Does your high-rise apartment or office tower look like a mobile phone? These ones do, and you can bet smartphone users inside them get REALLY good reception.

Telefónica Chile Building – Santiago, Chile

(image via: Celebrate Big)

The Telefónica Chile Building (Torre Telefónica Chile) in Santiago was designed by architects Seismic A&E and while the firm doesn’t explicitly say so at their website, the structure was clearly intended to house a mobile telecommunications company – in this case, Telefónica Chile (known since 2009 as Movistar).

(images via: Chilling In Chile, Dijitalimaj and Wikimedia/Diego Sepulveda)

The 143 m (469 ft) tall tower’s design was an attempt to ape the appearance of state-of-the-art mid-1990s mobile phones… considering the building opened in December of 1995, we’d say the architects achieved their goal. It’s odd, however, that planners did not foresee the continuing evolution of mobile phone design through the Telefónica Chile Building‘s estimated lifespan and indeed, only a few short years after it opened the design was already looking quite dated.

Omniyat Properties iPad Building – Dubai, UAE

(image via: WIRED)

Don’t let the name “iPad” fool you, this 23-story building concept from Omniyat Properties dates from 2007 and its design was intended to evoke Apple’s iPod MP3 player sitting atop a docking station. If the design doesn’t resemble an iPod upon first glance, keep in mind the edifice will lean back at a six degree angle.

(images via: Roberta’s Blog and LandvestDubai)

Omniyat Properties suspended work on many of its planned building designs as the late-2000s world financial crisis bit into investment budgets, and the iPad was one of those to be put “on hold” until better days arrived. By 2010 the design had been re-named “The Pad” for obvious reasons and according to Omniyat Properties over 50 percent of payments required to re-start work on this and other outstanding projects had been nailed down.

Bic Camera Building – Tokyo, Japan

(image via: Panoramio/alicemarotta)

The Bic Camera building in Tokyo’s Ikebukuro district is one of about 40 Bic Camera stores in Japan, though it’s the only one that looks like a cellphone. The building’s facade is actually functional in a way, as the number buttons match the building’s floors and include a short description of what products may be found there.

(images via: Spicykarma and Kirainet)

Oddly for a building shaped like a cellular phone, the Bic Camera building in Ikebukuro does not specialize in mobile phone sales. Instead, this particular location predominantly sells computers, parts, peripheral devices and the like.

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Calling Home 9 Nifty Smartphone Shaped Buildings

Soon, you’ll be able to charge your iPhone at strategic locations around New York City – but you’ll have to put in a little leg work. The Charge Cycle is a stationary bike equipped with an iPhone dock, so users can charge their phones with the power of their own muscles, without plugging into the grid.

The Kickstarter-based project by David Krawczyk and Navjot Kaur aims to get at least 30 of these bikes out into the city where anyone can use them by early May 2013. Prototypes have already been placed around New York in locations like Washington Square Park, Zuccotti Park and Brooklyn Bridge Park.

The bike is equipped with micro-USB, 30-pin and 8-pin adapters, so virtually anyone can charge their phones. It takes about the same amount of time cycling as it does plugging into a wall charger to charge up a phone, since most phones have built-in charge limiting functions to prevent overheating. The Charge Cycle will be free for public use.

To use it, you attach your phone to an adapter ad secure it to the bike with a silicone band. A 10-segment LED display bar tells you how much charge you’ve accumulated as you pedal. The basket in the front holds your belongings as you ‘ride’. Watch the video above to see it in action.

Want to support this project? Check out the Charge Cycle Kickstarter page.

Quick, when was the mobile phone invented? If you thought it was the 1980s, when businessmen lugged them around in giant briefcases, think again. The earliest version of a mobile phone was first created in 1946, evolving into ultra-durable, shock-proof, vacuum-tubed contraptions that mounted to car dashboards by the 1960s.

According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, mobile radio-based phone systems started in the early 1900’s in the form of ship to shore radio, and some police cars had them by 1921. In 1946, the first “mobile radiophone service” allowing calls from fixed to mobile telephones became available in St. Louis, and by 1964 there were 1.5 million mobile phone users in the United States.

Radio expert Geoff Fors has exhaustively detailed the history of these phones with a website that chronicles their progress from the 1940s through the ’90s. In the ’40s, radio phones had massive transmitter cabinets and receiver cabinets that had to be mounted in the trunk of the car, with a cable that ran under the carpet to a ‘control head’ on the dash.

Motorola and General Electric stepped in during the 1950s to streamline the equipment, making it smaller and lighter in weight (but still gigantic by today’s standards, of course!) In the ’60s, Motorola’s TLD-1000 was fittingly used in the opening scenes of the James Bond film Live and Let Die.

See lots more images including brochures, advertisements and photographs and read all the details about these dino phones at Fors’ website.

One of the marks of our modern culture is the proliferation of gadgets most of us carry around. From digital cameras to cell phones to tablet computers to laptops to MP3 players, we have our hands full just trying to keep track of all of them. This excellent concept could go a long way toward streamlining our technology while still keeping us as connected as always.

(all images via: YankoDesign)

One of the problems with having too many different pieces of technology is the fact that hardware and functions are often repeated between the devices. Your digital camera and cellular phone both take pictures; your tablet and MP3 player both play videos; your phone and laptop both store your data. The Lifebook concept could solve several of our modern first-world gadget problems.

According to designer Prashant Chandra, combining all of our gadgets would make life simpler and allow all of our technology to share resources. Rather than having the same bits of data stored on multiple devices, Lifebook would let each device form part of an overall super-gadget. It’s sort of like Voltron – but instead of being composed of vehicles, it’s made up of a tablet, a camera, a phone/music player and a laptop.

The laptop serves as the base for all of the devices. There is no physical keyboard; rather, a touch keypad appears whenever the tablet is plugged into the laptop base. The phone/music player is fully integrated into the laptop as well, and all of the devices share memory and data as soon as they are plugged in.

In addition to streamlining the process of storing and transferring data between devices, the Lifebook concept would allow users to charge all of their devices in one place without that huge, ugly tangle of cords we all hate. Although the Lifebook is still in the concept stage at the moment, it is not hard to imagine it becoming an indispensable piece of technology in the foreseeable future.

Graffiti is one of those art forms that really is only for the brave. It takes a fair amount of courage to risk arrest just to put your mark on the world. For everyone who has always wanted to engage in some heavy tagging without the fear of doing time in jail, the Street Tag app from Channel 4 lets you use your iPhone’s camera to spray paint in augmented reality – no furtive glances or cover of darkness required.

(all images via: Pop-Up City)

The free app turns your iPhone into a virtual spray paint can, letting you tag any building you want in broad daylight. Feel like defacing the Empire State Building with your name? Go for it. Want to leave a big smiley face on the Sears Tower? No worries. The augmented reality abilities hold your artwork in place on an image of the building so that you can spray away to your heart’s content. While the app is full of cool and a lot of fun to use, there is a slight learning curve involved. But once you get the hang of it, you can upload all of your masterpieces to an online gallery – complete with geo-tags – to share them with the world.