Motorola's flexible phone concept can wrap around your wrist

Motorola is now well-versed in foldable phones, but its new concept is taking a swing at another alternative phone format. The company unveiled a new bendable phone concept that doubles as a standard smartphone and an elaborate digital bangle.

Unveiled at its Tech World conference, Motorola’s “adaptive display” concept employs a 6.9-inch flexible pOLED screen that can be used flat, in a “tent” mode, bent back in self-standing mode, or twisted back on itself and fitted on your wrist like an oversized smartwatch.

We’re unsure how practical or safe the latter use case is. Concept images provided by Motorola suggest that the phone could easily slip off your arm if you’re a particularly slender or excitable user. However, with more development, we could imagine the appeal of such a device. The company notes that in standing mode, users can take advantage of 4.6 inches of the display, with all guises running a full version of Android.

Motorola provides little other details beyond the device’s screen potential, so it remains unclear what would power the phone, its battery capacity, and other vital specifications.

Bendable devices and screens aren’t new, but they’re not common. The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold is perhaps the most promising device in this genre thus far. Motorola’s device is a concept first and foremost, so it remains to be seen if it’ll eventually become a fully-fledged market release in the coming years.

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Motorola’s new AI assistant is incoming

The adaptive display concept wasn’t the only tech on show. Motorola also announced its AI ambitions, with the MotoAI personal assistant leading the line. The learning model is “uniquely personalized to the user,” which can seek data in the cloud or run on-device. The company hopes to debut the feature on Motorola smartphones and PCs, but a timeline was not provided.

The company also debuted its new Doc Scanner feature, which uses AI to improve final product quality, a Text Summarization functionality that “takes longform chats, emails, or reports and distills them down to key messages,” and a content obfuscation feature that warps personal information in social posts when required. We can expect these features to arrive on Motorola phones in the future.