Meet the future: This is Polytron’s transparent smartphone prototype

Smartphones are already futuristic — they’re small rectangles that act as computers that we keep in our pockets. Phones made a huge leap in advancement when they upgraded from land lines to mobile phones, then took another step when they upgraded from mobile phones to smartphones. Now, if sci-fi movies and TV are to act as a guide, the next step in smartphone advancement will be making the entire phone transparent, which is exactly what the Taiwanese company Polytron Technologies did with this see-through prototype smartphone.

Due to the prototype status, Polytron doesn’t have software running on the unit just yet, but the hardware is in place. As you can see from the above picture, the SD card, SIM card, microphone, and batteries aren’t translucent, but Polytron is planning on covering that panel with an opaque fixture, so as to leave the screen above translucent.

Polytron isn’t a stranger to translucent glass technology, as it has its own version of smart glass (not to be confused with Microsoft’s SmartGlass) that starts off opaque, or cloudy, in its powered down state, but when electricity is applied, the liquid crystals inside the glass align in such a way where light can pass through the glass, thus making it transparent.

Though software isn’t running on the prototype just yet, the hardware is able to be powered on, which turns on an LED and the speakers, which in turn are powered by the batteries seen in the bottom-right of the device. Polytron plans to have software running on the unit by the end of the year, and possibly even have the device in production by then as well.