Author Archives: JC Torres

TECNO CAMON Slim 5G Review: Thinner than a Pencil, Tough as a Tank

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PROS:


  • Unbelievably slim and lightweight design

  • Striking and stylish art-inspired finish

  • Large 6,000mAh battery despite slim profile

  • Exceptional durability with quad-IP rating, supporting underwater photography

CONS:


  • Modest hardware specs

  • No dedicated telephoto camera

RATINGS:

AESTHETICS
ERGONOMICS
PERFORMANCE
SUSTAINABILITY / REPAIRABILITY
VALUE FOR MONEY

EDITOR'S QUOTE:

Slim, art-inspired, and tougher than it looks, the TECNO CAMON Slim 5G packs a 6,000mAh battery into a body thin enough to turn heads.
award-icon

Slim phones have always come with a catch. Shave down the body and something else usually gets sacrificed: usually the battery, sometimes the durability, occasionally both. The TECNO CAMON Slim 5G doesn’t play by that old rulebook. At just 6.39mm thick, it still packs a 6,000mAh battery, 5G connectivity, and a durability rating most phones twice its thickness wouldn’t dare claim.

This review spent real time with the phone away from spec sheets, mostly to see if the design holds up once the initial wow wears off. That meant handling the Neo Mondrian finish TECNO sent for testing, carrying it through a normal week, testing the camera in situations that actually matter, and checking whether the durability claims survive contact with water and everyday clumsiness. The design conversation comes first.

Designer: TECNO

Aesthetics

Pull the CAMON Slim 5G out in public and watch what happens. People notice a phone this thin the way they’d notice a watch too elegant for its price tag, usually with a double take and a request to hold it. TECNO carried over the swan-neck curve from the CAMON 50 series, and on a body this slender, that curve reads like a signature rather than a spec sheet footnote.

TECNO sent the Neo Mondrian colorway for this review, and it’s the strongest argument for treating a phone back as an actual canvas. Expose the panel to sunlight and yellow, green, and cyan blocks slowly bloom out of white, forming the grid Piet Mondrian made famous a century ago. It’s a photochromic trick, but watching it happen feels less like a gimmick and more like a magic show.

Neo Mondrian isn’t the only finish doing something interesting. Van Gogh Blue uses similar light-reactive techniques to make its swirling nebula pattern look like it’s actually rotating as shadows shift across it, closer to a painting than a phone back. Matisse Black leans into fluorescent green or pink color blocks that echo the artist’s cut-out work, while Burgundy Red blends fiberglass and matte texture into a warm, understated finish. Rebel Pink keeps things simpler, pairing a black body with sharp pink accents for something a little more playful.

Phone backs used to be an afterthought, something to protect rather than admire, which is why so many people slapped an opaque case on day one without a second thought. That’s changing. As manufacturers invest more in finishes, textures, and light-reactive coatings, more owners are leaving their phones bare, treating the back panel the same way they’d treat a piece of art they paid good money to display.

Ergonomics

Carrying the CAMON Slim 5G is where the thin body actually pays off day to day. It slides into a front pocket without that telltale bulge, sits flat against a jacket without pulling on the fabric, and feels lighter in hand than the display size suggests. After a few days, reaching for a thicker phone almost feels like picking up a brick by comparison.

Those flat edges aren’t just a style choice borrowed from boxier design trends. They give fingers something to actually grip onto, instead of sliding off a rounded rim the way slippery slab phones tend to do. The matte texture on the Neo Mondrian panel adds even more confidence, and TECNO’s wet and oily finger recognition keeps the touchscreen responsive when hands aren’t exactly dry or clean.

Performance

The 6.78-inch AMOLED display runs at 1.5K resolution and 144Hz, and both numbers translate into a screen that looks sharp and feels fast under a thumb. Photos pop with the kind of contrast only AMOLED delivers, video looks great for a lunch break binge, and scrolling through a feed never feels like it’s fighting the hardware. TÜV Rheinland’s low blue light certification is a nice bonus for long reading sessions.

Under the hood sits a MediaTek Dimensity 7300e, a processor built for balance rather than benchmark bragging rights. It handles social apps, photo editing, and everyday multitasking without hiccups, though demanding 3D games will ask more of it than it’s built to give. The 8GB of RAM stretches to 24GB with virtual memory extension, which covers most multitasking habits without needing to close every open app.

The 50MP Sony LYTIA 700C handles most of the photography workload, and it earns that responsibility. A 1/1.56-inch sensor paired with an f/1.8 lens pulls in plenty of light for evening shots, while the closed-loop ball motor keeps focus locked even when subjects won’t sit still. The 8MP ultra-wide feels more like a footnote, and there’s no telephoto here, but the main camera rarely leaves you wanting one.

The real showstopper is the 6,000mAh battery, a number that seems almost impossible once you remember this phone measures 6.39mm thick. It comfortably carries a full day of camera use, video, and scrolling without the battery anxiety that usually comes with slim designs. That same waterproofing also unlocks a dedicated underwater photography mode, one that kicks in automatically the moment the phone senses it’s gone for a swim.

Sustainability

TECNO rates the CAMON Slim 5G at IP69K, IP69, IP68, and IP66, a combination that’s rare even among phones that don’t have to worry about staying thin. That covers everything from high-pressure water jets to dust particles to full submersion, which is a lot of technical armor for a phone this delicate-looking. Finding this rating on a 6.39mm body is the kind of detail that quietly impresses.

There’s also a MIL-STD-810 rating covering shock and drop resistance, which pairs nicely with features like Rain Touch and Waterproof Case Touch that keep the screen usable in a downpour or behind a case. This doesn’t read like a feature bolted on at the last minute. It feels like TECNO wanted this phone to survive actual daily chaos, not just look good sitting still on a shelf.

Longevity extends past the hardware, too. TECNO promises three major OS upgrades and five years of security patches, plus a 60-month smoothness certification from TÜV SÜD. That’s a meaningful commitment in a market where phones often get abandoned after two update cycles. A well-built object is worth keeping around, and TECNO seems to be betting that owners will want to hold onto this one for a while.

Value

TECNO hasn’t confirmed global pricing yet, but early indications point to somewhere around $400. At that number, buyers get a phone with genuine art-inspired finishes, a 6.78-inch 144Hz AMOLED screen, a Sony-backed 50MP camera with real stabilization, a 6,000mAh battery, and a durability rating that most phones twice the price don’t bother chasing. That’s a fairly generous list for a phone that costs less than most flagships.

Most phones in this price range make you pick a lane. Go thin, and the battery usually suffers, or the body skips water resistance entirely, or the software support runs out after a couple of years. TECNO’s five-year update promise and its layered durability ratings quietly add up to lower long-term cost, since a phone built and supported to last half a decade doesn’t need replacing as often.

This phone makes the most sense for people who are tired of carrying an identical black slab and want something that says a little more about them. It’s not the right pick for hardcore mobile gamers chasing max frame rates, or photographers who need optical zoom on tap. For nearly everyone else, it covers daily needs while looking like it belongs on a gallery shelf.

Verdict

After a few days of actual use, the 6,000mAh battery and the quad-IP rating stop feeling like marketing footnotes and start feeling like the whole point. TECNO built a phone that looks like it belongs in a design museum and still survives a rainy commute or a splash at the sink. The Neo Mondrian panel alone gives it a personality that’s genuinely hard to find anywhere near this price.

Plenty of phones ask you to choose between something beautiful and something dependable, and most buyers have quietly accepted that trade-off as the cost of owning a nice-looking device. The CAMON Slim 5G makes a strong case that the choice was never as necessary as the industry made it seem. It’s a phone that looks good on a café table and still works fine after falling off of one.

The post TECNO CAMON Slim 5G Review: Thinner than a Pencil, Tough as a Tank first appeared on Yanko Design.

Camp Snap’s 110D Looks Like 1973 and Still Skips the Screen on Purpose

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Camera design spent the last two decades chasing thinner phones and bigger screens, so a company deciding to revive a boxy, finger-length shape from the 1970s sounds like a step backward. The Camp Snap 110D proves otherwise. It borrows its elongated, pocketable body from the old 110 film format, then strips out the one feature every digital camera has trained us to expect: a screen for checking the shot you just took.

That missing screen isn’t a cost-cutting shortcut. It’s the entire point. Smartphone photography turns every outing into a loop of shooting, reviewing, deleting, and reshooting until a moment gets buried under a dozen nearly identical takes. The 110D breaks that loop by design, letting a photo exist the instant it’s taken and staying invisible until you plug the camera in later and actually look at what you captured.

Designer: Camp Snap

Living without a review screen also solves a problem the original 110 format never had to think about: battery life. Screens are usually the single biggest power drain in a compact camera, so removing one frees up room for improvements elsewhere. The 110D pairs that saved power with QuickDraw sleep and wake functionality, letting the camera snap awake fast enough to catch a moment instead of fumbling through a slow startup.

Inside that slim shell sits an 8-megapixel sensor, modest by phone camera standards on purpose, since chasing sharper resolution would work against the whole idea of embracing a lower-fidelity, more film-like result. Five built-in filters let a shooter pick a mood before pressing the shutter rather than fixing it afterward in an app, pushing the entire editing decision to before the photo exists instead of after.

Storage runs on a microSD card, and images transfer out through a USB-C port, a small detail that keeps the retro shape from turning into an actual hassle to use. Charging works the same way, so nobody’s hunting for a proprietary cable or a dead battery with no replacement in sight. The vintage silhouette stays purely visual, while the internals stay entirely current.

Two colorways round out the release: a black variant and a cream-and-orange combination that leans harder into the ’70s reference than the shape alone already does. Both ship with a wrist lanyard and a small carrying pouch, treating the camera less like a serious tool tucked into a bag and more like something meant to hang off a wrist at a party or a weekend trip without a second thought.

At $74.99, the 110D undercuts most instant cameras and plenty of higher-end toy cameras while offering something neither fully provides: a shape borrowed from actual photographic history rather than a generic plastic body built to look vaguely retro. That’s a specific kind of nostalgia, aimed at people who remember what a 110 camera looked like even if they never touched the film it used.

The post Camp Snap’s 110D Looks Like 1973 and Still Skips the Screen on Purpose first appeared on Yanko Design.

MOFT’s Snap Fold Fits 5 Cards and a Stand on the iPhone Duo’s Back

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Foldable phones solved the screen problem and immediately created a smaller, weirder one: there’s barely any flat space left on the back to stick anything useful. The MOFT Snap Fold for iPhone Duo tackles that head-on, built specifically for the Duo’s cramped rear panel rather than shrunk down from an existing wallet design. It still manages to hold five cards and fold into a stand, which shouldn’t be possible given how little room it actually has to work with.

Getting that footprint right meant working around obstacles most phone wallets never have to consider. The camera module on a folding phone sits somewhere that would normally get covered by a standard card holder, so the Snap Fold’s shape clears that housing entirely while staying tucked within the phone’s own edges. Nothing overhangs the sides or risks catching on a pocket, which matters more on a folding device than a rigid one.

Designer: MOFT

Holding five cards in that reduced space is the part worth pausing on. Most compact MagSafe wallets top out around two or three cards specifically because slim profiles and card capacity fight each other, and every additional card usually means added thickness. Fitting five into a footprint already constrained by a camera cutout suggests the internal card layout was rebuilt from scratch rather than adapted from a wallet meant for a flat, uninterrupted phone back.

The stand half of the equation runs on the same origami folding logic MOFT has used across its laptop stands and tablet covers for years, just reworked to survive a much smaller starting shape. Unfolding the wallet reveals multiple viewing positions rather than a single fixed angle, letting the same flat card holder become a way to prop the phone up for a video call or a recipe on the counter without needing a separate stand taking up space in a bag.

That dual identity only works if neither function undercuts the other, and this is where the tight design tolerances actually pay off. Card capacity doesn’t shrink to make room for the folding mechanism, and the stand doesn’t wobble because there wasn’t space left for a sturdy hinge. Both jobs get done inside the same limited footprint, which is a harder balance to strike than building either function alone.

Priced at $49.99, the Snap Fold sits closer to the premium end of MOFT’s wallet lineup, reflecting the added engineering that comes with fitting five cards and a folding stand around a camera cutout instead of across an open, flat surface. That price also positions it as a companion piece bought alongside a foldable phone already carrying its own premium, rather than a casual accessory picked up as an afterthought.

Building for a folding phone means redesigning assumptions that held up fine on every rigid iPhone before it. The Snap Fold treats that constraint as the actual design brief instead of an inconvenience, and the result carries more cards and more stand positions than the smaller back panel should reasonably allow.

The post MOFT’s Snap Fold Fits 5 Cards and a Stand on the iPhone Duo’s Back first appeared on Yanko Design.

Fast Food Gimmicks Stop at Sauce Packets, so Burger King Made a Handbag

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Fast food brands love a marketing gimmick, but most of them stop at a wrapper redesign or a limited-time sauce packet. Burger King skipped that entire playbook with Le Nugguette, a micro-bag shaped and colored to look exactly like one of its newly reformulated chicken nuggets. It’s a handbag built to promote a menu item by literally becoming that menu item, scaled up just enough to carry a set of keys instead of a dipping sauce.

The shape does the heavy lifting here. Le Nugguette mimics the rounded, irregular silhouette and golden-brown coloring of an actual nugget rather than smoothing that shape into something more conventionally purse-like. A short handle and a zippered compartment turn that lumpy, organic form into something genuinely carryable, while a small metallic BK logo keeps the branding subtle instead of stamping the whole surface with a wordmark.

Designer: Burger King

Scale is the detail that makes the object read as absurd rather than merely branded. Described by reviewers as roughly the size of three real nuggets, the bag sits closer to a keychain accessory than a functional handbag, and that’s clearly intentional. Shrinking the object down to nugget-adjacent proportions keeps the joke legible at a glance, since a full-sized version would just look like a brown leather purse with a strange texture.

Every accessory decision loops back to the food rather than standing apart from it. Each bag ships with one of four charms tied directly to Burger King’s relaunched sauce lineup, Special Savory, Honey Mustard, Buffalo, or Sweet and Sour, turning a random grab-bag surprise into a miniature flavor sampler hanging off the zipper pull. That charm effectively becomes the bag’s only variable feature, since the nugget shell itself stays identical across every unit sold.

Pricing reinforces the same logic rather than breaking from it. Le Nugguette retails for $3.99, matching the price of the nugget order that inspired its shape, so the accessory costs exactly what the food product costs rather than commanding a premium for the novelty. A bundled code for a four-piece nugget order rides along with every purchase, closing the loop between the object and the meal it was built to advertise.

None of this positions Le Nugguette as a serious entry into handbag design, and that’s precisely where its cleverness sits. Treating a fast food shape as a wearable object, then pricing and bundling it exactly like the meal it promotes, turns a limited drop into something people photograph and share rather than scroll past. That’s a harder trick to pull off than most food marketing attempts, and this one lands it through restraint rather than spectacle.

The post Fast Food Gimmicks Stop at Sauce Packets, so Burger King Made a Handbag first appeared on Yanko Design.

This DIY Computer Build Looks Like a Muppet and Works Like a Real PC

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Nearly every DIY computer build chasing the cyberdeck label ends up looking like a prop from a gritty sci-fi film, all exposed wires and grungy metal panels borrowed straight from Neuromancer’s aesthetic playbook. This build ignores that entire tradition on purpose, wrapping a fully functional single-board computer inside a soft, orange, furry puppet head with a mouth that actually opens. It’s a cyberdeck that looks like it wandered off the set of a children’s show instead of a hacker den.

A single-board computer sits at the center of the whole thing, running the Linux side of its chip rather than tapping into the onboard microcontroller some builders use to drive servo motors. That decision kept the mechanics simple. A 5-inch HDMI screen handles the display duties, paired with a compact Bluetooth keyboard and touchpad combo for actual typing, while a USB battery bank keeps the entire rig running without hunting for an outlet mid-performance.

Designer: Natasha Dzurny

A webcam tucked into the build adds a function most puppets never get, letting its creator record herself running an actual puppet show through the lens mounted somewhere in that fuzzy head. That’s the kind of detail that turns a novelty prop into something genuinely useful for someone practicing puppetry, since reviewing your own performance afterward is a lot easier when the camera is already part of the puppet doing the performing.

Getting all that hardware to fit inside a rounded puppet skull took real spatial planning rather than just stuffing components wherever they’d squeeze in. The head itself started as a spherical mold, cut into two halves specifically so the mouth could open and close during a performance. A frame built inside that sphere anchors the electronics in place, giving the soft fur exterior something rigid to hold onto underneath all that plush material.

Fitting a human hand inside the same space the electronics occupy created its own puzzle, since puppeteering requires room for fingers to move the mouth while the board, screen wiring, and battery pack all compete for that same interior volume. A mounting platform above the hand cavity solved that conflict, giving the electronics their own dedicated shelf instead of floating loose around whatever space a puppeteer’s fingers happened to need that day.

Small engineering choices reveal how seriously the functional side of this build got treated despite the whimsical shell around it. The board itself sits on a piece of foam board rather than glued directly to the frame, which keeps adhesive away from sensitive components while also helping dissipate heat that would otherwise build up inside an enclosed, fur-covered space. A modified stereo jack even gets its own reinforced pocket near the mouth so headphones can plug in without disrupting the puppet’s face.

None of that hidden engineering shows once the fur and the big cartoonish eyes go on. What’s left looks entirely harmless, friendly enough to hand to a kid, right up until someone notices it also streams video, plays media, and somehow doubles as a bag you can carry over one shoulder. That kind of layered function inside a shape nobody would ever suspect is exactly what makes a build like this worth remembering.

The post This DIY Computer Build Looks Like a Muppet and Works Like a Real PC first appeared on Yanko Design.

Holy Moly Is the Swiss Army Knife of Flat-Pack Furniture Hardware

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Most flat-pack furniture ships with a plastic bag full of different screws, dowels, and brackets, each one doing exactly one job and nothing else. The Holy Moly Cabinet throws that entire parts bag away in favor of a single connector, a clover-shaped orange fitting that turns into a door pull, a leg, a hinge, and a shelf bracket depending on where it gets mounted. One piece of hardware ends up doing the work an entire drawer of assorted fasteners usually handles.

That fitting splits into two halves that snap together, and the design team baked its own name directly into the plastic rather than printing it on a box. The clover-shaped cap reads “HOLY” across its four petals, while the cylindrical stem underneath reads “MOLY” on its flat face. Pull the two apart, and the joke becomes obvious. Screw them together, and the joke disappears into a working piece of furniture hardware.

Designer: Liam de la Bedoyere (boredeye.design)

Every visible surface of the cabinet is a perforated steel panel, the kind of dense hole grid you’d expect on a pegboard rather than a piece of furniture. That choice turns the entire body into a mounting surface rather than just four solid walls, since the same connector can thread into practically any hole depending on where a shelf, a foot, or a door needs to land. Nothing about the placement is fixed once the manufacturing is done.

Standing the cabinet on its own four fittings turns it into a compact cube barely bigger than a nightstand, complete with a door pull mounted flush against the front panel and enough clearance underneath for airflow. Add a second cube on top using the same connectors at the seam, and the whole unit doubles in height without needing a different set of parts for the taller version. Scaling up means reordering the same hardware, not redesigning the furniture.

A shelf slots inside using that identical connector logic, locking into whichever row of holes puts it at the right height for whatever needs storing, whether that’s a stack of books or something taller that needs more headroom below it. Because the perforated steel body is the mounting surface everywhere, that shelf can move up or down later without drilling a single new hole or buying a different bracket to match a new position.

The perforation earns its keep beyond just anchoring the fittings. A pair of headphones hooks directly into the holes near the front panel with nothing extra required, treating the cabinet’s skin as a hanging surface the same way a pegboard in a garage holds tools. That’s a function most cabinets never offer, since a sealed door front usually has nowhere for anything to grab onto.

Reducing a whole cabinet’s hardware down to variations on one connector isn’t just a manufacturing shortcut. It changes how a piece of furniture ages in someone’s home, since a cracked foot or a worn door pull can be swapped using the exact same part sitting in a spare parts drawer, rather than hunting down a discontinued bracket from a company that stopped making that model years ago.

The post Holy Moly Is the Swiss Army Knife of Flat-Pack Furniture Hardware first appeared on Yanko Design.

Power Banks Make You Pick a Size, Trozk T3 Lets You Build One

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Most power banks force a single decision at checkout: buy the huge one for peace of mind, or the tiny one for your pocket, and live with whichever tradeoff you picked. The Trozk T3 Module Power Bank refuses that choice entirely, building a charging system out of three separate pieces that snap together or peel apart depending on what the day actually calls for. Capacity becomes something you assemble, not something fixed at the factory.

Each piece plays a distinct role instead of just being a smaller copy of the whole. Module A holds the control button, the ports, and a charging cable that’s already built in, acting as the brain of the system no matter how many other pieces get attached. Module B adds a hefty 10,000mAh reserve for a full day of use, while Module C packs 5,000mAh into something closer to a lipstick tube than a battery pack.

Designer: Trozk

That size difference in Module C matters more than it sounds. On a day when a bag feels like overkill and a phone just needs a quick top-up before heading out the door, Module C alone plugs directly into a device without any cable dangling from a pocket. Add Module B back in for a commute or a work trip, and the same system scales up to 10,000mAh without buying a separate product for each scenario.

Stack all three together, and the full setup climbs to 15,000mAh, enough to get a phone through repeated charges during a long travel day or a weekend away from an outlet. Every configuration still charges at up to 22.5W over PD and QC fast-charging protocols, so swapping modules never means swapping down to a slower charging speed. The system scales in capacity without asking anyone to compromise on how fast a device actually fills back up.

Inside Module B and Module C sit automotive-grade 21700 battery cells, the same cell format used in electric vehicles, chosen here for the higher energy density that keeps output steady rather than tapering off as the charge drops. A flame-retardant PC housing rated UL94 V-0 wraps around that battery core, paired with overcharge, over-discharge, and short-circuit protection working together as a layered safety net rather than a single point of failure.

None of that hardware stays hidden behind a plain status light either. Module B carries an animated color display that shows total battery percentage alongside the status of each connected piece, turning what’s usually a boring number on a phone screen into something worth glancing at on a desk. Connecting different module combinations even triggers its own visual response, giving the display a bit of personality most charging bricks never bother with.

Owning one system that reconfigures itself changes how you think about packing a bag in the first place. Instead of choosing between a bulky charger you rarely fully use and a small one that runs dry too soon, the same three pieces cover both extremes and everything between them, snapping together only when the day actually demands the extra capacity.

The post Power Banks Make You Pick a Size, Trozk T3 Lets You Build One first appeared on Yanko Design.

Screens Got Louder, These 5 E-Ink Gadgets Went Deliberately Quiet

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Screens have gotten loud, and most of them are fighting for the same six to eight inches of attention in your pocket. E Ink is quietly answering that fatigue by shrinking instead of growing, going deliberately narrow instead of chasing every feature possible. These five gadgets carry that spirit into pockets, fridges, and phone cases, each one claiming a job so specific that trying to be anything more would ruin it.

That range runs wider than you’d expect from a single display technology. On one end, a screen gets stripped down to nothing but page-turn buttons, refusing every upgrade that isn’t necessary. On the other, a screen becomes the front door to a full computer, complete with an app store and a voice assistant baked right in. Everything else in between quietly picks its own lane instead of trying everything.

Xteink X4 Classic

The X4 Classic doesn’t look like an upgrade so much as a refusal to change. It keeps the same 4.3-inch E Ink panel, the same button-only interface, and the same $79 price tag as before, resisting the urge to bolt on a touchscreen or a camera just because it could. What’s new sits underneath the shell: a reinforced magnetic backplate, a faster processor, and a noticeably bigger battery than before.

Designer: XTEINK

That combination changes how the device actually gets used day to day. The magnetic backplate snaps onto any phone case, MagSafe included, turning the X4 into a companion screen that rides along instead of competing for pocket space. Pull it off during a commute or a museum visit, and it fills the in-between minutes a phone usually swallows, no unlocking, no notifications, no excuse to open anything else at all.

BOOX Picco

Picco’s whole personality comes from how small it actually manages to be. BOOX shrank a real E Ink touchscreen down to 3.97 inches, closer in size to a stick of gum than an actual book, and paired it with a stripped-back Linux-based interface instead of the full Android build found on its bigger siblings, trimming away anything that would even slow that simple page-turn experience down.

Designer: BOOX

That shrinking act pays off the moment you actually try to carry it somewhere new and unfamiliar. Picco fits flat in a coat pocket or a wallet, slips into a bag without adding bulk, and swaps storage through a microSD card instead of locking you into whatever space came in the box. There’s no algorithmic feed hiding behind the home screen, just books, waiting patiently to be opened.

reTerminal Sticky

Sticky solves a problem every household already knows all too well: paper notes fall off the fridge, and group chats bury reminders under a dozen other messages before anyone actually reads them. Seeed’s answer is a display that magnets onto any metal surface in the kitchen, runs for up to a week between charges, and turns the fridge door into a genuinely shared notice board again.

Designer: Seeed Studio

Getting a note onto that screen doesn’t take any real effort at all these days. Press a button and speak, and Sticky transcribes it instantly, no typing on a tiny keyboard required. Anyone away from home can send a reminder remotely through the Seeedash app too, so a parent stuck at work can still get milk on tonight’s list without starting a whole text thread over it. And yes, it can read eBooks, too.

Flowtica Verso

Verso takes a completely different bet on where a small screen actually belongs these days. It’s a panel barely thicker than a couple of credit cards that clips onto the back of a phone, sitting quietly against a five-microphone array that listens through an entire meeting. By the time everyone’s packed up, it’s already turned that conversation into a clean, readable summary, no notebook required at all.

Designer: Flowtica

The same panel keeps working long after that particular meeting actually ends. Calendars and pending to-dos stay visible on that always-on e-paper face, readable even in direct sunlight where a phone screen would wash out completely. Battery life stretches to 72 hours, so it becomes less of a gadget and more of a permanent fixture riding quietly along on the back of a phone.

DuRoBo Krono

Krono sits at the opposite end of that whole spectrum entirely, and it doesn’t hide it. The 6.13-inch Carta 1200 display lives inside a mechanical-looking body built around a tactile Smart Dial that handles page turns, brightness, and volume with an actual click. Underneath all that hardware runs full Android 15, complete with access to the Google Play Store, a leap the other four devices here don’t attempt.

Designer: DuRoBo

That openness changes what a reading session can actually turn into. A built-in speaker and Bluetooth pull in music or a podcast between chapters, while an on-device assistant answers quick questions without ever breaking focus on the page. It’s the same E Ink material that Xteink stripped down to page-turn buttons, just handed every tool a full operating system can offer, closing the spectrum this list started with.

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Phone Photos of Materials Lie, This Scanner Reads the Surface Itself

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Every designer has a folder full of phone photos that were supposed to capture a specific shade of oak or a particular matte finish, and every one of those photos looks wrong the moment it’s opened back at the studio. TRA:CE, a pocket CMF scanner concept, treats that failure as the actual problem worth solving: building a device that reads color, material, and finish directly off a surface instead of trusting a camera sensor to guess.

The shape gives away the intention before you even use it. TRA:CE is a flat, coin-like disc with a glossy display on top and an optical scanner built into the bottom face, so the entire interaction comes down to setting it down and pressing a button. That’s a deliberate contrast to snapping a photo, which still depends on ambient light doing you a favor.

Designer: Seongwook Jin

Placing the disc against a surface and pressing the side button starts a scan, and a radiating animation on the circular display counts up as the sensor reads what’s underneath. That readout isn’t just a color value either. The scan captures material type, texture, and finish characteristics in the same pass, treating a swatch of oak or a painted panel as a full dataset rather than a single hex code pulled from a photo.

That distinction actually matters once you’re standing in a furniture showroom trying to remember if a tabletop finish was satin or something closer to matte. Lighting shifts color perception constantly, but the scanner reads the surface directly rather than interpreting reflected light through a lens, which is exactly the inconsistency that photos and memory both fail at. A quick press replaces a mental note that would’ve degraded within the hour anyway.

Every scan gets logged as a reference card in a companion app, breaking a single surface reading into HEX, RGB, LAB, and CMYK values alongside the closest Pantone or RAL matches. Material grain, pore size, and a numeric gloss reading round out the same card, so a design team pulling reference weeks later gets the same fidelity as someone standing in the room during the original scan.

None of this asks a designer to change how they already work through a space. TRA:CE fits into a pocket, clips onto a bag, or hangs from a neck lanyard, so it’s present at a material library, a client’s showroom, or a job site without becoming another piece of equipment to remember. That kind of portability turns a scanner from a specialized tool into something closer to a pen, always within reach when a texture or shade actually needs capturing.

Field notes about color have always been approximate, filtered through whatever light happened to be in the room and however well a memory held up hours later. TRA:CE swaps that approximation for a saved, measurable record, turning a fleeting glance at a material into something a design team can actually build from later.

The post Phone Photos of Materials Lie, This Scanner Reads the Surface Itself first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Clock That Works Like a Music Box, With Dice Instead of Bells

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Most clocks either sweep hands around a dial or flash numbers on a screen, and neither option feels particularly satisfying to watch. OVODYO skips both approaches entirely, telling time with two rolling, dice-like balls that physically tumble into position every few minutes. It’s a clock built around a small mechanical performance rather than a passive glance at the wall.

Each ball is shaped like an icosahedron, a 12-sided solid closer to a fat die than a sphere, with one ball dedicated to hours and the other to minutes. The hours ball carries all 12 hour marks across its faces, while the minutes ball splits into 5-minute intervals, so together the two objects can display any time of day using nothing but which face happens to be sitting on top at that moment.

Designer: ekaggrat singh kalsi

Getting those faces to land correctly took real mechanical problem-solving rather than a simple motor and a timer. A differential mechanism drives each ball forward in fixed increments, tumbling it forward until the correct face rotates into view, then holding it steady until the next update is due. Watching a rigid geometric shape tumble like a die and settle on the exact right face reads more like a magic trick than a timekeeping mechanism.

Behind that motion sits a fairly modest set of electronics for what the mechanism achieves. An ATmega8 chip runs the control logic, paired with a pair of DRV8833 driver boards handling the stepper motors that push each ball forward. Three Hall effect sensors track motor position in real time, giving the system enough feedback to know exactly when a face has rotated into the correct spot and stop turning at precisely the right instant.

It definitely wasn’t a walk in the park to get that precision. An early prototype of the mechanism suffered from rough printed surfaces and enough friction that the small motors struggled to turn the balls at all. Adding bearings to both shafts solved that problem, smoothing out the rotation enough for modest motors to reliably drive a solid printed ball without stalling partway through a cycle.

Solving the mechanism turned out to be the easier half of the project. A later prototype had both balls fully working inside a plain, solid base built purely to test function, and it looked the part of a lab bench rig rather than an actual object worth keeping in a living room. That gap between working and looking finished pushed a redesign of the base itself, treating the enclosure as its own separate design problem once the moving parts finally behaved.

That order of operations tells you something about what makes a project like this hold together. The mechanism has to work before anyone can judge whether the object looks any good sitting out in a room, and OVODYO nails the harder half first. A desk clock built on two tumbling dice sounds like a novelty right up until you watch it settle on the correct hour with mechanical certainty, at which point it just looks like the obvious way a clock should have worked all along.

The post The Clock That Works Like a Music Box, With Dice Instead of Bells first appeared on Yanko Design.