SlashGear

Perhaps the only worse thing than some sort of gorgeous prototype by a manufacturer which you know will never be built is a gorgeous prototype by someone entirely unconnected with the company – at least in the first scenario you know there’s a chance elements of the concept willl get picked up in later handsets.  Okay, so often the fan-designs aren’t up to much and you wouldn’t want to upgrade to them anyway, but occassionally a really hot piece of industrial design comes along.  Well, meet the Sony Ericsson Adriana…

Pretty, huh?  I’m sure the Sony Ericsson designers are thinking the same, as well as kicking themselves that they didn’t create it themselves.  It’s the handiwork of Luis Camino, one of the Unnofficial Club Sony Ericsson team, who was charged with taking a boring handheld Sudoku game and transforming it into, well, anything he liked.

Being a SE fan he of course dreamt up a fantastic concept phone, with a DVB digital TV tuner, scrollwheel-surrounded joystick, 10gb internal hard drive for recording and time-shifting video, Memory Stick Micro slot and a new, more flexible interface, taking the handheld game and making a very realistic prototype.

Perhaps too realistic; photos of Camino’s project were stored on his cellphone (a SE K750, incidentally) which was stolen, and the photos passed off as a real concept.  Edit: Luis informs me that this part was, happily, a joke. 

Sadly for us it’s not a real concept, but if I were heading the design team at any of the major cellphone companies I’d be looking to snap him up asap.

Unofficial Club Sony Ericsson [via SlashPhone]