If you're like me, then, you'll be glad to know that Italian blog iSpazio has just posted a few other concepts currently on the media circuit.

NAK Studio Concept

Created by France's NAK Studio, the following mock-up is nothing if not well-crafted. It is quite lustworthy in its own right, though Apple purists will argue that the lines are too divergent (and too stylistically similar to the newly-minted Nokia N9) to be accepted as progressively canonical. Still, the fictional unit looks sleek and decidedly cutting-edge; and, while not much else is changed when compared to the iPhone 4, this approach might actually work in NAK's predictive favor come Apple's September unveiling.

Antonello Falcone Concept

The next entry, this time from Antonello Falcone, strays a bit further from Apple's touted design sensibilities. Featuring a "blur"-edged glass front, super thin profile, and capacitive home button, there are a lot of good (if ultimately impractical) things happening here. Unfortunately, the massive 4.7-inch screen (since restated as 4.3 inches) doesn't play nice with the upscaling numbers Apple's likely to use on future display-size increases; and the badge on the back is a page right out of HTC's (rather gaudy) design manual.

Alternative Industries Concept

Lastly, we've got a wild rendering from Alternative Industries -- and "alternative" is exactly right! Without any physical buttons save for an interesting on/off/home switch With extremely small physical buttons (including an interesting on/off/home switch up top), this handset is edge to edge from top to bottom. Utilizing an expensive-to-manufacture curved-corner display, the behemoth is all screen and little else. When viewed alongside its cited 4mm depth (That's less than half the width of the iPhone 4's profile!), the fantastical concept is all the more irrevocably separated from any near-term reality. Fun, but not feasible. Concepts like these, created by aspiring professionals as referential recordings of their predictive vision and technical acumen, are, at the very least, bits of entertaining food for thought. And, while parts of them appeal to my sensibilities (and hint at my expectations), they're certainly not perfect. Indeed, the next iPhone Apple releases will be drastically different from those listed above, though fragmentary elements of these impressive works may perhaps shine through. In fact, I'm even thinking about whipping up an iPhone concept for 2012. My main assertion? Like Yanko, I'm betting on a convex rear panel. Unlike Yanko, mine will be all glass (with none of this teardrop business, either). After all, Apple did buy all those fancy, curve-shaving glass cutters...

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