People lease cars, TVs and furniture - why shouldn’t they lease something that gets replaced even more often than those, their cellphone?  That’s the concept behind development consultancy Kaleidoscope’s LINC cellphone: a handset that not only takes into account the fact that people want to upgrade every 12 months, but makes a feature of its recyclability.  Users pay for the cellphone service and borrow the LINC handset; right now, its feature list is bang up to date - GPS, full internet browser, Bluetooth, WiFi and 3G - but in a year there’ll be fresh tech on the market.  That’s when your new LINC drops through the mail, automatically switching your account to the new, updated handset and leaving you to send back the old one for reclamation.

The recycling process is perhaps the most bizarre element of all; the way Kaleidoscope tells it, once back in the factory a “directed radiant heat beam” is fired at an internal memory latch, at which point the handset falls open to free up glass, aluminium and more, all without any paints or surface adhesives.  Kaleidoscope predict that some parts would be reused in the next generation of handsets, some would be considered outdated for cellphones and passed on to less spec-intensive applications, and the bare minimum would be disposed of as hazardous waste.

Of course, there are no plans to put this into production; Kaleidoscope are more think-tank than manufacturer.  But as cellphone contracts get longer in order for carriers to get their money back on subsidising giving out expensive handsets, there may come a pivot point when the promise of cellphone reclamation is enough temptation to loan rather than sell the device.

[via BoingBoing Gadgets]