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.

Comments

Will these phones run FirefoxOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Another piece in the puzzle...

[mosiadh]

Just reading this and imagining if you could make a T-1000 with it

Re:Another piece in the puzzle...

[Chris Mattern]

Terminators are made out of nanomachines, not "liquid metal".

The movie seems to disagree with you:

John Connor: So this other guy: he's a Terminator like you, right?
The Terminator: Not like me. A T-1000, advanced prototype.
John Connor: You mean more advanced than you are?
The Terminator: Yes. A mimetic polyalloy.
John Connor: What the hell does that mean?
The Terminator: Liquid metal.

Still waiting

[LesFerg]

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.

Re:Still waiting

[Darinbob]

It's overkill. An awesome material used to create a mere toy for narcisists that will be discarded in one year. Seriously, who cares about corrosion resistance when the phone is considered obsolete before it gets out of the shop? Do we really need all these high tech alloys in our landfills?

Re:Still waiting

[Dutch Gun]

A mere toy? On my last business trip to an unfamiliar city, my smartphone was absolutely indispensable. It's already closing in on three years old, and I have no intention of replacing it anytime soon unless it breaks. It recently got its first bit of damage (and no clue how it happened), where the lip above the charging port got bent. A little worse, and I would have either had try to pry it open with handtools or replace the phone, as I wouldn't have been able to recharge it.

While some people replace their phone each year, it's certainly not universally true. Those who cycle through phones yearly are undoubtedly *perceived* to be a higher percentage, because all the people who constantly *talk* about phones (bloggers, tech columnists, enthusiasts, status seekers) always buy the latest gadgets, of course.

My prediction is that smartphones will become more like PCs, in that they will tend to remain viable far longer than they used to. I believe we're going to reach a performance and feature threshold of sorts. There's very little a modern high-end smartphone *can't do* simply because it doesn't have enough CPU or GPU power anymore (perhaps outside of pure entertainment). The operating systems are becoming more mature, and the app goldrush has petered off into a more sane and sustainable pace. In short, they're becoming more of an everyday tool rather than some sort of tech status symbol, and few people can actually tell whether you have a brand new or a three year old phone outside of a very small niche.

In terms of the market, again, the exact same thing that happened to PCs (and more recently, tablets) will happen to smartphones. The initial tech rush will die down into a more stable and sustained growth with only slow, incremental improvements and "as needed" replacements. Pundits will lament the "death" of the smartphone market, when all it really means is that most people now have a perfectly usable device and don't feel the need to upgrade each year. Rest assured, the status symbol crowd will find some new sort of gizmo to replace it though.

Dents, chips...

[zephvark]

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.

Re:Dents, chips...

[dugancent]

Don't be that jackass. Shit happens.

I drop my phone all the time because I can be a klutz, therefor a use a case.

Re:Dents, chips...

[thegarbz]

They don't dent. They don't chip.

I on the other hand have a perfectly working phone covered in dents, chipped off paint (actually there's no chrome bezel around my Galaxy anymore) and cracks in the housing.

Maybe it all comes down to how you drop it and on what surface?

q/a

[Anonymous Coward]

Question is will it blend?

Memory prices are crazy

[bobbutts]

How long until all phones and tablets come with a reasonable amount of storage and don't have an insane premium to upgrade it?

Who the fuck is Turing

[Razed By TV]

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."

Deformity and bounce

[Iamthecheese]

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.

All I hear is...

[Joshua Fan]

Gimmick, gimmick, gimmick, unproven gimmick, take our word for it and give us an exorbitant amount of money, you sucker.

When will they learn

[kuzb]

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.