Prototype NTT DoCoMo phone turns into a flute and takes your blood

There are many things an NTT DoCoMo handset can do in the year 2009 -- tune in live television, shoot HD video, tell you whether you need to be wearing sunscreen, and pay your train fare, just to name a few. Inexplicably, though, you can't bust out a white-hot Jethro Tull solo on anything currently in the carrier's lineup, so we're happy to see that its Institute for Advanced Technology is hard at work on a modular hardware system that would allow users to attach all sorts of wacky peripherals to their phones. Billing them as "hardware upgrades," DoCoMo is showing off a blood tester, e-ink reader, and -- yes -- a flute as examples of attachments we could see down the road by the time they commercialize the tech around 2015. We're not sure why Bluetooth isn't a better option for some of this stuff, but we then again, we know better than to question a Japanese carrier's infinite wisdom. Follow the break for video of the prototype in action.