Helix, the phone that wanted to be a slap bracelet

What it was

In October 2009, product designer Rob Luna showed Helix, a phone built like a slap bracelet. Luna had studied product design at The Art Institute of California, Orange County, and his renders carried the LG logo. Laid flat, Helix was a long, narrow strip with a touchscreen. Slapped against the arm, it curled into a cuff.

The body was described as black stainless steel and rubber with flexible circuits inside. Bands of colored LEDs crossed the front to show updates, and shifting a band was meant to change what the phone did. A matching clip hooked onto the front belt loops of a pair of pants. It held the phone with magnets and was supposed to charge it from the wearer’s movement. We found no sign that LG commissioned the design.

Helix borrowed its one trick from a toy that is little more than a steel spring in a sleeve, and a phone has never been that simple.

Where the idea went

LG did sell a phone for the wrist that year, a rigid one. Its GD910, a 3G touchscreen watch phone, was shown at CES 2009 and launched in Europe on the Orange network. LG’s first phone with a flexible display, the G Flex of 2013, was a curved 6-inch slab, not a band.

The slap mechanism itself got as far as paperwork. In February 2013, the US patent office published an Apple application titled "Bi-stable spring with flexible display". It put a screen on the kind of bistable steel spring found in the slap bracelet, which Wisconsin teacher Stuart Anders invented in 1983. In April 2015, LG received a US design patent for a curved phone that bends and docks onto a wristband. Neither became a product.

Working prototypes came from other companies. Lenovo’s CPlus of 2016 curled on a row of hinges, and Motorola’s 2023 concept, a 6.9-inch phone, snapped onto a metal cuff. Neither went on sale. LG will not be the one to try again. On April 5, 2021, it announced that it was leaving the phone business.

What it means now

Helix asked for a screen, a battery and circuits that all curl along their whole length, wrapped around a spring strong enough to grip an arm. Flexible screens now ship in folding phones, but those fold along one fixed line. A phone that snaps from flat to round is still something shown on a stage.

The belt charger went nowhere either. We could not find a phone on sale that charges from its wearer’s movement. That trick remains with automatic wristwatches. Luna’s own path was more practical: his portfolio lists phone cases and a wireless charging holster designed for Trident Case between 2012 and 2015. What reached the wrist in the end was the cellular smartwatch, a watch with a connection of its own.