How many of you have had moved on from the mono ringtone cellphones to versions with MP3 ringtones, multi-megapixel cameras, and a large touchscreen for all your Internet surfing needs? Even the large QWERTY keyboard has been shrunk to fit into the smartphone form factor, and while all the extra bells and whistles might appeal to the gadget aficionado, there are plenty of people out there who are sick of being flooded with way too many choices offering a bunch of functions that they probably have no need for. In fact, there is a large percentage of the population who would most probably prefer something extremely simple, which is why BloodRabbit at the Product Design Forums decided to take up the task of creating a concept phone that whittles away all the extra icing on the cake, leaving only the barebones essentials.

This unique concept measures roughly double the length of an ordinary matchstick, and comes with just four buttons for all your calling needs. Making a phone call is as simple as rocking each individual number in different directions – for example, manipulating the 123 button left will get you one, 2 when the button is pressed down, and rocking it right will net you a 3. Of course, with the lack of alphabets, you will have to live without text messaging functionality for the moment.

As for the display, you won’t find any 16.7 million color TFT display, but instead an old school calculator type without the reflective backing, effectively making it transparent. The display shows the caller ID of incoming calls, and pushing it back into place will hang up a call. Are cellphone companies taking note of this concept? It would be cool to see a Shuffle-class phone hit the market amidst all the latest and greatest handsets.