It’s no secret that foldable is the latest buzzword in the smartphone industry.
However, the fad might have dimmed the spotlight on the massive shift witnessed by mobile design trends in recent months.
Smartphones with displays that bend, aka “foldables”, have become all the rage in the mobile world.
While in its infancy as a smartphone design trend and fetching a high price tag thanks to the cost of materials, there is still time to tell if the design trend might catch on. This is also coupled with the uncertainty about whether consumers will find a need for the feature.
Despite being one of the most significant design trends in the past decade, foldable smartphones have stolen the show from the praise-worthy performance of mobile design evolution.
While users might have noticed the design trend, unbeknown to many is that specific new design cues have been adopted by various manufacturers resulting in an overall innovation to the mobile appearance.
To understand the significance behind this evolution, a brief history of mobile design may paint a clearer picture.
When cellphones made their way to the country in the 90s, they came in a range of unique shapes, styles and sizes – bricks, flip-ups, slide-ups and much more – for many years.
However, in the early 2010s, BlackBerry ushered in the smartphone era, with present-day technology showing how the BlackBerry wasn’t as smart a phone as it could be.
BlackBerry’s abolishment of the cost-effective BIS subscription resulted in an exodus and migration to Android and iOS devices.
While marking the end of the Canadian phone maker’s heyday – the shift away from BlackBerry nudged consumers to ditch physical buttons in a smartphone in favour of the slate-form design of the smartphone we know today.
In case you missed it, these three design cues are now commonplace in smartphone engineering and could be here to stay for a while:
Pinhole or a notch?
Thanks to manufacturers’ pursuit to offer users more display real estate, it isn’t easy to find a smartphone without a notch or pinhole in its screen, reserving space for the facing selfie camera and other functionality, like a proximity sensor.
Given that the content demands of users have increased over the years, with many consuming most of their entertainment from their smartphones, manufacturers will unlikely reduce display real estate any time soon.
However, the trend might only last for a while, as smartphone firms are working on embedding the camera under the display.
Bigger and better?
This might not be the most noticeable trend, but visiting any smartphone retailer or mobile network store clearly shows camera lenses have become noticeably larger. Smartphones launched in recent months are donning larger lenses – by more than one manufacturer.
After smartphones adopted double, triple and quad module lens set-ups for their main cameras, the size of megapixels behind them has increased exponentially over the years, from a few mere megapixels edging toward 100 megapixels.
Despite this, smartphone makers are looking to emphasise the advances in mobile photography with bigger lenses.
Colour-blinded
Remember when cellphones came in just black, silver or white, with very little variation in colour?
Well, most developers have heeded calls for more flamboyantly coloured and shimmering smartphones, leaving most users unable to describe the colour of some of today’s premium devices.
Back in the day (the BlackBerry era), most devices were made using plastic-based materials. At the same time, the majority of displays featured Gorilla Glass to prevent scratches on just the front.
The beautification of the cellphone brought along today’s glass-backed casing, protected by Gorilla Glass too, in some of the most indescribable colours, tones and hollow graphics.
Most of the design trends have been witnessed across a range of smartphones; iPhones, of course, feature large camera lenses and are also responsible for introducing the notch in design.
However, new smartphones from Huawei, Oppo and Vivo epitomise these latest trends and could be a telltale sign of more widely adopted design trends than foldables.
IOL Tech