Yuxa, the bracelet phone made from plants

What it was

Yuxa was a phone you wore. Veronica Eugenia Rodriguez Ortiz, a designer from Monterrey, Mexico, drew it as an open cuff for the wrist: a dark shell with a woven texture, yellow-green raised details and a black strip down the middle. Design blogs published it in June 2010.

The description was short. The shell would be made from plant fibers and biodegradable plastic. There was an OLED display, a rechargeable battery and Bluetooth. Calls and messages announced themselves by vibration instead of sound, with different patterns for different callers, and a call began when the wearer took the bracelet off the wrist.

Her portfolio adds the context. It files Yuxa under the Greener Gadgets design contest of 2008 and says she had five days to develop it. The question she set herself was electronic waste. Her presentation board puts the working life of a cell phone at about 18 months.

Yuxa was right that a phone on the wrist should tap instead of ring, and hopeful that a compostable shell could answer for what sits inside it.

Where the idea went

We found no sign that Yuxa went beyond renders. The portfolio shows no prototype, and no manufacturer took it up.

The wrist phone was arriving anyway. In August 2009 Orange announced that it would sell LG’s GD910, a 3G touchscreen watch phone, in limited numbers from its Bond Street store in London. In September 2017 Apple announced the Apple Watch Series 3 with built-in cellular, which makes calls with no iPhone nearby. In February 2019 Nubia showed the Alpha at the MWC trade show, a phone worn around the wrist with a 4-inch flexible OLED display.

The material had a head start. In 2006 NEC put the FOMA N701iECO on sale in Japan. Its casing was polylactic acid, a plastic made from plants, reinforced with kenaf fiber, and the makers said approximately 90 percent of the casing came from biological sources. Today plant fiber appears mostly in accessories, such as phone cases made with flax.

What it means now

Yuxa’s best guess was the quiet one. A device on the wrist does not need to ring. When Apple announced its first watch in 2014, it described alerts you could feel as well as hear, and a tap on the wrist is now an ordinary way for a watch to ask for attention.

Its hardest problem is the one it started from. A plant-based shell says nothing about the battery, the display and the circuit board inside it, and the concept never explained what would happen to those. Sixteen years on, the wrist phone is ordinary, and the phone made from plants is still mostly a case.