Color-changing phone allows you to choose from 1,600 different colors at will

When you buy an Android smartphone, you usually have a few color choices. What if you don’t like any of them, though? What if you want a very specific color? Furthermore, what if you want a very specific color today but know you’ll want a different one tomorrow?

The Tecno Chameleon Coloring Technology could solve this problem. Just announced at Mobile World Congress 2023, it allows you to pick from 1,600 different colors for the back of your phone.

You might think Tecno is just slapping a display onto the back of a phone. However, it’s much more complicated than that. According to Tecno, it uses a sub-micron prism that scatters light as it hits it. You can shift the arrangement of the prism to change the color you see when that light scattering happens.

The material can change up to two million times before potentially failing, allowing you to change the color 100 times a day for nearly 55 years (in other words: go nuts).

Of course, you’ll suck a little battery every time you change the color. However, Tecno isn’t too concerned with this, as it claims the battery consumption for 100 changes would be about the same as watching a five-minute YouTube video. So there’s a power drain, but not so much that it would be too burdensome.

If you feel like you’ve heard of Tecno doing color-changing smartphones before, you’re not wrong, as the Tecno Camon 19 Pro Mondrian Edition from 2022 offered a color-changing back. That was a different type of technology, though. That system required UV light and wasn’t controllable by the user, so this newer tech is much better.

Unfortunately, the Tecno Chameleon Coloring Technology is not available in a smartphone or even a prototype, at least for now. We’ll likely see this land in a future Tecno smartphone, perhaps even this year.