This Teenage Engineering-inspired smartphone fits an entire synthesizer into its body!

Billie Eilish and her multiple Grammy wins last year is proof of one undeniable fact. You can, most certainly, make great music using just one laptop and a crummy set of speakers in a bedroom. Eilish’s tracks were produced entirely using consumer tech, with hardly any professional instruments, backup band, recording equipment, and production setups. Now just imagine a future where the bar for entry into the music industry was even lower. The OP-S is a conceptual smartphone designed by GRIS Design with an actual synth built right into it.

Modeled on the OP-1, an iconic portable synth and sequencer from Teenage Engineering, the OPS compresses all that technology into a tiny handheld frame. The smartphone comes with a sliding screen to reveal 24 keys and a sequencer. Pair this with the touchscreen interface and you’ve literally got yourself a complete Digital Audio Workstation that you can use to compose, sample, loop, and produce audio. The OP-S packs not one, but TWO audio jacks too… one for monitoring on your headphones, and another that lets you send sound out to a speaker setup or a laptop running your music software of choice. Designed to also be a pretty capable smartphone, the OP-S comes with a three-camera setup and a camera bump that actually does something pretty smart by propping up the phone in a stable way to enable you to use the keyboard without your phone rocking back and forth. Pretty neat, eh? Sadly though the OP-S is just a fan-made concept… but I wouldn’t put it past the guys at Teenage Engineering, who could probably build a prototype of this if they wanted.

Designer: GRIS Design