Electronics design studio Mintpass is treading a fine line. They’ve come up with a pretty cool concept, bit it’ll probably never make it to market. What have they done that’s so controversial? Created calculators based on the designs in Windows and OS X.

Somehow I doubt this will ever make it to production, but this hole-punch camera is really a great idea, even if it’s a bit anachronistic. Basically, it rasterizes whatever image you give it, then you can put a piece of paper in, give it a good smack, and it’s “printed” a copy by punching out holes of different sizes. Genius!

Japan is the nation of robots. Everybody knows that. It’s also the nation of cell phones. So why not mix robots and cell phones? That’s what the country’s second biggest mobile phone provider KDDI au thought and today presents the iida Polaris, a robotic cell phone [link in English], for the first time (click here for my iida concept photo report from April).

In Seattle, umbrella culture is vibrant — as you might imagine. People have big umbrellas, small umbrellas, black umbrellas, colored umbrellas, clear umbrellas, cane umbrellas, micro-umbrellas, and bumbershoots. You also have umbrella-haters who boycott umbrella use and simply dash from awning to dripping awning.

So there’s a lot of umbrella etiquette on a rainy day downtown, and while this partially-retractable umbrella concept might complicate your umbrella experience, on the whole it’s probably a good idea. I’ve seen good men die from umbrella wounds, and I myself bear scars from these monstrous, twirling razor-wheels.

This will never come out, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth looking at. It’s called PathQuest, and it’s a portable GPS device that’s shaped, yes, like a compass. How this isn’t a more popular concept—GPS devices shaped like a compass—I have no idea.

We’ve seen some strange concepts in our time, but this has to be one of the weirdest and most unlikely. This concept KissPhone is probably going to stay imaginary, since it’s the most ridiculous thing in the galaxy. Capture the movement, warmth, and “sucking force” of a lover’s lips and transmit it in real time to a pair of robo-lips? Yeah, I see a market for that. It’s called crazy people.

The opening line of the Kicker Conference Phone product page tells you just about all you need to know about the motivation behind this thing: “Conference phones suck.” Amen, brother! I hate sitting around a conference table, speaking either too loud or too soft for the conference phone, straining my ears to hear what’s being said, and wondering when the hell this madness will end. The folks at Kicker obviously feel similarly, and set out to design a better conference phone.

Another day, another iPhone 3 (iPhone Video?) mockup. Clearly this is completely from some fellow’s imagination, but it’s fun to play make-believe anyway. So, what do we think of today’s?

It’s pretty obvious that our fascination with crazy designs and fancy renders has recently returned. Today’s example, a scooter—oh how European—that solves the problem of, “Gee, where do I stash my bread and cheese?” Why, in the large space underneath the seat, silly!

This is a scanner. It may not look like one, and, technically, it’s not even real, but it’s a scanner. Promise.

WHO LIKES BICYCLES?! (Whoops, sorry, caps lock.) This little design-thing caught my eye, and I figured I’d share it with y’all, because, let’s face it, it’s Friday and most of you, myself included, would rather be constructing an army of snowmen or tap dancing on a Brazilian beach than [whatever it is you're currently doing].

No one uses Apple’s Mighty Mouse because it’s a giant heap of hot, liquidy garbage. This render, whipped up by the MacBlogz folks, shows one direction Apple could take to remedy the problem.