Over at Mobitopia, Russell Beattie looks at Nokia’s new cellphones, and wonders, has their phone design stalled?
[I]t seems to me much of Nokia’s new designs have been simply a combination of wacky keypad layouts and ever-so-slightly differently shaped bodies. The DIY covers on the 3200 helped jazz this sort of thing up a bit (because it is a neat idea) but from a basic industrial design point of view, the phone itself isn’t very much different than all the *rest* of the multimedia phones that Nokia offers.
And he has a point. Even when Nokia does take some risks, like with the 6800 or the N-Gage, they still look pretty much like the same boring Nokia phones we’ve all seen before, just slightly different in some way. It gives you the sense that they may have just run out fresh ideas for how a phone could look. Samsung, Siemens, and Sony Ericsson, on the other hand, realize that cellphones aren’t just tools for making calls, they’re fashion accessories that people carry around with them, and so have been taking more risks with their designs. They might not always be successful, but by and large we’ve seen lots more sleek, well-designed phones from those companies lately than we’ve seen from Nokia.
