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Turing Near Ready To Ship World's First Liquid Metal Android Smartphone
MojoKid writes: Liquid Metal is an alloy metal (technically, bulk metallic glass) that manages to combine the best features of a wide variety of materials into one product. Liquid Metal also has high corrosion resistance, high tensile strength, remarkable anti-wear characteristics and can also be heat-formed. Given its unique properties, Liquid Metal has been used in a number of industries, including in smartphones. Historically, it has been limited to small-scale applications and pieces parts, not entire products. However, Turing Robotic Industries (TRI) just announced pre-orders for the world's first liquid metal-frame smartphone. The Turing Phone uses its own brand of Liquid Metal called Liquidmorphium, which provides excellent shock absorption characteristics. So instead of making a dent in the smartphone casing or cracking/chipping like plastic when dropped, a Turing Phone should in theory "shake it off" while at the same time protecting the fragile display from breaking. The Turing Phone does not come cheap, however, with pricing starting at $610 for a 16GB model and escalating quickly to $740 and $870 respectively for the 64GB and 128GB models, unlocked. Pre-orders open up on July 31.
Will FirefoxOS run on these phones? I prefer Firefox over Android because it's developed by Mozilla, because it's powered by Firefox technology, and because it uses open standards like JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS3.
Just reading this and imagining if you could make a T-1000 with it
I'm gonna wait until they invent transparent Liquidmorphium, then the case and screen can all be one big unbreakable piece... with a whale song ringtone.
If I had a DeLorean... I would probably only drive it from time to time.
Here's the thing: my smartphones and tablets always look brand new after I've dropped them. They don't dent. They don't chip. They look perfect! They just stop working properly.
Tell me you've fixed that problem and you've got my money. In the meantime, my piece of crud $40 refurbished smartphone has the really significant advantage that I don't really care if I drop it.
Question is will it blend?
How long until all phones and tablets come with a reasonable amount of storage and don't have an insane premium to upgrade it?
does it run the T-1000 os? wopr os?
and why should I give a shit?
Turing Robotic Industries is a company that has created no products to date. One article says it is mostly funded by Lugee Li, CEO of DongGuan Eontec Co., Ltd. That company seems to be primarily involved in die cast metal.
So far, none of this is important enough to be news to me.
What is this mysterious Liquid Metal, that I can't tell if it is a trademark or brand name or what?
Well, it seems to be an amorphous metal alloy with a non crystalline structure. This grants it some physical properties, different strengths and weaknesses, than a chemically similar crystalline metal. However, I doubt this is going to save your screen if you do drop your phone.
Anyways, a couple of paragraphs from wikipedia:
"An amorphous metal (also known metallic glass or glassy metal) is a solid metallic material, usually an alloy, with a disordered atomic-scale structure. Most metals are crystalline in their solid state, which means they have a highly ordered arrangement of atoms. Amorphous metals are non-crystalline, and have a glass-like structure. But unlike common glasses, such as window glass, which are typically electrical insulators, amorphous metals have good electrical conductivity."
"Amorphous metals have higher tensile yield strengths and higher elastic strain limits than polycrystalline metal alloys, but their ductilities and fatigue strengths are lower.[12] Amorphous alloys have a variety of potentially useful properties. In particular, they tend to be stronger than crystalline alloys of similar chemical composition, and they can sustain larger reversible ("elastic") deformations than crystalline alloys. Amorphous metals derive their strength directly from their non-crystalline structure, which does not have any of the defects (such as dislocations) that limit the strength of crystalline alloys. One modern amorphous metal, known as Vitreloy, has a tensile strength that is almost twice that of high-grade titanium. However, metallic glasses at room temperature are not ductile and tend to fail suddenly when loaded in tension, which limits the material applicability in reliability-critical applications, as the impending failure is not evident. Therefore, there is considerable interest in producing metal matrix composite materials consisting of a metallic glass matrix containing dendritic particles or fibers of a ductile crystalline metal."
The bounce video does not demonstrate the ideal mater for a phone casing unless it's the frame that breaks. Note how their alloy bounces a long time. That means it's hardly deforming under the pressure at all, and immediately returning the kinetic energy. You want that in a golf ball. You probably don't want that in a car frame or a cell phone.
The frame will be very robust, but at the cost of transferring all energy to the internal components. Fewer will break due to a deforming case but that's not why your phone breaks.
It's not the ideal material for today's phones but the material could be the first step in a new, very robust kind of phone design. If the components are cushioned with energy-absorbing structural elements (don't screw the motherboard directly to the case) then the phone's durability is no longer a function of case or component durability but of clever kinetic energy management.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
I remember playing with some liquid metal. Call me crazy, but I prefer my things made from solid metal.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Gimmick, gimmick, gimmick, unproven gimmick, take our word for it and give us an exorbitant amount of money, you sucker.
So what you mean is cheaper than apple idiotphones,at least in the uk..
Now now, my challenged friend. What happened to the cows and the app appers?
Nobody is asking for a new material to build the phone out of. Nobody is asking for another gig of ram, or a bigger screen. What people ARE asking for is better battery life. Making a phone out of exotic materials and then pricing yourself out of the market is a dumb idea. The world doesn't need another luxury smartphone. It needs a better smartphone for the average user.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
This product doesn't appear to be outside of the realm of the possible; bulk metallic glasses are a real thing (and apparently not excessively expensive for consumer electronics, a number of Sandisk's adequate-but-cheap-and-wholly-unexciting MP3 players used them as chassis materials); and the rest of the specs are on the high side; but available.
However, there appears to be almost nothing about this 'Turing Robotic Industries' except a couple of sites with the same 3d renders and vague puffery. Is 'cryptic' just what all the cool kids are doing these days, or is this the ever delightful scent of vaporware?
Sure, it's dog slow, but it's hit the asphalt at least twice now and it's still kickin'. Hell, if they'd stop putting a heavy piece of glass on them to make them feel less like the cheap toys they are my kid's iPhone would stop breaking when she drops it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Liquid Metal is a penny stock scam. their CEO was indicted for fraud. The whole Apple deal was completely fabricated. There are no press releases by Apple EVER stating that they made ANY kind of deals.
Their (liquid metal) website is a joke. I found a few images on there website of instruments they make taken form stock photography websites.
I can't believe theyre still getting away with this.
Unless I'm reading this wrong (and I might be):
Apple renews Liquidmetal exclusivity license into 2016
http://appleinsider.com/articl...
One of the things that immediately puts me in alert mode is that name 'Liquid Metal', capitalised, no less. Understanding of what a glass actually is, is realtively new, of course, and something that is likely to become very useful in the future, but why make a phone with frame made of it? If it is indeed as good and durable as all that, is it actually going to be relevant? Smartphones are 'old' almost as soon as they go on sale, since the technology is still developing quickly, and unless the hardware etc can be upgraded easily, having an expensive phone like this is no more than a toy for the rich and stupid.
These douche bags are doing nothing other than trying to profit from Alan Turing's name(they have nothing to do with him or his estate from what I can tell)
Why not come up with your own name cock suckers?
is inversely proportional to quality
liquidmorphium ?
give me a break
What I really want is a phone that I can read the screen in direct sunlight. That would be a moble phone for the real world, not just in some office cubicle.
Looks pretty solid to me: http://hothardware.com/news/turing-announces-pre-orders-for-worlds-first-liquid-metal-frame-smartphone
From what I see this Liquidmetal is VERY good at transmitting shock and not absorbing it. So when you drop your phone it will send that shock back out of the metal to the screen and bouncing the device higher than normal so it can fall down again and again.
I'm wondering about this as well. Apple and Liquid Metal have had an exclusivity agreement in place for consumer electronics for years, and by all indications, that agreements remains in place.