Xiaomi Mi 4 vs Apple iPhone 6 (image: Ewan Spence)

Why is nobody taking a risk in smartphone design?

With the launch of the Galaxy S6, Samsung made the decision to remove some of the key hardware elements that had differentiated its handsets from the competition. Previous Galaxy handsets had been noted for their user-replaceable batteries and support for expandable storage. With the S6, Samsung has exorcised these elements, reducing consumer choice and creating ever more sterile smartphone designs.

Samsung is not alone in treading this path. From some of the wild designs at the dawn of the smartphone age, manufacturers have been slowly evolving into a similar size and style of physical design. The corner shapes are slightly different, the materials might change, but in terms of design, everyone knows what to expect from a smartphone – a flat design, a large touchscreen, minimal buttons, with everything locked away in a unibody shell.

Why is this the case? I think it comes down to three major factors – consumer expectations, reducing cost, and reducing risk.

Handspring’s Treo 270, left, and Nokia’s 9290 (AP Photo/Suzanne Plunkett)

The first is meeting customer expectations. A smartphone is a major purchase for almost every consumer as it will be their personal device for at least two years of a contract, if not longer. While there are some brave buyers out there who would be willing to experiment with new ideas (such as Amazon’s Kindle Phone), the majority will err on the side of caution.

Manufacturers are aware that very few customers will take risks. With prices on smartphones being driven ever lower, the lower margins on the successful handsets have resulted in less available headroom to experiment with new designs and form factors in the way that companies such as Nokia or Siemens did in the first few years of the 21st century.

It’s also about reducing cost. A removable battery implies working on a removable back cover, hooks and fixtures for the cover, hooks and fixtures to hold the battery in place, robust electrical connectors between the battery and the circuit board, and the extra plastic to insulate the battery when it is not in the smartphone. That all adds cost. Micro SD cards require gaps in the casing and circuit board connections so these are on the way out, much like separate charging jacks and data connectors have been replaced by a single USB socket.

That means a lower bill of materials and a positive effect on the margins offered by the simplified design. While the geekerati might complain about the missing elements, the marketing teams will talk about ease of use and it appears that the general public will accept this reduction in capability.

I also wonder if there is a sense of collective industrial immunity at play? If a smartphone design team comes up with a radical design and it fails to sell, then the blame game is going to find it easy to fall on them. If the design is similar to everything else on the market, then a few glances towards the marketing team, the software implementation team, or other internal teams, could be enough to keep someone in a job.

Sabine Wulff of Siemens presents the new SX 1 at CeBIT 2003. (AP Photo/Fabian Bimmer)

I miss the early days of the smartphone, when out-there designs could be placed alongside clamshell handsets, the delights of Nokia’s Communicator series, Palm’s early attempts to get on board the mobile revolution with the Palm 7, the focus of fashion over function in the RAZR, and more outlandish designs.

Those times are long gone. The industry has settled on the portrait/slab touchscreen as ‘the’ format of a smartphone. Barring some exceptions from niche manufacturers – notably BlackBerry not giving up on the physical keyboard, Yota working a second screen on the back of a handset, or Google’s Project Ara (which is still based around the slab touchscreen format) - I don’t think we’re going to see anything radical in the design of smartphones over the next year or two. Manufacturers will deliver the same shape, with the same features, with slightly bigger numbers on the specifications sheet, to an audience looking to pay less than the last handset but only if ‘it works’.

With Apple dominating the high-priced high-margin space, everyone else is left to sell handsets with lower retail prices and handset margins. There simply isn’t the economic room to radically innovate outside of the envelope the smartphone world has iterated itself into.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2015/03/19/smartphone-design-failure/