Is it a smartwatch? No it’s a flexible smartphone that looks like a smartwatch! It’s called Blu, and it’s a wearable smartphone. Some may say that in a way we already wear our smartphones, but not like this! It’s quite hard to categorize this wearable but after a few urmms and arhhs we put it in with the smartwatches.

Blu is a truly excellent concept coming out of Perth, Australia. The Project is still in It’s early days, but one prototype has already been made. It has been in the making for over 3 years, the first prototype was completed in 2014 and now the team are looking for funding to finalize the design of the second prototype ready for production.

Blu is shaping up to be a very powerful and extremely cool wearable gadget. It will be utilising the most powerful of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors, the 805 Quadcore which has a processing rate of 2.7GHZ (p/core), and graphics from the Adreno 420 GPU. It will have 2GB of RAM, which is the same as a Samsung Galaxy S5, 64GB of storage and the list of impressive specs goes on.

Blu has a versatile design, it can either take the form of a flat and very thin smartphone, or be wrapped 360 degrees around your wrist. It will basically bring the power and large screen of a smartphone combined with the convenience of a watch.

The Flexible-OLED touchscreen is 5 x 2 inches, so it’s considerably larger than any smartwatch on the market. The technology used in the F-OLED display is pretty cutting edge, it consists of no solid backlight and is sandwiched between flexible conductive film known as TFT (Thin Film Transistor). It is said to have excellent brightness and wide viewing angles.

One of Blu’s latest innovations is GO UI, a gesture orientated user interface. It will always be within the users eyesight and seemingly move with the users wrist staying at the optimum eye sight level.

The futuristic design of Blu incorporates an innovative light bar which lights up the sides a little bit like the scanner lights on the front of Knight Rider. It will fit most sizes, it has an overlapping clasp allowing it to fit users with 5.5 to 8.5 inch wrists.

Blu will be water-resistant, just how much we don’t know. It will also be protected by Cornings Gorilla Glass.

So what will it be able to do? As it’s basically a very flexible smartphone, the Blu will offer very much the same features, but Blu will offer 360 degree sound with multiple speakers.

The battery, which is obviously (very) flexible is estimated to power Blu for twice as long as the average smartphone.

The team is currently in talks with Google about a licensing deal so they can use the Android operating system. They believe that by presenting a fully functioning prototype they can create a solid relationship with Google and further enhance the Android experience specifically to smartwatch Technology.

Just like a smartphone, Blu will be targeting a wide variety of users, such as fitness people, casual people, business people and normal people.

The first batch of the wearable smartphone should be shipping to its early backers in May 2015.

When it finally hits the shelves it will probably retail at around $799 AUD ($620 USD)

Why not head over to kickstarter and get involved with the project!