The bizarre Portal smartphone is meant to be worn on your wrist

The crowdfunding sites of Kickstarter and Indiegogo are places where the strangest ideas can be pitched to the public, but we’ve seen few devices as unusual as the Portal. This “wearable smartphone” is currently looking for $300,000 in funding on Indiegogo and features a flexible 6-inch TFT display that wraps around your lower arm.

For the past few years, the standing lazy punchline about wearables has been something about awkwardly strapping a computer or a phone to your body. Finally, a crowdfunding campaign has taken the joke to the next level and made that punchline a reality. San Francisco Bay Area startup Arubixs has designed a flexible screen phablet dubbed “Portal” that slides into a dual-strap arm cradle that extends about halfway up the forearm from the wrist. It seems equal parts brilliant and ridiculous. We’ve seen flexible displays like this for years now — mostly as demonstration models at CES that never make it to market — but this is the first design I’ve seen that’s built entirely around the flexibility of the screen.