A New Era in Mobile Phone Design
The foldable smartphone is going to be accessible as following the maturity of the foldable display technology. 中文版文章
One of my sketches shows the horizontal “sandglass” shape mobile phone design evolution, from 1G to future 5G:
1G: only basic voice service (1G network is analog-based protocols). The mobile phone was huge and not easy to carry.
2G: voice communication, sending a text message, part of web browsing (2G network is the first digital standard). The portable communication was the most significant advantage for users, and it started to develop from bar type to clamshell, flip, and slider form factor.
3G: base on the 2G feature, it adds the multimedia message, mobile internet functions, and mobile social network was getting popular with users, and it evolved QWERTY phone and PDA for mobile business purposes.
The 2G to 3G feature phone era evolved a lot of mobile phone form factors due to display was small, and the Navi-keys and numeric keypad design are the key elements of its face design.
iPhone, with its iOS, was a revolutionary product to use capacity touch display technology to pioneered the phablet design. Then Google Android system with large Android smartphones started to occupy the mass-market smartphones. The phablet (phone + tablet) era has begun, but phone factors design diversity became narrower and limited almost only leave as a bar-type.
4G: high-speed mobile internet, high-speed transmission, 4G development & implementation from 2011 to 2020 for almost ten years. The mobile phone display was evolved more significantly and more prominent by user needs with multimedia streaming services getting popular.
The bar-type phablet phone display proportion was influenced by the user’s hand size and cinema technology to develop from 4:3 to 16:9 to 18:9 to 21:9….and with more types of display: Notch, Dotch, and full-view. But the shape of phablet phones is limited as a rectangular bar shape and becomes a limitation of portable phone shape homogenization. It looks like the bottleneck of the sandglass from the overview of mobile phone design evolution.
AMOLED (Active-matrix organic light-emitting diode) is a unique display technology due to it’s flexible and bendable. By using AMOLED technology, the display of phablet can design as edge display, waterfall display, four sides curved display, bend-around display…..many fantastic form factors are appearing in the market due to display technology is developing.
5G: now, in 2020, while 5G is coming as an infrastructure of data transmission, the active screen ratio per unit area is becoming practical and essential for users, and the maturity of foldable AMOLED display technology is getting critical to break the limitation of mobile phone shape homogenization.
Nowadays, following a mainstream mobile design is not that difficult to use mature technologies and manufacture infrastructure base on the foundation of the 1st tier brands have built-up. But if you want to make it with your own character, the mobile phone is tough to design due to every mobile phone has its face.
A visionary mobile phone product team should have evaluated every possibility of the curved display technology, and make a plan to invest it and develop design following the maturity of the foldable display technology. In the coming future, there will be more diverse form factors that will appear to open the new era of the smartphone market and change the daily user scenarios.
