He says that smartphones are now "portals" that people use to access and organize their entire lives, and "designers have a big responsibility to get things right." He also believes smartphones are uniquely personal objects; there are few pieces of electronics that provoke such a sense of ownership, and many of his designs incorporate materials that allow each device to be unique. For example, the first concept to make it past the drawing board into prototyping was a copper and ceramic design. He chose the copper housing because the process of oxidation would, with time, make each device different, but the design was scrapped because of fears that the copper would react badly with people’s skin.

“We want to tell stories through our material selections,” says Woodhouse. “We needed a strong material that would still offer a unique finish for each user — bamboo was the perfect fit.” Although it’s far from conventional, a few product lines over the years have toyed with natural finishes, notably Asus’ U33JC laptop, Dell’s Studio Hybrid desktop, and NTT Docomo’s Touch Wood phone. None have been runaway successes, but all garnered plenty of attention, and at least proved bamboo and electronics could mix.

The ADzero prototype drew heavily from Woodhouse’s earlier designs. The ‘n’-shaped groove beneath the display came from an early, scrapped design, while the ring flash and tapered back recall the Xperia LED. Reliability issues with the groove led to another tweak: rather than being etched into the wood itself, the final product’s groove will be part of the bezel. But the idea lives on.

The ADzero was essentially finalized back in August, but major manufacturing issues forced Woodhouse to dramatically rethink his design and production process. The prototype features a unibody casing machined from a single block of bamboo. A thin plastic inner-frame that houses the internal electronic components then locks into the shaped casing before the glass front is placed over it. The system requires precise machining and miniscule tolerances to work. For what was supposed to be its production prototype, AD switched to using mass-manufacturing processes, and the results weren’t good enough. They were unable to get the precise fit needed without machining the inside of the casing, which led to “major weaknesses” in the bamboo itself. We’re told that the current unibody bamboo version is now “very stable,” but there is no way to scale up production to mass-manufacturing levels. Woodhouse maintains that it wasn’t down to an inherent weakness in the materials, but rather the limited manufacturing tools available to a small startup. AD will still offer the unibody model, but it’s unlikely to ever be manufactured on a grand scale.

So what was AD’s solution? Plastic. The new design incorporates two pieces of “eco-plastic” at the top and bottom of the phone that strengthen the structural integrity of the assembled device. The plastic looks almost like a cap, and now houses the headphone and charging ports as well as its microphone. It’s a shame that the company will have to water down what was essentially its main selling point: an all-bamboo shell. The new design has only recently been finalized and prototypes are currently in production, but from the early renders we've seen it doesn't look like the addition compromises the ADzero’s design too much. We’ll have to see how the bamboo and plastic sit together once we’ve spent some time with the new prototypes.