This Tecno tech lets you change your smartphone's color at will

Tecno has introduced a new technology that enables you to manually change the color of your smartphone. You can pick from over a thousand different colors and apply them to your phone’s back panel at will. The company also makes it possible to automatically change the color based on activity or battery status.

Introduced at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2023, which is currently underway in Barcelona, Tecno’s Chameleon Coloring Technology is a “full-spectrum electrically-controller prism coloring technology”. The magic is created by a grid of sub-micron prism material that changes direction upon applying an electric field. The company has devised a way to precisely control the direction of the material to achieve different colors. The prism can scatter light in different wavelengths to produce various shades.

This prism material can be embedded in the back of a smartphone to let users manually change colors at a touch of a button. According to a GSMArena report, this tech can produce a total of 1600 different shades. You can access the full spectrum on your phone and switch colors whenever you want. Tecno can also enable you to configure the system in a way that changes colors based on the battery level or activities such as music and incoming notifications. You may also be able to set a unique back color for each app on your phone.

It reportedly takes a fraction of a second for the material to switch from one color to another (just about 0.03 seconds). You can change colors up to two million times before the prism material starts losing its properties. That’s enough to outlast the device itself, though. As far as power consumption is concerned, changing colors 100 times in a day eats up “as much power as watching a 5-minute video”. So it will hardly impact the phone’s battery life.

Tecno makes it possible to manually change the color of your smartphone

Note that the material doesn’t produce light on its own. It can only scatter the natural light off its surface in multiple colors. This essentially means that the magic won’t happen in dark. Well, nobody will see the color of your phone when it’s dark, so that doesn’t matter. More importantly, it won’t require direct sunlight to change colors. That would be a little gimmicky. There already exist phones that can change colors under direct sunlight, such as the Vivo V23 series. It remains to be seen if and when Tecno applies its Chameleon Coloring Technology on its smartphones.