It looks like the world has agreed upon an unwritten norm for the way a mobile phone should look, and that's a rectangle. Such has been the uniformity that the upcoming Blackberry Passport, with his squarish design, is seen as a rebel.

A peek into the past will just reveal how crazy the ideas were, before the present universal form factor was achieved. They came out in all shapes and sizes, which sometimes even defied logic.
Not surprisingly it was the market leader Nokia who were calling the shots even trying to bend the design rules and imagination of the people. Even today some of the Chinese brands are at it, but here are some of the most mind boggling or craziest mobile phone made.

Nokia 7600

Only Nokia could have come up with this.  The Nokia 7600 was almost square in shape and almost as thick as a packet of cigarettes. One had to carefully hold the device with the edges of both fingers, but the menu-scrolling pad at the bottom of the device was awkwardly placed, making it difficult to navigate with one hand.

Telson TWC 1150

This looks more like a device James Bond would use, and just to make it clear, the Telson TWC 1150 is a phone, watch and camera. It has a digital camera that attaches to the side, a phone with voice recognition and it acts as a watch. It is light weight, weighing only 98 grams.

Golden Buddha Phone

Here is what happens when religion and technology team up and produce a mobile phone. Yup, the end result is quite awkward - a clam shell handset covered in gold, with a camera, LCD display, dual-SIM card support, and a virtual prayer room feature built-in.

Toshiba G450

If you planned to use the Toshiba G450 in public, you better have a paper bag handy to put over your head. The phone carries a strange resemblance to a TV remote control, and its design is so weird that probably no one outside of Japan finds it attractive.

Pantech

We know you're thinking this is a regular looking phone, but it's probably one of the weirdest ones ever created. By producing ultrasonic sounds that allegedly repel mosquitoes, this Pantech handset has been dubbed “Mosquito Repellant” slider. Apart from its believed effect on pesky insects, the mobile is rather unimpressive. It features a 2.6″ QVGA display, 2.0 Megapixel camera, EV-DO, MP3/MOV/VOD support, stereo speaker, MP3 player, and portable media player functionality. But the thing is so noisy you’d have to wonder if it would be easier to just avoid mosquitoes than tolerate this mobile phone.

Nokia 6800

A unique device for its time, the Nokia 6800 released in 2003, taking physical QWERTY keyboards on mobile phones to a whole new. The device bridg the gap between the dial keypad phones at the turn of the millennium and the BlackBerry-like devices we have today.

Nokia 5510

A unique design for the Finnish phone giant, the Nokia 5510 was a dedicated music and multimedia device, despite its monochrome screen, that featured the firm's first hardware QWERTY-keyboard. Multimedia -- at least back then -- was texting and communicating with friends. As email had not really appeared on a phone by this point in late-2001 when the device was released, the keyboard was a novelty

Nokia 3650

Considered at the time to be a 'business' phone, the Nokia 3650 was a game-changer to Nokia's device principles. The phone was heavy to accommodate a larger battery, but was sleek in design and thinner than most of the other phones on the market at the time. The rounded bottom fit comfortably in the palm of one's hand, but the keypad layout was strange and resembled a 1950's rotary phone dial. It took those who were used to the traditional texting principles a while to adjust to the new layout.

Nokia N93

Released in 2006, the Nokia N93 was one of the first N-series devices announced by the Finnish phone giant. A flip phone, it contorted to different positions and twisted into almost any layout. One could flip it around to play games like a handheld game console in a 90-degree sideways angle, or flip it open and twist the screen to take the perfect image.

Nokia N-Gage

Nokia's first dedicated gaming phone, released in 2003, sported a brand new design that allowed users to navigate menus and play games in landscape mode. Able to play groundbreaking games such as the original Tomb Raider, the device's 176 x 208 pixel screen was one of the brightest and color-dense displays seen on a mobile device at the time. It also included an MP3 player, downloadable content and a USB port. It was the first Generation Y-focused phone for those who wanted to show off to their friends.

Nokia 7710

Nokia finally developed a touchscreen phone -- one of the first on the market -- and released the Nokia 7710, the successor to the never-released Nokia 7700, around the time the discontinued phone was due to hit the market. Designed for use in the landscape mode -- one held the phone in portrait mode to make calls -- it was the closest phone that Nokia came to the Lumia but arrived on the market almost a decade earlier. Design wise, it was more like a slimmed-down tablet than a phone as such, but considering the only 'tablets' on the market were 180-degree screen-spinning laptops, it wasn't considered anything but a very clever phone.

Tags : Mobile Phones