The iPhone 11 and Galaxy Note 10 follow an established playbook, leaving consumers with few truly unique options
This week, Apple announced its latest iPhones, including the photography-oriented iPhone 11 Pro. It has all the bells and whistles that a semi-professional could want from their phone. For dedicated mobile photographers, it might be an exciting release. But at a time when hardware innovation has slowed down, they’re the only niche Apple seems to pander to.
In recent years, the design of smartphones has become homogenized, leaving anyone who wants niche features — like a hardware keyboard for those who type a lot, or even a smaller phone for people with smaller hands — out in the cold. Take a look at flagship phones from Apple, Google, Samsung, or even the beleaguered Huawei and you’ll see largely the same thing: a mostly featureless slab with a screen taking up as much of the front as physically possible. The camera might bulge out of the back a bit. There will be three, maybe four buttons on the side. No headphone jack, sorry, but if you’re lucky you might get a fingerprint sensor on the back.
When most major phones follow this formula, it doesn’t leave a lot of room for hardware innovation. Drastic changes to the form factor are rare, and when they appear they’re often attached to subpar phones that could never stand toe-to-toe with some of the more popular handsets on the market.
One of the few genuinely new and potentially useful innovations this year came in the form of Samsung’s Galaxy Fold. This device, as its name suggests, is designed to fold closed into a phone shape and unfold into a tablet. It’s an interesting development, but given the unpopularity of Android tablets, it’s unclear if a larger Android screen is much more useful than a normal phone would be. It doesn’t help that it cost $2,000, far more than buying a high-end phone and tablet combined. And the product was so poorly designed that Samsung had to delay its launch for months and even cancel all preorders until the company could develop a fix for its hinge.
In the modern world, almost everyone needs a phone, so sacrifices have to be made.
Foldable displays may yet have their day in the sun, but it’s telling that Samsung — which sells more smartphones globally than any other single manufacturer worldwide — has had to resort to such lengths to sell a phone outside of its normal line. Despite listing 26 distinct models of handsets on its site, most of Samsung’s sales come from its Galaxy S10 or Note 10 lines.
Beyond foldable displays, hardware differentiation is scarce and often purposeless like RED’s poorly-performing “holographic” phone. This year also saw a few phones with pop-up cameras. This module allows the front-facing camera to hide behind the screen until needed, making it possible to eliminate notches on phones with small bezels. This can appeal to tech reviewers who find bezels to be a big deal, but consumers don’t seem to care as much.
Worse yet, it gets in the way of a more practical feature: facial recognition. Recent iPhones, and the upcoming Pixel 4, use facial recognition to unlock their phones. This would be harder to do if you had to manually open the camera every time you unlock your device. For all the engineering prowess it takes to create a pop-up camera, it adds little to the device beyond chasing an impractical bezel-free design. It’s more of a gimmick than a hardware innovation.
It all raises the obvious question: Where have all the weird, specialized phones gone? In 2012, Samsung tried making a phone with a built-in pico projector. A year prior, the company introduced the Galaxy Note with a large screen and a stylus (one of few experimental lines of phones that have continued to this day). In 2010, HTC launched a phone with a laundry list of new-for-the-time features, including a front-facing camera, a 4G wireless connection, a wireless hotspot, and even a built-in kickstand. The first round of Galaxy S phones included one with a keyboard. Despite demand for them, phones smaller than five inches have become increasingly rare. Yet prior to 2012, small phones were so common that anything bigger than five inches was labeled a tablet-sized phone or “phablet.”
In 2004, Nokia unveiled the 7600, an unconventionally shaped device with interchangeable faceplates marketed to fashion-focused consumers. You wouldn’t see something like this today.
To be continued...