What new things are in? It seems no new breaking tech was introduced for the last 10 years. What all the engineers doing on this time?
Its same that from user side a phone from 5 years ago will be just fine for you as the most new ones.
In: 0
The concept of having as much usable screen when copared to the frame size became the goal of many manufacturers, so the whole industry largely shifted to rectangles that have one side that’s almost all screen.
There’s not really much room for making any unique visual design choices when the only part of the phone that the user doesn’t cover with a case is that screen.
The user wants the most screen space, the best camera(s), and the best battery life, so this becomes a least intrusive way to implement a selfie camera, and the biggest battery + fast charging, and maybe wireless charging. When you then also want the new app based system to integrate best onto your phone’s platform, you end up with some variation of a square. We’ve seen folding phones, make a big difference to this, but outside of that, it’s hard to make a substantial difference to that brick of glass, from the previous brick of glass.
You will notice that certain things tend towards a common design by their very nature.
There aren’t a ton of ways to make a steering wheel, same for a hammer.
Smartphones are kind of like that. You need a screen, microphone, cameras, etc. as u/XsNR pointed out. Cramming all those in a form factor that you can hold in your hands and have it work will tend towards the smartphone designs we see now.
That doesn’t mean that aren’t some innovations that occur like fingerprint readers, better haptics, better computing power, better displays, etc. Take an iPhone from 2009, the size is different, the overall design cues are quite similar, but if you were to try to use it, you might find the experience a pain.
The [UI has matured.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_interface)
Same as the auto industry, we still have doors, steering wheel, accelerator & brake (the UI)
It’s funny that we as a culture expect constant innovation in electronics. We’ve been trained to.
Cameras and their software get significantly better. More powerful processors. All the stuff you can’t see from the outside.
When the first iPhone was released there was a wide variety of phone designs. A lot of them had physical keyboards because the BlackBerry Bold was incredibly successful and had a physical keyboard. Screen-based keyboards were seen as hard to use.
After the first iPhone came out, almost all mobile phones just looked like the iPhone.
>what all the engineers doing on this time
Well we were trying to catch an easy paycheck and slack off for a few years, but you had to go and ruin it now didn’t you?
What else do you want then to look like? A cube? Have fun carrying that in your pocket.
The design of smartphones hasn’t changed much because it doesn’t need to. It needs to be light and pocket friendly and provide a screen that is suitable for making phone calls, sending texts, taking photos, checking email, playing games, and watching video.
After that it needs a quality camera, battery, and UI. All of those have been dramatically improved time and time again over the last 15 years.
I think it was just 10 or so years ago that wireless charging came out…but it was really slow and would often require you to take your phone out of the case. Now it’s much faster and can pass through most cases.
10 years ago I couldn’t cast my phone screen to my TV without the aid of an additional device, like a chromecast or AppleTV. Now I don’t need anything.
Not to mention that Samsung was the first to have a foldable screen. I’d say that’s pretty revolutionary.
Go blame Iphone for popularizing the candybar shape by marketing the Iphone with envy. From what I remember, they marketed the Iphone with celebrities and everyone had to get one so they are just like their favorite celebrity.
Phones used to be cool like the t-mobile sidekick, Sony ericsson and samsung slide (my personal favorite). But now because everyone wants an iphone, phone manufacturers have to compete and have essentially copied Iphone. I still wait for the day when samsung releases a phone with a pull out keyboard…but the s-pen is cool too.
Latest Answers