For cellphones, square is the new black.
This season, big handset makers including Nokia, Microsoft and Motorola are betting you’ll want to flaunt cute, palm-shaped devices that look more like compact powder cases than brick-shaped mini-tablets.
Motorola is likely to introduce a new phone next month called Flipout that will have a 2.8-inch display, a 3.1-megapixel camera and a twist-out keyboard. We haven’t tested it yet, but on looks alone, it’s fabulous, darling.
Motorola’s square-shaped phone follows the release of Microsoft’s fresh-looking Kin One earlier this month. The Kin One has a 2.6-inch display, a slide-out keyboard, and looks like a rounded square when closed. In September, Nokia introduced the Twist on Verizon, a squarish phone with a 2.5-inch display. Even LG has a square-shaped phone called the Lotus, which has been available on Sprint for more than a year, and though it’s not exactly been a big seller, its looks are hot, hot, hot.
“The small square design is very pocketable and feels particularly right for the younger audience and especially for women,” says Paul Bradley, executive creative director of Frog Design, a San Francisco-based innovation and design company. “It’s small, thin and you can just throw it into your pocket.”
Not surprisingly, ads and promotional spots for Microsoft’s Kin One phone are filled with teens and young people texting and uploading photos to Facebook.
Square-shaped phones also offer a way to stand out from the clutter of smartphones in the market and attract younger consumers who are looking for a splash of individuality.
“Industrial designers are looking at the square shape as the next opportunity in the handset marketplace,” says Bradley.”Unlike the candy bar design that has become synonymous with Apple’s iPhone, the square shape still doesn’t evoke the image of any one iconic device and it doesn’t feel like it’s imitating Apple.”
Smartphones are one of the fastest-growing devices in the consumer electronics business. Nearly 55 million smartphones were shipped in the first quarter of 2010, up nearly 56 percent from the same quarter a year ago, according to a recent IDC report. Attracting consumer attention in this market, though, has become a major challenge for mobile phone makers.
Motorola Flipout
Most smartphones today have at least a 3.5-inch touchscreen display, camera, video-recording capability, Wi-Fi connectivity, quick access to social networking apps and easy ways to share photos and videos. So what’s a phone got to do to stand out?
Exploring new designs may be the answer, says Max Burton, also an executive creative director at Frog Design.
The rectangular shape of the cellphone stems from the phone’s history, he says. The earliest cellphones naturally fell into a rectangular shape because of the way the display, keypad, microphone, antenna and speaker had to be positioned.
“The first handheld phones were rectangular-shaped and that made sense,” says Burton. “But now as the components and circuitry have gotten more sophisticated, the need for the traditional form has all but disappeared.”
There are trade-offs. A smaller form factor leaves much less room for the screen, and the new square phones have screens that are at least an inch smaller in diagonal dimensions than their rectangular cousins. Forget about a wide, cinematic screen aspect: Any movies you watch on these things will basically be animated postage stamps. Keyboards are small, too, and are usually hidden underneath the screen in a slide-out bottom shell.
But square phones offer the perception of being more fun and flirty, which could make up for some of the shortcomings, say Bradley and Burton.
“It’s all about communication,” says Bradley. “The candy bar form factor supports web browsing very well but once that is not your primary goal then its time to look at other shapes.”
Younger users who are also more likely to give square phones a chance, say the duo. “The youth market is not caught up in history,” says Bradley. “They will adapt to new forms quickly.”
Top Photo: Keith Axline/Wired.com
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