Mozilla's Seabird phone concept teaches us how to dream

Look up, peasant, from your soot-stained hands. Drop that shovel into the furrowed ground and gaze upon the magic* that Mozilla has wrought. Concept designer Billy May, working through Mozilla's "Open Web Concept Phone" project, has gathered community feedback and followed up on some rather mundane visions for the mobile future with this little beauty, the Mozilla Seabird. The completely fictional device has a disturbing initial resemblance to a BlackBerry Storm, but as the video unfolds the functionality is really what sells this thing. The big innovation is the use of dual pico projectors on the side of the handset, which can provide different functionality based on the phone's orientation: flat on a table they pump out the two halves of a QWERTY keyboard, up on a dock they offer the dual purpose of a large viewing screen above and a seamless projected keyboard below. Other features, like the pop-out wireless pointer / Bluetooth headset are slightly less realistic but no less charming. Now, before you get too excited, you should know that Mozilla has no plans to build this or any phone, they're just messing around with some fancy 3D software and the bright imagination of their community of users. Still, for the two minutes and thirty seven seconds that the video after the break unfolds, allow yourself to think: "What if?"

*Actually, it's just a 3D render.