Skip to Main Content

6 Phone Form Factors Apple's Samsung Win Could Reignite

Apple's court win against Samsung may lead the phone industry to rediscover sliders, swivels and even weirder designs.

August 28, 2012

Whatever you think of , it may have one salutary effect on the smartphone landscape—serving to finally liberate us from the tyranny of all of those repetitive slab-phones.

Apple's huge win on its design patents could scare manufacturers away from designing similar slabs. While the slab is the easiest way to create a phone with a big touchscreen, it's far from the only form factor phone makers have tried to achieve this end. For the three years before the iPhone came out, there was a huge amount of experimentation in phone design, a process that slowed down after the industry reached a consensus, post-iPhone, that most smartphones should be slabs.

Now before we get too far ahead of ourselves, this is far from the death of the slab phone. If you want to design a device that's slim and simple with a huge touchscreen, the slab is the obvious go-to form factor. Rather, we're likely to see more phones with slightly different overall shapes that find ways to avoid Apple's patents.

Let's look back at the past ten years' worth of smartphones and check out some of the form factors manufacturers could use which look nothing like an iPhone. Many are pretty recent, too. Click on any of the images to expand them.

The Slider
(pictured, left), a slider with two screens? Or the (pictured, right), which sticks a little display in between two halves of a split keyboard? The Echo failed, but not because of the form factor; it had performance and compatibility issues. I'd certainly like to see a manufacturer try a phone which turns into a "phablet" again.

The Swivel
(pictured above), the (pictured, left) or the original T-Mobile Sidekick. The Siemens SK65 was a really unusual swivel phone which opened up into a cross shape. It's a fun, kinetic way to play with your phone, and when I've had swivel phones in my hands, I haven't been able to resist swiveling them back and forth for fun. Swivel phones have the same advantages and disadvantages as sliders, but they have a younger feel to them.

The Flip
(pictured, left) is one of the few flip smartphones we've seen hit the U.S. market, with a screen on the top half of the flip and a keyboard on the bottom half.

(pictured, right). Or you could have a smartphone with a big screen on the outside of the flip, like the Samsung W899.

The Portrait QWERTY
Best-known as the "BlackBerry" form factor (pictured, left), the portrait QWERTY lets you quickly glance at information and type replies without having to swivel, slide, or fold anything. Let's be clear: a great physical keyboard absolutely spanks any touch keyboard when it comes to typing accuracy, and people still like to type. HTC execs have told me that only 15 percent of their customers want QWERTY any more, but that still represents millions of potential units sold. There has to be room for the portrait QWERTY in the world of cell phones.

The Weirdo
(pictured, left)? We called it the "lipstick phone," and it was more of a piece of jewelry than anything else. The was an unusual kind of a flip that winged open to have a split keyboard surround the main screen. The flipped backwards. Before you call these devices DOA disasters, remember that the 6820 was actually a best-seller among people who texted a lot.

The Enhanced Slab
Finally, there's what I call the "enhanced slab" —a slab-phone that wouldn't be mistaken for an Apple product at a hundred paces. Nokia's Lumia phones (pictured, right) are the best example of an innovative slab design, with their bold colors and rolled edges.

Speaking of colors, back in 2006 we had a rainbow of colors in the phone market and consumers said that color was one of their top reasons for choosing a device. I'd love to go back to having that diversity of options with form factors as well. I'd also argue (with no legal backing, alas) that new device sizes like fall squarely into the category of un-iPhone-like.

Are there any form factors you'd like to see supersede the slab? I'm curious to know.