This concept Nokia phone charges in your pocket by inducting heat from your body. It comes from English designer Patrick Hyland, who sees the phone being made from copper and capable of drawing heat from your body, then converting it to energy.

It does this using a thermogenerator that’s been placed in the copper E-Cu phone (“E” for environment, and “Cu” for copper). Sadly, what with the demand and high prices of copper, this phone will never see the light of day.

Well, here’s a first. We’ve never seen a round laptop before. It comes from Revo Round, so maybe it isn’t so surprising. Yep, this is a round laptop that comes with a round display, a round case and a curved keyboard.

It’s called the Roundtop. This has to be how aliens use the internet in their UFOs. This concept model would take some getting used to. Revo Round hopes that their Roundtop technology will see action as billboards and other displays one day. Good thing too, because this laptop is just too weird.

I like a nice concept product because it lets us have a glimpse at what the gadgets of the future might look like. I have no doubt that at some future date solar power will be the main means of powering all manner of electronic devices. Today isn’t that day though with solar panels that are generally unable to power much of anything quickly or for a long time without room for a very large solar panel.

A new concept media player has surfaced that has the Sony brand. It’s not an official Sony concept apparently and it is called the Eclipse. The Eclipse has a solar panel on the back that gathers all the power the thing needs to operate. It has integrated speakers and a touchscreen for viewing video content.

Alarm clocks are far too easy to turn off, defeating the purpose of an alarm. Just hit the button and go back to sleep. But with the Aphelion clock concept, you will wake up annoyed. It forces you to retrieve the ball that it just threw at you, so you can put it back in its holder to activate the snooze function.

The other features are pretty standard. There’s a radio and MP3 player input, and a large display. Depending on how heavy the ball is, it may just put you back to sleep. Permanently.

Mac Funamizu has designed a smartphone concept called the Nagisa Phone. It looks like a surfboard with a dented looking keypad. The other stand out feature is a display that literally “turns around the bend”.

Nagisa means beach in Japanese. This would be an awesome stylish phone, but sadly we don’t expect it to hit the market anytime soon though. It’s a great design.

Design concepts are interesting most of the time with cool ideas for products that will never see the light of day. If you are one of the folks that are rather challenged when it comes to reading a tape measure of ruler, the Smart finger concept may be perfect for you.

The concept is a pair of little finger appliances that look sort of like sci-fi thimbles and can measure distance between the two sensors on the devices accurately. As you move the sensors apart, the measurement is shown on a display on the top of one of the sections of the gadget.

It can’t be easy being hearing impaired. Many can read lips, but that may not be the easiest way depending on the situation. Not everyone moves their lips the same way to make the same words, after all. But a new designer has just come up with a great way to make life easier. Wear glasses.

These speech-to-text glasses are a great concept. Someone has to make these a reality. They are designed by a Danish designer by the name of Mads Hindhede. The Babel Fisk glasses can allow the deaf to read what you’re saying, while you’re saying it.

Sometimes I see design concepts that are so simple I wonder why they aren’t on the market already. This concept wall outlet with a couple USB ports built-in is one of those things.

Just about all the gadgets around my house can charge from USB. Things like the iPhone, iPad, digital cameras, and all manner of other devices get juice from the ubiquitous USB port. The problem is that USB ports on our computers get filled fast just as AC outlets in many homes do.

I have seen my chare of concept products before and many of them have been furniture items. Typically, a concept is a cool product with a unique design. A new concept chair has surfaced, and I use the term chair loosely here.

The chair is called the OOoo chair and isn’t a chair, it’s a couple holes in the floor. You sit on the floor and stick your legs into the holes rather than sitting pretzel style. You can hardly call this a chair.

It’s safe to say that we’ve never seen a DSLR like this before. All DSLR cameras on the market look quite similar, but Yaniv Berg has a DSLR camera design that looks…different. Like an old army flashlight or curved pipe.

The design of this camera makes it easy for the user to take photos at some strange angles. In fact, you would be tempted to say “Up periscope” every time you snapped a pic. You would definitely stand out from the crowd.

Do you tote around both a phone and a tablet? Apple fans need not answer since we already know that you do. Why not merge the two? That’s the idea behind the Sony Ericsson FH concept.

The FH is a dual screen flip phone. The hinge allows you to position both halves of the phone side by side, so that the screens line up and work like one big screen. Wait, there’s more.

The Chip concept computer looks pretty hot. Sort of a desktop computer, notebook, and a tablet computer all together. This concept design has a removable display that can be converted into a tablet, while the hinged keyboard can be accessed when the display is docked.

It goes by the name“the Chip”. It’s a great design. Functional and futuristic. Women wouldn’t complain about ugly PCs at all if they all looked like this one.

We don’t have to use umbrellas too often in my area, but when we do the floors in the house and at stores around town are very slippery thanks to all the water. If you live in an area where it rains a lot you will find this concept umbrella stand appealing.

The stand has these long green foam fingers that you slip your umbrella between. Those green foam fingers take the rainwater off your umbrella and use it in a very green way.

Designer Sylvain Gerber must have winter on his mind. And he, like us, is sick of all docks looking the same. So he came up with this neat Snowflake Dock. It boasts lights that change according to the current music track that is playing.

It’s a concept right now, but some manufacturer will surely make it. How can they resist? Not only is it a snowflake, but it changes colors. It’s perfect for a Christmas tree topper. What do you think?

Here’s an ingenious idea that we should have thought of a lot sooner. This power strip ditches the usual hole approach in favor of slots. It allows more plugs to fit onto the same amount of space.

This design comes from Chen Yinfeng and is called the Slot-Type Power Outlet. It uses a swipe-in slot design so that plugs can comfortably rest next to one another, thus allowing more plugs to fit than on a regular strip. The design is much cleaner than your typical power strip as well and nicer to look at.