First up, the Nokia Kinetic is not a real phone, rather it is a design concept, dreamt up in 2010 by Jeremy Innes-Hopkins, while a student at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design.

The design brief, was to “design a playful phone for 2012”. In addition to his own design skills, Innes-Hopkins had as his tutor Silas Grant, a former senior designer at Nokia.

It’s a very clean, great looking (concept) phone, isn’t it? But looks alone aren’t the kicker here. Notice the bulge at the bottom of the Kinetic? Inside there, Innes-Hopkins proposes in his design, is an electromagnet.

What the electromagnet does is to have the phone stand up from a prone position when, for instance, you receive a call. You look at the screen, and if you don’t want to take the call, or have it go through to messagebank, you give the phone a little push with your finger and the phone returns to its prone position.

The idea is that it performs this action for text messages, alarms, reminders, video calls… a neat trick. I’d like to think you could add sound effects to the phone as it moves between the prone and upright positions.

If you want to see more of Jeremy’s work, have a look at the Jeremy Innes-Hopkins/Design website.