Samsung have recently responded to Apple’s relentless legal hounding with a big, exasperated shrug – what do you want from us? At the core of Apple’s beef with Samsung (and for that matter, everyone else) is the question of design. Apple claims that they invented modern cellphone design in a way that works, and everyone else just copied it. And what can the various defendants say? Apple’s right. But what’s a touchscreen cellphone supposed to look like, if not a shiny black rectangle?
Behold, it runs on 3G!
Click here for the best iPhone plans
Click here for Samsung phones
Click here for Nokia phones
Phone design is a curious thing. The device itself is both utilitarian and intimate. Think about its function – it acts as our proxy mouthpiece for people far away. That’s it. It’s a courier. And yet, it sits in our pocket and at our bedside table, making it as valuable as our wallets and keys, those objects that guarantee us safe passage through a dangerous world. Even landlines were significant enough to become as basic a service as plumbing and electricity.
Our phones, now stacked with pictures, contacts, appointments and other extensions of our personalities, are as essential a tool as a hand-axe was to Homo Habilis. Actually, that’s something I’d like added to the iPhone 12 – a sharpened carbon fibre edge, allowing me to crack nuts and flay the skin from mutant squirrels I’ve captured while foraging for food in Space Melbourne (I’m not a scientist).
Once you get past the ‘simple’ mechanics of hooking up a microphone to a switch, and transmitting the sound of your voice to a network, there’s not a heap of things you can do to play around with the overall look and feel of a phone. For decades, the phone was a fixed-line device, as immovable as a kitchen sink. As such, early designs were made from bakelite, ebony, wood, brass…heavy stuff. They also had onions tied around their bells, which was the style at the time.
All I can see is a face going "OHHH". Photo courtesy museumphones.com
Plenty of tiny innovations were made thereafter – moving from rotary dialing to push button, the use of plastics to make phones cheaper, lighter and more ubiquitous – but really, what can you do in terms of paradigm shifting design? I mean, apart from making a phone in the shape of a hamburger.
The leap into cellphones opened up the floodgates of innovation for a while. The first cellphones were ungainly bricks, partly by necessity – the internals hadn’t been micro-sized yet, and certain materials had to be used to avoid blocking radio signal. But all of this plastic encumbrance did help in that the push-button keypads had to be unobtrusive by comparison – which set the stage for the simple grid pattern that was the norm thereafter – to the degree that portable landline phones rushed to look like mobiles. It was a case of “what else is it supposed to look like?”
When Motorola introduce the StarTAC in 1996, minds were blown. This $2000+ space age wundergadget was mind blowingly stark and simple. Small. Compact. AND IT FLIPPED. Flips are just awful for phones – they reduce space a smidge, while increasing the risk of snapping in half to a statistical certainty. But the addition of the flip – the aesthetic addition of something that could allow a businessman to TRANSFORM from one conversation to another, was one of those Mad Men-esque moments of illumination that completely resets perceptions.
Post-adventure Marty McFly would have had one of these, charged up and ready to go for his trip to the lake with Jennifer. Photo courtesy mobilephone-spares.com
Meanwhile, the Europeans (well, the Finns) started popularizing the candy-bar phone during the same period. The candy bar phone offered the same portability with far more sturdiness, and after a frenetic period of competition, the public more or less settled on the candy-bar, or even the slide-out design. Then Motorola came back and reinvented the flip phone with their RAZR model, which again got the ball rolling.
This frantic period saw plenty of new designs, most of them with a fun, desperate sweatiness to them – the Nokia 3650 aimed to bring back the swinging 20’s by including a faux-rotary dial number pad. It was codenamed the ‘Cameron’, no doubt to recall Ferris Bueller’s sad sack best friend and his hopeless attempt to please his father. Presumably, this phone had its genesis in a particularly panicked marketing meeting.
Hahaha...wut?
The iPhone wasn’t exactly the first black rectangle – the LG Prada beat it by a few months – but it was certainly the massive leap into the current era. It wasn’t really an evolution of the phone – it was an evolution of the computer, with the phone as sideshow. But it tapped into the important elements of a telephone- it’s an intimate communicator, a proxy for our self image. It certainly managed to capture that. The App Store, the real killer app of the smartphone era, was an extension of that – and the popularity of social apps like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram further drive the point home.
But moving past the application side of the mobile – what can be done to improve on the current design? Everyone has migrated to the black rectangle, because hey, “what else is a smartphone supposed to look like?”
Adding QWERTY keyboards, whether they slide in or not as BlackBerry is fond of doing, is a step backward. Sure, RIM (the makers of the BlackBerry) might be keen to step back into a past where they were the envy of the tech world, and not the corporate equivalent of…you know what, I can’t think of a metaphor to match the scale of RIM’s real-time death spiral. They’re the equivalent of only themselves.
In fact, adding any sort of moving part would be a step backward. Most tech is moving towards solid state, as Moore’s law dictates the ever shrinking space into which we cram more and more function. This means no whirring hard drives, and certainly no hinges. This is truer in the mobile space than in computers, but the rise of tablets is a clue that this is where most consumer technology is headed.
Materials would be a subtle, but ground breaking change. The world may not be ready for a bamboo phone (a few excellent attempts have been made, but haven’t yet reached any sort of critical mass, sales-wise) but something needs to be done about the proliferation of e-waste. Many components of cell phones can’t be recycled, and can be toxic when leaked into groundwater through landfills. That needs to change.
Still on materials, much could be done to increase durability. We’ve actually gone backwards on that. Flip phones and slide phones may be easy to break, but they don’t shatter. Gorilla Glass, the Corning product that makes up the touch panels of most phones and tablets, is terribly strong, but not strong enough. Morotola is experimenting with a Kevlar chassis, but mostly as a forward-thinking gimmick. BlackBerry still uses rubber and leather to cushion impacts, but so what? You still throw it away after two years.
With so much attention shifting to the mutable world of plug-and-play software, maybe the answer lies in that. The competition is very hot, meaning lots of turnover as everyone wants to get on the next big thing. What about a super durable shell that lasts 10 years, but new chips and batteries can be swapped in and out? There has to be a better way to update a phone's capabilities than having to throw the whole damn thing away.
Aside from that, there’s the question of form factor. Nokia and Motorola have added exciting “edges” to their latest Lumia and RAZR handsets, which reeks of desperation. They add nothing. Apple’s design changes have made sense- a black rectangle of glass is necessary for the launch-pad paradigm of apps. Making it pretty is the next step, and everyone’s got that. The next change has to be fundamental.
Headsets with floating displays? Gimme a break. We’re tool users. That hand-axe I mentioned in the first part of this article is a clue to just how inate a hand-held device is to humans as a species. We need a hand axe. Or a knife. Or a credit card. We still need that gulf of separation from ourselves and our tools.
Really, the phone may not evolve. The computer will, until computers are phones. Micro projectors and wireless keyboards – stuff like this will allow us to use the phone as our computers.
Writer's impression of the future of computers/mobiles. Note we say writer's, not artist's.
The simple act of communication will continue to merge into the act of producing content, until we all have a credit card in our pocket that acts as phone, computer, wallet and keys (this will also drive the evolution of ever-skinner jeans, until sub-dermal denim is the norm). But it’ll still be a rectangle. And probably black. And maybe shiny.