Only so many ways to make a slab of glass with sensors and speakers on it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ad yet the Industry has been thriving and evolving from decades:
From Plastic phones and screens of feature phones and camera add-ons and lenses.
Many from Nokia pretty much created every conceivable (besides roll-able) phones anyone can make even today.
Now its metal/ceramic, or other recyclable material along with glass.
Nokia dawned upon us these form-factors:
Clamshell smartphones = Communicator/Communicator 9000/etc to E90
Taco phone = 3390(?)/NGage/NGageQD - in fact the very first phone designed specifically with calls, SMS and gaming.
Lipstick phone! Yeah they actually made one with jog-wheel navigation and it had a VGA camera lol. Definitely limited edition and not very useful.
Luxury phones = 8800/8890 etc THESE were the first luxury phones on the market anywhere! Using polished metal. Then created the Vertu brand - waaay too expensive for the global market at that time.
^ of these luxury phones, Vertu brand was ALSO the first to Co-Brand phones, another industry first:
Ferrari, McLaren ... selling to F1 team members to help market.
- furthermore the first phones to have premium leather on them as well.
Google AndroidOS partners in the first 3-4yrs have tried:
While simultaneously keeping Apple's iPhone hardware design language, kept trying to keep phone hardware language relevant at that time:
> Keyboards (aka BlackBerry killers/fighters): HTC, Motorola, Samsung, etc have kept trying to keep keyboards on their early AndroidOS phones to mimic their existing hardware or competition market.
> Single/multi-hinged smartphones - HTC, Motorola, and Nokia where BIG on doing this with Android / SymbianOS.
> Sliders for Gaming controls, Sony's XPeria line had a PSP like Android phone.
^ these btw all will kept the 'slab' design when not in-use or specific extended use design.
I'm not certain if this was due to Apple's patent for Multi-touch kept the competition out for just about 5yrs or exclusive hardware production of that technology or something else. Still it took ANY of Apple's competitors about 5yrs. You'll also recall Hon-Hai (aka Foxconn) was not making that many other phone assemblies to even 1/10th of the scale back in 2015 let alone today. Once contracts and facilities expanded and more workers arrived in cities from rural China to work therein, THEN that's when we've seen a HUGE influx of competition.
As manufacturing facilities completed being built, contracts for assemblies and sub-components exponentially increased, to the scale that nothing else in the world could be compared to. I'd say the human race is the closest, scaling from global population of 1.2billion in 1900 to just under or over 8 billion today (that's just over 100yrs!). Regarding manufacturing that's when we began to see not consolidation but a trade of powers in the smartphone global space. HTC was purchased by Google, BlackBerry, Motorola, and Nokia ALL stopped production, sold off their brands for cellphones/smartphones or licensed them off to new manufacturers and moved onto other business ventures. Ericsson, which make cellphones on their own originally (a way to market their cellular network gear), partnered with Sony for 10yrs and made some incredible magic which pushed the industry forward:
User expandable storage: Sony Duo, MicroDUo, etc. Sony already had already had expandable storage and used in their Sony Clie PalmOS PDA's. YES Motorola partnered with some company to make TransFlash - rebranded as MicroSD ... first used in Motorola's Java smartphones and their RAZR feature phones, but the industry push was SonyEricsson. Nokia followed with MMC which miserably failed; SD kicks it's arse.
> Music, Pictures, Files (end user documents or J2ME executable to run new software.
> Camera for phones - to the best of my knowledge and recorded Ericsson's T68m was the first phone to use a camera - by add-on attachment. Just at launch, the partnership began with Sony and thus the T68m was rebranded as SonyEricsson T68i.
> Bluetooth - Ericsson.
After the original demise of feature phones, and after the first 4yrs of smartphones, yes we've stuck mostly and predominantly on slab phones. Only the last 4 to maybe 5 generations from Samsung/Motorola have we gone to foldable form factor. There are a LOT more limitations currently with foldable phones to resolve first before that could potentially become the mainstream form-factor, yet I doubt it will. I see rollable phones coming close to 50% mainstream against the slab design form-factor before before we eventually get to AR + slab as the dominant use case : as it's more useful and compatible beyond just phones, but also our computer screens, interactive surfaces (walls, mirrors, tables etc).
So with that entire diatribe and essay above to give you scope over a 25yr span of phones across the globe, Is there only a limited ways to make slab phones? Rudimentary there is only 1 way, so yes. Does that mean all slab phones will look the same regardless of manufacturer, a resounding NO.
3D glass, hard or smooth edges, camfered edges, stepped edges, etc. smooth or hard gradual steps to accomodate camera bumps, back to no camera bumps. Why does periscope lenses technology need a such a large camera bump on several models/generations of phones from Huawei, Xiaomi, and Samsung yet barely even 3mm camera bump on the XPeria 1 III & IV from Sony such a VERY small manufacturer in terms of yields of products made?
Basically what I'm saying is there are so many ways to interpret a hardware design, implement it, and then the design of the surface that really helps sell it.
What most of us forget is these manufacturers are not just making phones as a 1 off, far too expensive to be profitable. Their making generations of phone models to keep users buying. At the end of the day its not just the hardware case/accessories/decals/branding - its the OS and features that USE the hardware that KEEPS users buying and sticking to the model or brand
