Considering tablets are the most fashionable gadgets right now, one can forget that a couple of years ago MIDs were pretty cool, too. With a blast from the near past comes designer Choi Koun and the On Display MID, a dual display palmtop built around a dedicated Google search app.

If you close the device, the upper half shows a transparent display with real life feedback from social networking services. The MID is 20mm thick and it uses OLED technology for its screens. Considering the fact that we’re dealing with a transparent screen here, we can easily say that augmented reality would be nice to use on it, especially with a camera mounted at the back of said display.

If you’re an architect or designer, you’ll love the MPad tablet (in fact spelled m • pad), that’s pictured below and created by Volker Hübner. This concept tablet comes with a 15.6 inch OLED display and 9 fixed buttons, that include the classic ALT, CTRL and more.

You’ll also find two programmable button rockers with e-ink display incorporated in the slate. You can use up to 24 shortcuts for each application and assign any feature you want to them. The scroll wheel enables gesture control and fast 2D navigation, plus there’s a 3D space mouse available.

The MPad is inclined 15 degrees and great when it comes to ergonomics. There’s also a ball-bearing hub and the device measures an overall 430 x 280 x 25mm. Perfect for designers?

At first glance this seems like a future Sony PlayStation console, an alternative to the Sony NGP. Created by Hirotaka Matsui, the PS Square is a conceptual smart mobile device that’s oriented towards members of the public who are 12 to 14 years old.

PS Square supports induction charging, Bluetooth, possibly 3G and it embeds a microSD card slot. A QWERTY keyboard and a large (probably OLED) screen are incorporated and the device can connect to the PC and TV with ease, via wireless.

The same concept portable device supports social networking, gaming (as shown by the directional pad) and even school work, if you have time for that. Action keys are present as well and an eReader should be on board, too. It’s hard for me to see teenagers doing homework on this device, since I personally would be tempted to socialize and play games on it, but it’s an incredibly cool gadget, to be honest.

What do we have here? The replacement for a PC, a tablet and a smartphone… This strange device is a dual side sliding unit, created by Lin Jian Feng and reminding us of an older Nokia model from back when the Finns were top notch phone makers.

This two-way slide netbook uses a multimedia shortcut key and its screen angle can be adjusted with ease. Its sliding parts make up a QWERTY keyboard and they also manage to integrate a rocker instead of a mouse. Shortcut keys are also placed on the keyboard, with multimedia functions involved. The total width of the device (when open) is 500mm, while the width is 122m and the thickness is 15mm.

With the sliding parts closed we guess that this concept becomes an elongated smartphone with at most a 5 inch touch display. Beautiful? Yes! Practical? Not quite, at least not yet.

[via Yanko Design]

How about a flexible tablet to brighten the CES-filled day? Andrew Nammiga from Orange County created the Flexible Modile, a mobile device that flexes and becomes a tablet. This touch sensitive gadget incorporates a flexible display and can fold out in order to be turned into a slate.

The external screen displays the background picked by the user and the unit is ruled by customizability, as its main aspect. There’s a videocall camera in there, plus the ability to turn the conceptual gadget into a photo frame or a media player. Also, considering that the display basically covers the entire device, you can change its looks in any way you want, as pointed out by the last pic below.

Android was chosen as the ideal OS for this concept!