The stronger-than-titanium Turing Phone is not just another smartphone

The Turing Phone is stronger than steel and titanium.
The Turing Phone is stronger than steel and titanium.
Image: Mashable, Lili Sams

The Turing Phone is the beginning of the cipher phone era.

"First there were feature phones, then smartphones and now cipher phones," Turing Robotics Industries CEO SYL Chao told Mashable.

You're probably wondering, what is a cipher phone? As Chao explained when he swung by the Mashable office to show off the stronger than titanium and steel Turing Phone, it's the next evolution of the mobile phone — phones with futuristic industrial design, and private and protected communication networks.

The word cipher in "cipher phone" is short for decipher — as in the Turing Phone is designed to be virtually un-hackable. It's exactly what people want in a post-Snowden world.

There's a bland sameness to today's smartphones. Every phone wants to look like an iPhone. Aluminum, glass and really thin. It's all become so boring. Just look at Xiaomi's Mi Note, Huawei's P8 and Samsung's Galaxy S6.

The Turing Phone is not another cookie-cutter smartphone. It trades curves and thinness in favor of sharp corners and edges. The three designs I saw, which were inspired by kings — Beowulf and the Egyptian pharaohs, for example — look more like something from Japanese anime like Gundam or Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Turing Phone

Image: Mashable, Lili Sams

It's such a refreshing design. The polished chrome frame that wraps around the 5.5-inch (full HD) display is not aluminum or stainless steel. It's made from Liquidmorpheum, a type of liquid metal and it feels like a material (like Wolverine's Adamantium claws) from the future as well. The Turing Phone is heavier than other phones, but it still leaves a solid impression in your palm; kind of like a firm handshake.

Turing Phone

Turing Phone's side-mounted fingerprint sensor works just like the iPhone's TouchID.

Image: Mashable, Lili Sams

The Turing Phone, which runs Android 5.0 Lollipop, has a really snazzy app launcher. Chao says the launcher is for demo purposes and may not make it into the final device, but I really hope they keep it in some capacity. The app launcher is heavy on the 3D effects; swipe left and right and the screen splits into three columns, each side revealing hidden buttons. Playing with it made me feel like James Bond.

What makes the Turing Phone a potential game-changer could be its security.

"Its all about authentication," he says. "It's all about decentralized, end-to-end authentication that matters."

Turing Phone users will be able to send sensitive information to one another over an encrypted network, where nothing is stored on third-party networks and everything is securely encrypted behind the fingerprint sensor that's built into the side of the phone.

Chao sent me email through the phone's encrypted network and challenged me to get a hacker to hack it. Here's what it looked like encrypted:


Image: Mashable, Raymond Wong

Here's what the email looked like without the encryption:


Image: Mashable, Raymond Wong

"Your information is not only encrypted, it's encrypted by your own private key," Chao explained. "That key was produced by a master private key. And the master private key that produces that private key — as soon as the private key is produced, it goes offline. So there's no third-party communication involved in the production of your key."

It's all very technical, but the bottom line is that every key is unique. Chao says there's only one way for the network to be compromised and that's "if someone broke into our offline server center (not hacked) and got hold of our offline server with a machine gun or something; otherwise it'll be quite impossible."

That's not to say the phone's 100% un-hackable — where there's a will, there's a way.

"There are ways to penetrate one phone at a time, but normally — you see how hackers work — they break into a server and get tens of thousands of data. There's no 100% security, but I think we're quite high up there."


A very James Bond-esque app launcher that will probably not make it into the final version.

Image: Mashable, Lili Sams

The Turing Phone is powerful. It's powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor, 3GB of RAM and options of 16, 32 and 64GB of internal storage. Geeks will lament the 801 chip, which is outdated by today's standards, but Chao says it's the most stable Qualcomm mobile processor right now. He is, of course, referring to the overheating issues from which the newest Snapdragon 810 chip suffers.

I only had a few minutes to mess around with the device, but it felt speedy. The 13-megapixel back camera and 8-megapixel rear camera also fired off shots in a jiffy.

Designed to be forward-thinking, the Turing Phone spares no expense ditching old technologies. As such, you won't find a 3.5mm headphone jack on the device or a Micro USB port for charging. The phone uses a proprietary magnetic charging port, which works like Apple's MagSafe charger it uses on its MacBook. Chao says USB can easily be compromised.

For music, you'll have to use Bluetooth headphones. It's concession, for sure and may well be the phone's weakest point.

Turing Phone

If you're one of the first 10,000 Turing Phone buyers, you'll get these extra accessories for free.

Image: Mashable, Lili Sams

Pre-orders for the Turing Phone start on July 31. It'll be available in three models: 16GB ($610), 64GB ($740) and 128GB ($870). The first 10,000 buyers will get a few extra goodies for free: a Bluetooth headset, a micro Bluetooth controller and a wireless keyboard.

The Turing Phone is interesting for many reasons — design and security — and I'll definitely be looking to test it out once we get a review unit in. Bring on the cipher phones.