This man wants to be the Steve Jobs of robotics

Tomotaka Takahashi and one of his robot creations

Take a close look at your smartphone for a moment.

Unless you’re among the rare Blackberry holdovers or a true clamshell-toting troglodyte, it’s a slab of glass and plastic and/or metal, a plug or two, a couple of camera apertures and a couple of buttons. From the perspectives of design and user interface, your phone is basically the same thing it was years ago.

Considering the gigantic scale of smartphone business, the tight product cycles and the hordes of creative people and engineers working to make the latest and greatest, conventional wisdom says there’s nowhere else to go with smartphone, design-wise. Tomotaka Takahashi would beg to differ. [more]