Turing Near Ready To Ship World's First Liquid Metal Android Smartphone 93
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 these phones run FirefoxOS? (Score:2, Funny)
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.
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Another piece in the puzzle... (Score:5, Funny)
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Turing and "imagine" is normally in the same sentence with "powerful processor" and "Beowulf cluster".
Re:Another piece in the puzzle... (Score:5, Informative)
The movie seems to disagree with you:
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The movie didn't show us the alloy under a microscope.
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If the comment I was replying to is off-topic, then the one i replied to is as well.
The fact is other than describing it as 'liquid metal' they do not explain how it actually moves or where its actual processor is and how it communicates with the rest of its, for lack of a better term, 'mass'. We don't know what it looks like on a microscopic level, for all we know it *is* a ton of little nano machines. We certainly do not know any differently from that and the description in the movie isn't adequate enou
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I was thinking about how a new Terminator movie is coming out, like... RIGHT NOW.
And Slashdot is posting their first "liquid metal" post since... I dunno. When was the last Slashdot "liquid metal" post?
Still waiting (Score:3)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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Re:Still waiting (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [telecompetitor.com]. 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.
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Yes, I am still using my SGS3, and the SGS6 is definitely not more attractive to me (no external SD, No removable battery = no use. With CyanogenMod = no bloatware).
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A mere toy? On my last business trip to an unfamiliar city, my smartphone was absolutely indispensable.
Don't get me wrong, they're incredibly useful and I'd hate to be without mine, but indispensible? We managed to make trips to unfamiliar places before smartphones. These days one doesn't bother to plan anything in advance becayse there's no need if you've got a smartphone. This is of course a boon for the perenially disorganised like me.
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Even trying to plan everything in advance, it would be incredibly difficult to navigate an unfamiliar city by myself, as I was, with only a paper map and a route drawn on it. I remember on our family vacations driving across the country that we always needed a second person as a navigator, and even then there was often a lot of guesswork and missed turns.
My phone, on the other hand, would verbally direct me, and do so even better than a human navigator could. I would only have to occasionally glance at th
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Do we really need all these high tech alloys in our landfills?
Would you prefer plastic?
Dents, chips... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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...Or you could just buy a case for your phone.
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To prevent cellphone damage from drops, the solution is simple: move to space. It's that pesky gravity that is wrecking your electronics.
but then any momentum given to the object would keep it moving as there is no friction... therefore you will lose your phone if it's not attached to you!
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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.
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I good way to fix that issue is simple. Stop dropping your electronics.
Smartass, you're talking about a device with the single highest rate of manual handling out of anything. A side effect from being our personal organisers, time wasters, universal communicators, navigators, and all around do everything gadgets. Oh and most people keep them in our pockets which means we need more manual handling for common use than drinking a coffee cup.
Your assertion that once and simply stop dropping electronics are absolutely ludicrous. Do you work in OH&S by any chance?
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And how many times in your perfect life have you landed painfully on your left testicle because you fell after some other clumsy oaf bumped into you? Not that I want this to happen to you or anything.
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You're not married to my husband. Two weeks after he gets a new phone, it looks like he's run it through the clothes dryer in a box of rocks. I don't know how he does it.
Re:Dents, chips... (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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I dunno about that. I have an aging TF101, that's beat the F* up but keeps running. I got it black friday, took it home to a wife and a 9mo (nearly 4 now) it's been with our youngest since birth (now nearly 2) the edge of the bezel no longer snaps in, the corners are so busted that the back plate doesn't fit properly. it is in a sorry looking state.
The thing is, it just keeps working. combined with the sweet, sweet Katt Kiss project (Shout out Duru!) I dont think the thing will ever stop working.
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Ermm also, what I was trying to say is that I consider the state of the glass to be the deal breaker. If the glass is broken, I will not let my kids anywhere near it. The TF101 glass is 100% fine, not a chip or crack anywhere, the body is falling apart. My Nexus 6 OHO... My Nexus 5 gave a gallant effort but succumbed too early. The Droid models did pretty well, but that was before I had kids....
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Lastly, I consider most things to be tools. Form follows function sort of guy. I'd be super Pissed if my hammer shattered the first time it encountered a nail.
q/a (Score:2, Interesting)
Question is will it blend?
Memory prices are crazy (Score:3)
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How long until all phones and tablets come with a reasonable amount of storage and don't have an insane premium to upgrade it?
Most non Apple mobile phones come with SD card slots which allow you to upgrade storage at will.
Many devices are also quite cheap.
Oh but I imagine you also wanted a 16 core processor, 32GB of RAM, a 4K display, and a 2 week battery life too right? Well that WILL cost you.
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Never. The price reflects what you can afford, not what it costs to manufacture.
does it run the T-1000 os? wopr os? (Score:2)
does it run the T-1000 os? wopr os?
Who the fuck is Turing (Score:5, Informative)
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."
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More interesting to me from the same article [wikipedia.org] (probably), is the compositions listed : zirconium, beryllium, titanium, copper, nickel, and more recently aluminium and niobium. From a health-effects and recyclability point of view, I'd watch out for the nickel and beryllium in particular. I don't have a nickel sensitivity myself, I think, but I've had enough contact with people who do have a bad response to anticipate problems, for a moderate proportion of users.
Deformity and bounce (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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Generally speaking you are right about car frames, wrong about phone frames and technically wrong about golf balls.
Car frames are made to absorb energy deforming because the internal component it is trying to save (the people inside) are very fragile to high G forces. The internal components of a phone on the other hand, are extremely resistant to high Gs, what dose components can't withstand are forces applied irregularly to just part of it. So yes, current phones always break because of deforming cases,
Solid metal (Score:2)
I remember playing with some liquid metal. Call me crazy, but I prefer my things made from solid metal.
All I hear is... (Score:3)
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not only is it a gimmick, it's completely made up and false. this is a penny stock scam.
When will they learn (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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As long as my smartphone lasts through a long, busy day, I'm fine with the battery. I used to have an Android phone, and carry two extra charged batteries. However since the iPhone 6 Plus, I'm coming home with 70% charge left.
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Well, unless you have an external method of charging those batteries, extra batteries are a huge PITA. Now, some phones DO have extra docks and such available so you can charge batteries outside the phone, but the vast majority do not.
The problem is, the user switches batteries, and goes home, puts the ph
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Umm, who are these guys? (Score:2)
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 'cryp
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Um... I drop my el-cheapo LG all the time (Score:2)
SCAM (Score:1)
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.
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MojoKid was probably in such a rush to get his clickbait up that he forgot to do any checking. Explains "pieces parts" too.
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Something sounds fishy about this, for sure, but Apple has shipped Liquid Metal components before, namely the "SIM Removal Tool" (i.e. a glorified paperclip) that shipped with, I believe, the iPhone 3GS. So yes, we do know that a deal with Apple has existed for quite some time, and by all indications and the reports I've see, Apple's exclusivity deal with Liquid Metal for the consumer electronics market was re-upped last month when it was due to expire.
Doesn't Apple have exclusive rights to LiquidMetal (Score:1)
Unless I'm reading this wrong (and I might be):
Apple renews Liquidmetal exclusivity license into 2016
http://appleinsider.com/articl... [appleinsider.com]
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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.
Just a toy for the rich? (Score:2)
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
douchebags profitting from Turing's name (Score:1)
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?
But it doesn't stop the shock ? (Score:1)