Fujitsu touts four-way slider phone

Fancy a phone with a large enough screen to surf the web as well as you would on a desktop? Fujitsu may have the answer. Well, its industrial designers do, and they'll this week show off their ideas at a special exhibition taking place in Milan.

In addition to a pair of concept PCs, the Japanese giant has a couple of futuristic mobile phone designs up its sleeve. The first is a landscape-orientation unit designed more for browsing than making calls. Dubbed the "slider", it sports a full keyboard - the keys are touch-sensitive, we presume - for web use, texting and instant messaging.

More radical is Fujitsu's "multi-slider", which features a virtual keypad allowing it to display a pad appropriate to whichever way the keypad slides out: left, right, up or down. There are four buttons on the front which would make the machine very tempting as a music playback device. Indeed, there's something of the iPod about the device, though we're not saying this is the kit Apple's going to unveil as the iPhone...

Fujitsu's concept machines are on show this week in Milan's Triennale di Milano as part of an Japanese Design exhibition. ®