When we see alluring phone concepts that'll never leave the lab, we end up wishing there was a little more innovation in the handsets out in the wild. There was a wealth of eyebrow-raising examples of that principle when LG Japan exhibited top entries to its Mobile Design Contest last weekend. We're keen on the fbt, a phone designed for braille text messaging, and the Tap, which is shaped like a light switch and functions like one too -- when you tap it, the phone turns off so you can live once again in peace. The winner, though, was the above-pictured Planet Phone, the surface of which is dotted with LEDs representing your friends; if you don't talk to someone for a while, their light gradually moves out to the edge. It's supposed to remind you to keep in touch, but it has darker connotations -- if you become angry with someone, you can revel in the pleasure of watching them slowly tick away into oblivion. That's absolutely a feature we want to see added to the Storm.

[Via Hallyu Tech]

This set first appeared in a supremely blurry video we posted back in May, and we're more than a little thrilled to see it making a comeback. The pics do seem to suggest it could have -- we say could as this thing may never arrive, or may in fact be what we now know as XPERIA X1 -- a QWERTY keypad, and two portrait slide modes for camera and multimedia functions. Of course, we'd love to see something like this land in our hands, but we'll get by with pictures until we get disappointed more info at some point in the future.