Designs like this are great, but often the achieve their elegance by ignoring physics or some other constraint that makes them completely unworkable.
the "kick stand" would be hard to engineer due to speaker location.
the UV light while charging thing is a bit off
If you want to design a phone for the ages, it needs to be somewhat expandable, a sd card slot and/or a changeable main board might do the trick
The phone could just be a really nicely designed and well built 'shell' to hold the main board + display etc. Then every 2 years, instead of buying a whole new phone, you just get an upgrade to the internals.
It seems a little silly to pay too much attention to the external design of phones since most people only have them for a year then change.
I'd sort of like a beautifully designed custom phone shell into which I slot the latest internals with the new chips etc. Having the same phone shell for 10+ years, but seeing the internals upgrade would be nice.
Maybe we treat our phones differently, but unless it was made of diamond it would be beat to hell well before 10 years passed. Not to mention that mobile changes so quickly that internals will be hardly recognizable in 10+ years (at least 5G and god knows what else).
I'd actually quite like a metal/leather one. And no, a case/protector just isn't the same.
Do people here remember the Nokias where you could buy different facias, backs, etc - They kinda separated the case in that way which I thought was a step forward. And if the facia gets scratched you just bought a new one and slotted it in.
...he used to tear up her hardware, the designer's, and put the real parts into cases he'd make in his shop. Say he'd make a solid bronze case for a minidisk unit, ebony inlays, carve the control surfaces out of fossil ivory, turquoise, rock crystal. It weighed more, sure, but it turned out a lot of people liked that, like they had their music or their memory, whatever, in something that felt like it was there... And people liked touching all that stuff: metal, a smooth stone... And once you had the case, when the manufacturer brought out a new model, well, if the electronics were any better, you just pulled the old ones out and put the new ones in your case. So you still had the same object, just with better functions.
Regarding your last point: How many people would change the inner workings of their device? I think a big selling point is the sleek look of the phone. You'd have to account for a lot of eventualities: What about a second camera, additional microphones etc.? How thick should it be, given that advances in technology could make it feasible to reduce the thickness significantly.
I'm not sure it's even possible to create a phone "for the ages". Even if you disregard the wear of the hardware: A phone design from even 5 years ago looks dated - maybe simply for the fact that it has been around for so long. And while you remain the same design, every company around you changes their designs.
At this point, the material cost of the outer shell of your phone is pretty insignificant compared to the rest of the hardware. You'd have to ramp up the value of the shell quite a bit to make it economical to keep the hull and change the innards.
As long as there's no lag, it would be a lot better than accidentally hitting them while typing.
(Also those who have issues with accidental keypresses should give swype a try -- since you rarely tap keys, the accident rate should drop.)
Double click invokes multitasking panel (iOS 4).