Lecture 10 : The shape of smartphones

Discussing the evolution of shape of smartphones. Why did they change their shape ?

This picture may be considered off topic or too caricatural, but I believe it displays perfectly the evolutions the smartphone’s (and cellphone’s) shape has faced throughout the years.

The first phone of its kind was a big technological leap, so its design was not truly its best asset. Of course it did fit the shape of the hand but it looked so bulky and hard to maneuver. That’s I belive for the first 15 years, smathpone manufacturers have put a lot of effort in miniaturization, trying to build the smallest and most covenient device. What mattered was portability above all else. That’s why at the time we had companies claiming they had built either the smallest or the lightest device ever. The screen was just to display the actions you could achieve with your keyboard and nothing truly urged a bigger screen.

But then, the capacitative touch screen arrived and with it, the keyboard slowly faded away. But with all this space freed the screens got bigger. So we had larger and larger smartphones to actually benefit from having a screen. And from that moment on, I believe the shape of smartphones has only evolved towards aestethics at least for now. We are getting thinner smartphones, with borderless screens but that does not truly impact performances that much.

The smartphone is today less used as a phone than it was originally intended to.

What is the next step in this transformation ?

If you thought I was skeptcial about the evolution concerning the shape of smartphones, I’m not entirely actually. I believe there is a lot of cool stuff coming we now have folding phones, wrap around displays and stuff but even if they are still getting worked, I don’t believe them to be the future of smartphones.

I do believe however that the next revolutionnary shape will be completely different to what we’ve been used to for the last decade. A smartphone nowadays is sometimes even more powerful than a laptop but you cannot truly and fully use all that horsepower. It’s like using a sports car, it looks cool but you cannot use it at its fullest. I believe that smartphone will be foldable, rollable, and shapeable as much as we want in the future so much so that we would use it any ways we want. You could swith between smartphone mode, tablet mode and laptop mode to get the fullest out of your device.