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There was a stretch where phone design went bananas

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Re: There was a stretch where phone design went bananas

#11

Post by alex_c »

Somewhat related - I feel like we're in the middle of a general trend of boring, monochrome design.

Car colors come to mind:

https://www.thedrive.com/news/37001/this-graph-shows-how-car...

Winter is coming - that means a sea of black, dark blue, or dark brown winter coats everywhere.

Or the trends towards same-looking logos that have been discussed here before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32040506

I guess all trends are cyclical, so looking forward to an explosion in colour in another 5-10 years!

Re: There was a stretch where phone design went bananas

#16

Post by mhaberl »

shubhamjain wrote: post #7

I did some investigation around this. At their peak, Nokia launched 46 models a single year [1]. I believe Apple has launched somewhere The genius of Steve Jobs was in showing that you can have whole company focus on making a brilliant device that works for everyone. I still don't get why companies are so much focused on launching hundreds of different models instead of one and leveraging economies of scale. [1]: htt…

> 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-...

Re: There was a stretch where phone design went bananas

#18

Post by RicoElectrico »

shubhamjain wrote: post #7

I did some investigation around this. At their peak, Nokia launched 46 models a single year [1]. I believe Apple has launched somewhere The genius of Steve Jobs was in showing that you can have whole company focus on making a brilliant device that works for everyone. I still don't get why companies are so much focused on launching hundreds of different models instead of one and leveraging economies of scale. [1]: htt…

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.

Re: There was a stretch where phone design went bananas

#19

Post by wildzzz »

Izkata wrote: post #3

> "OK... what if instead of it flipping, it PIVOTED" Kinda like the LG Wing: https://www.lg.com/global/lgwing

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?).
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