I have a cat s61, which has a tiny bump out at the top of the standard cellphone rectangle shape for the IR camera. People always ask me what it is, because this minute detail stands out so much when everything else looks the same.
There was a stretch where phone design went bananas
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Re: There was a stretch where phone design went bananas
#32I just wish we could get some smaller smartphones again. I absolutely loved the Nexus One (HTC Passion). Just the right size.
Re: There was a stretch where phone design went bananas
#33I miss the days when you had bonkers phones like this. I agree with most people that life is a little dull with our iPhone clones. It's nice for watching videos (which I don't do too much), and less nice for typing (which I do rather more). The E90 form factor is still my dream phone. If you think the Nokia phones were nuts, you should dig up stuff coming out of Japan 2000-2010, like the Hitachi WOO Ketai H001 (yes,…
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.
Re: There was a stretch where phone design went bananas
#34I miss the days when you had bonkers phones like this. I agree with most people that life is a little dull with our iPhone clones. It's nice for watching videos (which I don't do too much), and less nice for typing (which I do rather more). The E90 form factor is still my dream phone. If you think the Nokia phones were nuts, you should dig up stuff coming out of Japan 2000-2010, like the Hitachi WOO Ketai H001 (yes,…
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.
Re: There was a stretch where phone design went bananas
#35Is there a more general framework for understanding when a sudden amount of variation is expected and perhaps rational? The analogy is very loose, but this makes me think a bit of the cambrian explosion, or periods when a sudden environmental shift is followed by a profusion of new species. When a new 'space' is opened, it seems like a range of things can try to fill it, until one strategy becomes dominant, at least…
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.
Re: There was a stretch where phone design went bananas
#36I 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…
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.
Re: There was a stretch where phone design went bananas
#37I just wish we could get some smaller smartphones again. I absolutely loved the Nexus One (HTC Passion). Just the right size.
If you want an absolutely minuscule phone, there's Unihertz: https://www.unihertz.com/products/jelly-pro
Re: There was a stretch where phone design went bananas
#38The Motorola ROKR phone had iTunes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_ROKR
Re: There was a stretch where phone design went bananas
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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-...
Yeah, nah. In their lineup much of the models were exactly equivalent, only with a different shell, at best camera or display.
Exactly - market segmentation was huge and every phone was basically "identical" - storage space, processor speed, connection speed, even screen size, these things really didn't "matter" much yet.
Re: There was a stretch where phone design went bananas
#40I wish phone makers weren't all designing down to the lowest common denominator. You can spend a thousand dollars on a "gaming phone" but you haven't been able to buy a phone with actual buttons for playing games in eleven damn years because god forbid anybody diverge from the "glass monolith" design.
> 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+.