Here we are talking about the 12 Brutal Smartphone Fails starting badly but ending terribly. Let’s do this.
1. Escobar Fold 2
- If you haven’t already heard about it, the Escobar company made a small phone and some claims were made that Apple was ripping people off the Samsung about to be finished and the Escobar was the solution.
- As things turned out the company bask a Samsung phone, put an Escobar sticker over it, and sent it to only two reviewers.
- 12 Brutal Smartphone Fails (1/10)
2. Meizu Zero
- This phone was being marketed as the world’s first hauless (holeless) smartphone. So, no USB-C port, no buttons, no speakers, and no headphone jack.
- As a concept, we can see the appeal, you get a completely seamless phone and because the buttons are all virtual, you can use it in any orientation. But, for the starter, I think portless is way better than holeless design, which isn’t technically true. The phone di still have microphones on it.
- But, this wasn’t the issue. Think about when you go and buy a small phone. You’ve probably got a list of priorities in your head. You want to have a great camera for photos, a great display for watching videos, and also a great battery that will last you through the day.
- But we never thought like, “ you know what I hate, ‘Buttons’!”
- While the holeless is the direction phones will start heading in, being holeless in itself is not a selling point.
- As a result, the phone didn’t hit its crowdfunding goal and it just disappeared from the market.
- 12 Brutal Smartphone Fails (2/10)
3. PhoneBlocks
- The name of PhoneBlocks might not ring a bell but, the image of it probably will.
- There’s a guy called David Hawkins, who made a youtube video while back talking about the smartphones are not built to last, but also, he came up with a solution.
- A modular phone, where could customize your phone with the features that matter to you, and be replaced with individual parts if they break, instead of replacing the whole phone, and when you want to upgrade, you can just upgrade the bits you want to upgrade not the whole thing.
- This sounds like a dream and people thought it because the video is on like 20M views now.
- The major issue was that the concept makes some sense from a sustainability angle. You could massively reduce the amount of waste instead of dumping your phone when you are done with it, you could just replace one part.
- But it doesn’t make sense from a profit perspective. If you think about the companies like Samsung and Huawei, they’re not going to be within a mile radius of the ideas because it would wipe out their entire existing business model.
- I think modular phones are coolly riddled with some quite fundamental problems, like letting the Company decide what prior for the user and making a pre-built phone instead of sitting and trying to pick the parts that you want to assemble.
- Every single component of this phone has to be manufactured and put into its casing separately so that people can chop and change them. But, this makes everything thicker and a hell of a lot more expensive.
- 12 Brutal Smartphone Fails (2/10)
4. iPhone 5C
- This phone was terrible value in comparison but for the starters, you only save $100 and for that, you got given a plastic build, you got a year-old chipset, a much worse camera system, and no touch ID.
- Still, people bought it, obviously, it’s an iPhone. But, I don’t think it did anything good to the Apple brand image. If they pulled a move like that in today’s smartphone market, it got slaughtered. 3/10
- The phone still sold well, but it was a sting to Apple’s brand reputation and that is almost everything to them.
- 12 Brutal Smartphone Fails (3/10)
5. Sony Xperia Play
- It came into Android’s infancy and it was PlayStation-certified. They had a proper controller built inside of them. It was the first true gaming smartphone. But, there’s a cost to being first and in this case, it was the fact that Android as an operating system was not just ready for a gaming firm.
- Because there was nothing like this Xperia Play out there, almost nobody has made any games that could even use the phone’s physical controls.
- So, you’d be dropping $600 on this phone which has all sorts of compromises, like its ludicrous thickness.
- The only benefit to you is you could play a couple of emulators, a couple of cheaply made android games, and some PlayStation 1 classics that Sony had ported over, but it’s not great.
- 12 Brutal Smartphone Fails (4/10)
6. Lenovo Z5
- Lenovo was about to launch its next-generation Z5 smartphone. So I’m guessing internally, they were sort of thinking about how we re-engage people with our brand and they came up with was make load of teasers that are just ridiculous to try and get people talking about them.
- They started teasing 45 days of battery life and 4 Terabytes of storage. People were losing their minds and because of this wasn’t the product we got in the final.
- Being something completely different that didn’t come out till 5 months later. But, what about the 4TB storage? It turns out that was just a hard drive they were released alongside the Z5 and 45 days of battery life was for a Watch X.
- It lost a lot of respect in the tech community.
- 12 Brutal Smartphone Fails (4/10)
7. NextBit Robin
- A company with a kind of mobile tech specialty announced a revolutionary cloud-based smartphone called the NextBit Robin, that’s pretty hype-worthy especially when promising practically unlimited storage.
- This phone had 32GB of internal storage which was fairly normal at the time but the twist as your space starts to run out, your stuff will be automatically backed up to the 100 GB of the cloud storage got with the phone.
- The main concern with a small company tying big things like this is usually that the execution sucks, but it didn’t.
- For example, your photos would be backed up to the cloud in their full original quality but, your phone will also keep a lower-quality version locally. So, it wouldn’t feel like you’ve lost files.
- But the one weird thing is that the phone will send your apps to the cloud and what that meant was that they become grayed-out icons that could only be used once you would reinstall them.
- 12 Brutal Smartphone Fails (5/10)
8. Microsoft Kin Smartphones
- Its 2010 Apple iPhone have just flattened the likes of Nokia and Blackberry but now, it was Microsoft’s turn to fight and their answer to this was the Kin smartphones which they describe as a revolution
- .The phones came presented in a capsule. The slogan was these changes things and all the adverts said it could help you connect with people better than the iPhone ever cooked.
- What makes this one pretty funny is that these phones were discontinued within 6 weeks of being announced. Even the worst smartphones last for a year but this one made it in just 6 weeks (42 days).
- We can summarise it in 6 words: No apps are priced like an iPhone.
- 12 Brutal Smartphone Fails (6/10)
9. Samsung Exynos Varient
- Samsung makes two versions of most of their flagship phones, and the Exynos version for the last few years has lagged behind the Snapdragon version.
- Exynos is 20% worse both in the battery as well as performance departments.
So now, Samsung has two options, either step up their game massively with the next - Exynos or they scrap the Exynos version entirely. Because if they got wrong again, people are ready and waiting to just rip them apart for it.
- 12 Brutal Smartphone Fails (6/10)
10. Microsoft Windows Phones
- Kin wasn’t their biggest failure. Microsoft announced their Windows phones operating system was officially dead. But Windows phones died a long time before that.
- When it came out Windows phones were so promising, with radically different aesthetics to anything out there at the time. It was a faster and lighter feeling than a lot of the bloated Android phones we were getting.
- Not to mention the Windows brand carries enormous power when it comes to the operating system. This genuinely could be the third competitor in the Android Vs iOS battle.
- There was an app problem. Windows phones had a woeful selection of apps to choose from.
- There’s also a fact that Microsoft was late, they arrived at the time when Apple built of really strong reputation just offering the best smartphone experience and Google was offering very good smartphone experiences but with loads of choices. You could get an Android phone with a big screen and so on.
- But Windows phones don’t bring anything equivalent to these phones. Otherwise, you are just left with a bunch of niche pioneers who are willing to take a risk on something new.
- There’s no way that they can just drop a new operating system and expect to beat OS.
- 12 Brutal Smartphone Fails (7/10)
11. Nokia’s Disappearance
- In 2007, if someone has a phone, a 50% chance was a Nokia phone. How do they go from that to a dead smartphone company?
- it is unfortunately simple. In the old days, when phones could be anything, some of them could flip and some of them could slide. People used to pick their phones purely based on their hardware.
- In this area Nokia was outstanding. Their phones were affordable, they were customizable and they had the kind of durability that people still talk about 20 years later.
- What Nokia missed was that the second iPhone was announced in 2007, and the battle shifted from being about hardware to being about software.
- Nokia kept releasing their trusty old phones for a few years and their market share just evaporated.
- 12 Brutal Smartphone Fails (7/10)
12. Sony Smartphones
- Sony now sells 1/10th of the phones they did in 2014. While technically less of a failure than Nokia, the decisions that Sony has made are far more confusing. it’s like the poor decisions steeped on top of really stand bad ideas.
- For the starters, the naming systems. The way Sony names its smartphones is borderline criminal. The flagship phone’s name went from Xperia X10 to Xperia S to Xperia T to Xperia Z. It felt like they picked some random letters from the alphabet
- Then it got much worse from Z1, Z2, Z3, Z3+, and Z5 and ended with XZ. With the gap, they took they launched a new phone with nomenclature al back to Xperia 1.
- Part of the reason that Sony phones just fell into relevance is that they found something that worked in the Xperia Z.
- Up to 2017, Sony phones were looking completely outdated as they didn’t have any innovation in the design department.
- These phones had good camera hardware, but they did not take good photos and videos. Sony is one of the few smartphone makers that also make cinema quality cameras and that being Sony builds the camera sensors inside almost every phone, it’s laughable.
- 12 Brutal Smartphone Fails (9/10)
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