Forget about plastic, carbon, or painted, anodized aluminum-sided smart phones. The phone of the near future may be encased in bamboo. The eco-phone idea was sparked when Kieron-Scott Woodhouse designed a Sony Ericsson Xperia LED phone made out of steel and bronze. The concept got a lot of buzz and Jerry Lao contacted Woodhouse and asked him to help design a new phone. They wanted to work with natural, renewable materials and ADzero,the bamboo smartphone, as well as their company, Anno Domini (AD), were born. When AD started making the prototypes last August, the result was not what they were expecting. Without the same manufacturing tools larger organizations have, they encountered design weaknesses in the packaging. Woodhouse had to rethink both the product and the process. In order to reconcile the dual issues, they had to compromise their vision slightly and incorporate two pieces of eco-plastic on the top and bottom of the device.
AD is set to launch the project on Kickstarter, with a funding goal of $350,000. The bamboo smartphone will cost about $500, with price breaks for pre-orders. A $700 laser-engraved version will be offered for those who want to make a more substantial contribution to the project. The ADzero is set to have an Android operating system, a 4.5-inches 720p LCD display and an Exynos 4412 quad core processor, the same processor found in the Samsung Galaxy S III and will team up with 1 GB RAM and 16 GB internal memory. On its back there's an 8 megapixel camera and a dual led ring flash. Another cool element is that AD will give users two options in order to avoid fragmentation. They can request the stock Android version, or a customized Android version called ADAOS.
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