Spain – It’s no longer hip to be square. At least not when it comes to the shape of your gadgets. That’s one of the major design cues to emerge over the past week from the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona.
There were curves aplenty on display at this, the world’s premier portable tech trade show, from the subtly curved edges on smartphone screens to completely round gizmos, some of them downright wacky.
While many won’t make it into the mainstream, MWC is generally a pretty reliable pointer to the shape of devices you can expect to see in local stores over the coming weeks and months.
And one you will definitely be seeing soon is Samsung’s Galaxy S6 smartphone. While the South Korean tech giant hedged its bets by also unveiling a traditionally flat-screen version of its new flagship device, the one that drew the most attention was the “Edge” variant with its gorgeously curved screen.
I won’t say too much about this device here as it has deservedly hogged plenty of print and digital space over the past week and I’ll be getting a closer look at its local launch in a few weeks time.
But I will predict that the S6 Edge will be the smartphone to beat in 2015.
One company that has been at the leading edge of the curve trend is LG. Also hailing from South Korea, it may even have helped start the whole curve craze with the release in late 2013 of its Flex phone. It showed off its new bendy baby, the LG Flex 2 at MWC to general acclaim.
Unlike the S6 Edge, which remains essentially a rectangle with curved edges, the entire body and screen of the Flex is bent into the shape of a banana – albeit an elegant glass and plastic one.
By all accounts a marked improvement on its ground-breaking but flawed predecessor, the Flex 2 features a much improved 5.5 inch, 1 080p full HD screen, 13-megapixel camera with optical image stabilisation and a huge 3 000mAh battery, all powered by Qualcomm’s new 64-bit Snapdragon 810 processor.
Not to be outdone, BlackBerry plans to cash in on two trends – curved and retro – with the release later this year of a curved screen smartphone with a slide-out physical keyboard. No details of the device were announced and it was shown only in the briefest blink-and-you’ll-miss-it fashion. But the once-struggling Canadian phone-maker has come up with some great devices recently. I’d love to see its slider start a revival of the 1990s trend epitomised by the Nokia 8110 – it’s the one used by Neo in The Matrix for those of you too young to remember it.
On the subject of retro, they don’t come more old school than round, analogue faced watches and several were on show at MWC – or at least their 2015 equivalents were, in the form of smartwatches.
The two that caught my eye were the LG Watch Urbane and the Huawei Watch.
In both cases, the analogue face is an illusion, a digital simulation on a miniature touchscreen. Maybe it’s because I’m an old fart, but I find the effect pretty appealing.
The Urbane comes in two variants – a basic version powered by Google’s Android Wear operating system for wearable devices, and a high-end one with a 4G chip and a bespoke operating system that can make and answer calls and send texts without needing to be linked to a phone.
The Huawei Watch uses Android Wear, and has a bigger, sapphire crystal screen.
If a round, analogue faces wristwatch isn’t retro enough for you, how about a round, analogue faced, wood-backed, fob watch phone? That pretty much describes the Runcible, the oddball hit of MWC.
The saucer shaped prototype on show sported a maple wood back cover, but the manufacturer, Monohm, says production models will offer clip-on backs made of tin, copper, brass, and various woods.
Apart from making phone calls, the Runcible, which runs on Firefox OS, takes circular photos and videos – you rotate the device to focus and zoom.
Watch chains and leather cases are also in the works as if the Runcible hadn’t strayed far enough already into Alice in Wonderland territory.
I’ll take two, thanks.
For more details, pictures and links to fuller reviews of the devices mentioned, visit www.alanqcooper.tumblr.com.
Got any questions or comments? E-mail me at alanqcooper@gmail.com or tweet @alanqcooper on Twitter.
The Sunday Tribune
