Recently Turing Robotic Industries announced the Turing smart phone, a presumably “unhackable” phone which is made out of a material called “Liquidmorphium”, or an amorphous metal that can easily be formed into what ever shape that’s needed, with minimal waste and with it being stronger than steel.

Sounds familiar right? Liquidmetal makes the same stuff and is currently in an exclusive partnership with Apple for it’s use in consumer electronic devices, such as smart phones (but not watches, as Swatch currently has an exclusivity deal with Liquidmetal for that). While the licensing agreement with Apple remains secret as to what patents are licensed, one can pretty much surmise that it’s ALL of Liquidmetals’ patents up to 2012, including a number of more recent joint patents filed with Apple.

The question about Liquidmorphium is this, while it is based on the work of Atakan Peker (co-creator of Liquidmorphium) , how much of this work does NOT rely on the patents owned and licensed by Liquidmetal and Apple? It’s very probably that any newer patents on amorphous metals created by Atakan Peker reference the earlier Liquidmetal patents, that may cause problems regarding licensing. It should be interesting to see what Apple & Liquidmetal will do regarding these patents and if Liquidmorphium infringes them or the licensing agreement.

Liquidmorphium’s parent company, New Technology and Material Inc was only recently incorporated, and seems more to be a holding company than anything else. Bloomberg Business listing for Lugee Li (co-creator of Liquidmorphium) lists him as CEO of Dongguan Eontec, a materials company with specialization in offering light alloy precision die casting products.

Interestingly enough, Turing Robotic Industries, while it is listed as located in San Francisco, the correspondent listed in a trademark application, as Steve Yi Long Chao (TRI CEO), in Shenzen, China. So while the phone may be produced in China (as with 90+% of most phones) the question is how much of this phone’s development is connected to China and considering security and their additional services, what would that mean to everyone who would be interested in buying it? As with the competition, Turing Robotics seems to be aimed more at offering services specifically for their phone as a means of revenue generation. Though the location of servers is still unknown and under what jurisdiction their products will fall under.

The Blackphone by Silent Circle is headquartered in Geneva Switzerland (servers in Canada), and while NO country is completely sane regarding encryption and the idea of weakening it, the product is still one of the best out there. It’s been hacked, but at least Silent Circle continues to try to improve the product. How will the Turing Phone be accepted on the general market, and will it be competitive price wise to the Blackphone is to be seen (Turing Phone’s launch is listed as “this summer”).