The latest concept phone from OnePlus is a OnePlus 8T that features electrochemic glass on the back cover to enable colors to shift when you’re holding the phone or when you bring your hand near it thanks to an mmWave radar embedded in the camera bump, allowing the phone to react to touchless gestures.

OnePlus is only showing off the OnePlus 8T concept phone at this point to demonstrate the possibilities of electrochemic glass and the company hasn’t committed to actually bringing a device with this technology to market yet.

But the company says in addition to giving the back of the phone a unique design, the technology could enable things like notification. For example, the back cover could change colors when a phone call or text message arrives, and you could dismiss the notification with a gesture.

In a stranger potential application, OnePlus says the mmWave radar technology “can register a user’s breathing, enabling the color to change in sync and effectively making the phone a biofeedback device,” if that’s something you’re looking for in a smartphone.

This isn’t the first time OnePlus has shown off a concept device with electrochemic glass. In January, the company revealed the OnePlus Concept One, which used the color-changing glass to hide the phone’s rear cameras when they weren’t in use by turning opaque. When you want to snap a picture, the glass becomes transparent.

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One reply on “OnePlus concept phone has a color-changing back”

  1. No point in actually making it when you have to cover the back with a plastic case to correct the intentional design flaw of having a glass back in the first place.
    Also, someone please tell me that the mmwave radar is an extraneous accessory component and not something that any 5g antenna can be set up to do (the forum post doesn’t discourage this idea). I mean it’s hardly worse than what the average front/rear camera array can be made to measure, but at least if you destroy or cover the cameras if you think you might be in a situation where you really need to do that, the whole device doesn’t stop being a cell phone.

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