Kyocera Introduces New Washable Smartphone

Japan is no stranger to the weird and wonderful side of tech, and Kyocera have added to that by releasing a new washable smartphone. The Rafre, as it has been named, is currently only available in Japan, and is the successor to the DIGNO Rafre, which was released in Dec 2015.

As far as washing goes, this doesn’t simply mean it’s water-resistant like most phones seem to be these days, this phone can be washed with soap too. The original DIGNO had a specified resistance to hand soap, but the new Rafre also hails a resistance to body soap, this is of course with hot or cold water.

As for the spec of the phone, it has a 5″ touchscreen, a 3000mAh battery and a 13mp rear camera. The front camera is 5mp and it runs on Android 7.0 (Nougat). It will be available in 3 colours; pale pink, clear white and light blue.

Oddly (or maybe not so oddly?), the phone comes with a cooking app pre-installed, which can be controlled without touching the screen directly. Users can scroll through recipes, set timers and answer the phone using nothing but hand gestures, which is always handy, especially as someone always seems to call when your hands are covered in your next meal.

Overall, the phone itself isn’t anything to get overly excited about, but the features they’ve decided to introduce are. With phones already having water resistance as pretty much a standard feature now, it won’t be long before other manufacturers start to expand on this. It’s likely we’ll see more and more devices being resistant to more and more things.

There is no word on when or if this phone will ever make it out of Japan, but it’s likely the features will at some point. The phone is released in Japan next month and as of yet we have no pricing details.

Do you think this feature is useful? What features of the future would you like to see introduced into our everyday technology and smartphones?