Worlds First Magnetic Levitation Mobile Phone

The Pantech Group, Korea's No. 3 handset maker, Wednesday announced the Seoul-based company will take the wraps off magnetic levitation slider phones next month.Magnetic levitation, called maglev, is a method by which an object is suspended above another object with no physical support other than magnetic fields.

"This will be the world's first cell phone based on magnetic levitation technology. The top half of the slider moves via magnetic power,'' Pantech spokesperson Yang Yu-in said. "Thanks to magnetic forces, its users will be able to almost automatically slide open their phones and vice versa. This is an out-of-box product,'' Yang said. 

Another plus of the envisioned handset will be its sleek outlook. With a thickness of just 9.9 millimeters, it will be the first slider phone slimmer than one centimeter.Thus far, slider-type phones have employed springs, which have made the models thicker than bar-type or clamshell-type handsets,'' Yang said. 

However, our new products will not need springs and this will be made possible by an ultra-thin form factor that has never seen before,'' she said. Pantech did not disclose the price of the super-slim phone, which will also embrace such functions as a 1.3-megapixel camera, an MP3 player and terrestrial digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB).

The phones will debut in the domestic market in April and Pantech plans to export the versatile models after checking their commercial viability in Korea. source:hankooki