phones that flip phones that slide phones that have a full keyboard on the
inside it feels like it wasn't long ago that we had phones in all shapes and
sizes but with the exception of recent foldable phones and other things that
mostly feel like gimmicks these days they're all flat candy bar shape but why
well back in the day when they were all shapes and sizes our phones didn't
really do as much it was mostly calls texts and impressing your friends with
your cool new ringtone so for these use cases it was a
no-brainer what to put on a phone a small screen to handle the user
interface and a physical keypad since you'd be constantly punching in numbers
of course phones like the blackberry had full-on qwerty keyboards to make texting
and emailing easier but the screen itself was still rather limited in
functionality the point here is that a small screen and lots of actual buttons
made sense on every phone and as long as you had these two things there wasn't
necessarily a standard way to arrange them hence the very large variety of
phone layouts that we saw i had a kibo then of course the iphone came along in
2007 and helped set a trend it wasn't the first smartphone but it put the idea
in the mind of the public that the phone should actually be a hyper flexible
device that shouldn't be limited by things like hinges and sliders or
buttons instead it opted for a design that was mostly a touch screen so it
could adapt to whichever app the user was running and a large screen makes it
harder to incorporate tons of physical bells and whistles as you need one big
slab that can hold the entire display and if you have a do-it-all device you
also need a lot more battery life than you did in the days where the most power
draining activity you could do is to have a long phone conversation this
necessitates a larger physical battery which limits how the phone can be shaped
if you take a look inside just about any modern smartphone you'll see a
standardized rectangular lithium ion or lithium polymer battery that takes up a
significant amount of space inside on top of that making phones physically
complicated makes them more likely to fail this could be seen in everything
from slide out keyboards to more modern foldable phones and as important as
smartphones have become for daily life this is a big deal with most phone
makers advertising toughness and durability with ever stronger screen
glasses and impressive water resistance ratings phones get sold based on
hardiness speed and camera quality none
of which require a phone maker to push some crazy new form factor i mean it's a
lot easier to just point the back of your phone at something to take a picture than to have
an extra part like a pop-up lens
at most manufacturers might try and make a new device thin and elegant so there's
a high demand for the premium feeling phones or they make minor tweaks such as
a screen that wraps slightly around the edge of the chassis and with all the
high-end processors and camera lenses inside modern phones it's very important
to make sure the phone is tough enough to protect the sensitive innards a goal
that's most easily achieved by simple designs instead of weak hinges and
physical buttons that could serve as ingress points for water and debris and
of course even the most innovative manufacturers copy each other in the
constant struggle to appear trendy and bleeding edge it's difficult for a
company to put on a new form factor that customers simply don't associate with
high-end basically if it doesn't really look like an iphone then
it's kind of this wacky other thing though of course someone has to be the
trendsetter so maybe one day instead of just settling for rectangular devices
we'll have a perfectly round phone that can double as a coaster big thanks to
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