There was a stretch where phone design went bananas

Also comes in flip phone form factor: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2251832310833680.html?spm=a2g...

Not into cars. That's fine. How about a phone for people who really like soda: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2255799830362840.html?spm=a2g...

Once you drop the giant screen requirement that all smart phones cater to as their design center you can kind of go nuts on the ID. A relatively modest amount of NRE will let you spin up your own absurd vision into a feature phone. (Though you may end of losing a quarter million dollars just for the pure joy of having a rotary dial mobile phone with eInk display).

Officially licensed, I presume?

I think it's kind of sad that we went from "let's see if we can add a phone to this" in the 90s/2000s to "lets see if we can add this to a phone" in the post-iPhone era.

Given the scarcity of phone connections I suppose it was inevitable, but man was it fun for awhile.

Japanese phones get left out of the conversation because these topics spin into nostalgia and the Western audience doesn’t have any experience with them. Likewise the JP discussion wouldn’t fondly remember all the Nokia variants.

On a side note I have a pet theory that Japanese cell phones helped push display technology forward. The English alphabet can be displayed very easily with limited pixels but kana and kanji cannot so there’s less pressure for Western manufacturers to innovate displays. For a phone to first be successful in Japan it needs a very high resolution display.

I thought the list was missing Japanese phones too! I went on holiday to Japan in the early 00s, and I remember thinking how all of the phones were way ahead of their time. Phones with flip-and-swivel screens, phones that looked sleek, metallic, sexy and modern, phones with full colour displays that were not some Palm monstrosity, phones that didn't look like phones and instead looked like some leather-and-metal accessory (only took calls), so many cool phones! I wanted them so bad.

I wonder why they never became popular overseas. The iPhone, sure, but there was a whole period before the iPhone where Japanese phones were way ahead of their time.

>Hitachi WOO Ketai H001

I remember that one! The aughts were a truly a golden era in Japanese phone design. The technology was also waaay ahead of the west. We're just now starting to actually use the QR code thing, which was everywhere in like 2005. And 1seg? That was really fun tech. TV on my morning commute was truly like living in the future.

For iconic phones, though, I was always a big fan of the au Design phones like the infobar (2003) and Design Skin. The color schemes are legendary.

We all like crazy designs like these because they are a breeding ground for innovation. However they tend to flop unless one of their innovations proves truly revolutionary.

Early personal computers and even laptops had interesting and varied designs before everyone coalesced around the optimal desktop, tower, and notebook designs.

A big part of the problem is software. If a phone maker puts out a truly unique form factor today, they are stuck in a situation where most existing software was built assuming the user is on a giant rectangle.

More crazier models: F-04B, F-07C

Glad to see this comment - the Cambrian explosion analogy was the exact one that came to mind for me, and I actually think, as you put it, the same dynamics are in play. Lots of different approaches are taken until it is clear that, after time, one is dominant and the best. I remember when the iPhone first came out the whole "tapping on glass" keyboard was highly controversial, but it soon won out (and, IMO, especially because it allows swipe typing).

As an aside, this comment from the tweet thread is genius: "I call this one the Shyamalan because of the unnecessary twist".

The end result is often called a "local maximum" and what you've pointed out happens time and time again.

Cars underwent something similar very early on, but by the time we got to the "Model T" era it was pretty much determined what they would look like.

This happens in the growth phase of an industry lifecycle. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/industrylifecycle.asp. During the growth phase, investors value companies not based on the money they can make today, but on the money they might make tomorrow. This encourages risk-taking, and results in large amounts of variation in the market.

It is followed by maturity, a feature of which is consolidation (incl reduction in choice and variation as the less profitable options are weeded out).

Until the next disruption...

You nailed it. This had to happen. As phones got smarter, no one knew how to optimize the UI for so many new features. Everyone knew that a certain form factor would win out eventually, but no one knew what it was. Everyone knew that whoever got it right first might dominate the market. The only logical thing was to iterate constantly, and blindly. Much the same thing happened with the personal computer market from the late 70s until the mid 90s or so.

Samsung squits out like 50+ phone models a year. That's like one every week.

How can any of them be any good? How can any of them ever get any useful time in the spotlight?

> The genius of Steve Jobs was in showing that you can have whole company focus on making a brilliant device that works for everyone

No, it doesn't work for everyone.

He showed that there are enough people who can and are willing to pay for a premium device. He choose a niche.

Nokia uses a classic price segmentation strategy.

Read more here: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...

So I am not the only one who thinks their deluge of models was ridiculous. To be fair, most of them - for better or for worse - had the same guts (they only used a handful of bseband chips most probably from TI internally named UPP8M, UPPWD2, UPP2M); from service manuals you can tell the most often varied thing was the RF section. But still, NRE, tooling and certification would cost millions per model. Injection molds would cost serveral hundred grand alone.

It's like when you go to the cheap lunch restaurant that have 70 items on their menu vs the fine dining place that has a set three course menu for the evening. Quantity signals cheapness.

The genius of Steve Jobs was simply that he had enough taste, vision and authority that the company was actually focused on delivering _products_.

The state of the average enterprise, like Microsoft and Google, is that various business units and departments have devolved into cargo culting process to satisfy the petty career needs of their managers and workers.

It's not complicated. The people in charge not only do not understand product development, but they fundamentally don't care and will get uncomfortable if you try to make them care. It is far too tall an order, and too much work.

> because god forbid anybody diverge from the "glass monolith" design.

A few years ago my building's elevators were breaking down and had to be completely replaced. The new ones have a touchscreen that only ever displays the floor numbers, and real buttons that only go up to 9 (in a grid like a phone) where you have to hit two of them to go to floors 10+.

Now you get to buy weird "gaming cases" and who knows how bulky those are, and if they even work (random obvious SEO link thing: https://www.imore.com/best-gaming-cases-iphone-13-pro )

Perhaps Valve could add a phone to the Steam Deck.

The physical buttons get in the way of day-to-day use. That's why brands like Asus and Razer design phones that are shipped with special cases containing things like joysticks, trigger, and other physical buttons (using USB-C ports or Bluetooth for transmissing buttons). Others still experiment. The ROG Phone 2 came with distance sensors on the side to function as analogue triggers.

Phones with buttons have been tried and failed. Same with using your phone's processor for a desktop environment by simply plugging it into a dock; Samsung's DeX comes closest, but very few people seem to use it.

In practice, the easiest way to combine phones and games is to either stick with the touch screen interaction all games are designed for, or to grab a Bluetooth controller. Works across many games, almost all phones, and you have a pick in the hand feel or button quality rather than being limited by the design choices of the phone designer.

If you're into playing games on the go, tools like the Steam Deck or one of the more recent cloud streaming handhelds are probably better.

Hardware may be less interesting, but the software is way more dynamic than ever.

Second-hand phone shops now show the back of the phone in the display case because they all look the same from the front.

Well when companies try do something different - like a notch - they get shit on these days

As well they should, because making them look more interesting would be a waste of effort, and in some cases a waste of money like glass backs.

What matters is the rugged case selection, but unfortunately they don't seem to focus on that as much as they could.

Non-AMP link:

https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2015/09/history-of-the-s...

That thing is from 2002, kind of ancient even by side-swipe-keyboard phone standards. Only got my first one when HTC started offering them on our market around the 2004/2005 time (with windows mobile 5, ymmv).

My personal favourite but with shitty keyboard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Blue_Angel

Its form factor is also reminiscent of the later T-Mobile G1, the first Android phone. :)

Danger also had a pretty nice App Store model and a nice developer and user community in their phpBB forums. The carriers that supported the Hiptop also had a hosted web interface where you could manage your email, calendar, notes, etc.

I had one of these in college, and it was awesome. It had AOL Instant Messenger built on, and the L/R shoulder buttons would let you slide between your conversations. So quick and satisfying.

I had one and thought it was pretty cool - first phone I owned that could run an SSH client. I miss the tactile controls (jog dial) that compliment touch screens.

Even if this thread is fake, for me this is the most memorable thing about that phone

https://twitter.com/cooperlund/status/1185243122210656261

I have fond memories of the WAP internet. In 2001 in Canada it was really expensive to get any kind of data plan, and you might only get 5MB per month. I had a plan with no data at all, but you could use the WAP browser to access a handful of things for free, on the provider's website. It was things like weather, very limited news and movie times. One day I was messing around in there, and a 404 page had a link to google. I bookmarked the link and from that day had unlimited WAP internet access (and google had a built-in gateway to WAPify any web page). My next phone was not a flip phone, had a real (bad browser), and had a prominent web browser button that worked from any other screen. However you could only exit the browser by navigating menus. It also had a tendency to reset in your pocket, which of course turned off the keylock. So at least once a day you'd end up pocket-googling and using up your precious megabytes.

I had a coworker that had one of those, while I had only an IPaq PDA. They were roughly the same size, with the phone being slightly thicker and also an antenna nub on the top.

I found my IPaq while moving a month ago. The footprint is significantly smaller than my Google Pixel 6. Though the Pixel is significantly thinner, I find that also makes it more uncomfortable to hold. Like, imagine taking it to an extreme and the phone becomes as thin as a piece of glass. Even without sharp edges, it'd still be very uncomfortable to wrap your hand around such a thing.

I don't understand the obsession with thinner and thinner phones. Thickness is not universally bad. It would at least give us more room for battery.

There aren't any other, similarly-sized objects that I wrap my hand around completely. Small books, digital cameras, handheld game consoles, I hold gripping the edge of the device. But you can't do that with a smartphone because one of the two largest faces of the rectangular solid is reactive to any part of your skin.

My laptop touchpad can tell when I wrest my wrist on it while typing on the keyboard versus just touching it with my fingertips. Why can't smartphones reject grabbing the side of the screen and only react to fingertip touches?

I had the 7600 too, and enjoyed the “lemon” form factor!

But it certainly wasn’t a cheap phone when it launched. The typical Nokia cost around $150. This was the high-end model of Nokia’s feature phone range, and they highlighted it in ads with fashion brands. (The fashion touch was a leather strap you could attach to the lemon phone’s corner.)

The 7600 did include technical innovation: it was the first Nokia model ever to include 3G, and IIRC it was also the first European phone to shoot video (stamp-sized 144p clips).

Yup, I was a big fan of phones with actual keyboards, before and after the smartphone era, for exactly that reason. Transferring the muscle memory from typing on a PC keyboard to these mini-keyboards was surprisingly fast, and after that you could simply type without worrying about T9 fucking things up (one classic in German was that it turned "Frohe", as in "Happy Easter" or "Merry Christmas", into "Droge", as in illegal drugs). My collection includes the Nokia 5510 (also memorable for being one of the first phones with a built-in music player, although the memory was laughably small), the Nokia 6822 (I think this was the successor of the phone in the tweet - looks like quite a few "dads" must have bought one) and the Motorola Droid/Milestone.

It was actually aimed at the blackberry crowd that valued having a full keyboard at the time. I had one for a while in Nokia. It was great for things like email. Much lighter than the 9500/9300s it replaced. Those were heavy bricks. Different times of course but I do miss hardware keyboards.

I think we lost something with all those hardware form-factors converging on essentially the same design: a rectangle that barely fits in your pocket.

The author has no clue what he is talking about. I absolutely loved my Nokia 6822 - you could install a third party SSH client on it and that's how the remote work era really began for me. Next phone for me was obviously Nokia 9300 - also with full QWERTY keyboard. What came later was Android/iPhone which in a way was step back in terms of productivity due to lack of physical keyboard.

It also had stylus and a kickstand! It could broadcast in FM!

Do you mean T9? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T9_(predictive_text)

There are T9 phone keyboards on the Play Store and almost all phones (with Apple being the notable exception) also incorporate T9 into their dialers.

T9 worked great for words in the dictionary. When your word wasn't in the (often limited) dictionary, though...

The original sidekick is the earliest pivot phone I can think of. The Samsung Juke came out several years later but I don't think it sold that well because of how tiny it was. I don't expect any pivot phones to sell that well. For that LG phone, what are you supposed to do with the bottom screen? It's wasted on media controls, how often do you need a fully unobstructed view of a video while you are pausing or fast forwarding? Games make sense, the DS took advantage of a second screen but this requires games to develop just for this second screen. Video editing makes the most sense as long as there's a video editor out there that can take advantage of the second screen but also document editing too (but who really wants to do this on a phone?).

The LG Wing feels like the spiritual successor to the Sharp Aquos 912SH, where you flipped and then rotated the top half. (mentioned elsewhere while I was trying to remember its name)

Cellular, modular, interactivodular.

It was used in The Matrix with a spring-load mechanism because, IIRC, the Wachowskis thought it would be cool if the phone worked like the slide release on a handgun. For the sequels, they managed to convince Samsung to design a phone with a similar spring-loaded mechanism that you could actually buy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_SPH-N270

If you want an absolutely minuscule phone, there's Unihertz: https://www.unihertz.com/products/jelly-pro