Didn't get my first cell phone until I was about 19 but didn't get passionately into phones checking on PhoneScoop news daily until the cameraphone era.. 2004. Back then, I was very much obsessed with DESIGN. Motorola V600 was the first mobile to give me gadget lust and wet my pants based on its appearance.
Bought it for $400+ in May 28, 2004. I remember the date for most my previous phones since I use the receive date as my passcode. My third new phone in four months. Wasn't all hyped up to be. Didn't have video recorder like my Sanyo SCP-5500. Scratched itself just by opening the lid. Faulty engineering by Moto.
Six months later, the Motorola RAZR V3 comes out much thinner and is basically the same phone as the V600. Takes the world by storm in 2005-2006. So what was my biggest mistake? Wanted thinness and got a black V3. Wasted my two year update in Feb 2006 for practically the same phone as my V600.
I should have got a smartphone by then but most of them were UGLY before the original iPhone and I wanted a cool-looking phone. A short-sighted decision by me since Motorola would also release a V3i, same looking device, but can sync to iTunes. Or I should have got a Sony Ericsson W810 instead with 2MP auto-focus and an mp3 player that my crappy black RAZR V3 wasn't!
Before the iPhone 4s was released, not everyone believed Apple would call it 4s and have a similar design to the 4. You can go back and search threads in mid-2011 with people speculating it would have a different design and be called iPhone 5. Wrong! That's 16 months of waiting (June 2010-Oct 2011) and all we got was the same looking iPhone.
The greatest phones to me aren't the prettiest ones but have a unique forté. Nokia N91 for audiophiles. Sony Ericsson K800/790 which had a camera lens hump but blew my mind when I saw one in my art history class because it had Xenon flash which was rarely found later unless you bought a Nokia N82, N8, and SE Satio. HTC HD2 which can boot multiple OSes.
If you are a fan of the Samsung Galaxy S7 edge, don't expect drastic changes for the S8 edge. It will practically look the same just like the S6 edge/edge+ were. Sony and HTC which are known to be great in design haven't changed it much either. The only company that seems to take chances for better or for worse is LG. Since the Optimus G, each successor looks different. They also have the V-series.
Moral of the story - Forget about pitching a tent in your pants over a new design. It is all about the features you want for the long run. Companies release the same looking devices over and over. Apple has been guilty of this since 2009 with the 3Gs or their iPods, iPads, and MacBooks with incremental design changes. Now they are set to use a similar iPhone design thrice as seen this year with the SE and 7.
By the time the RAZR2 in 2007 arrived, most consumers moved onto smartphones...
^ RAZ2 V8 Luxury Edition. No thanks, David Beckham. Battery last 3 hours. Fingerprint magnet. It might seem gaudy to some, but I would love to see more black and gold schemes. White and gold is more for females.
^ Now that's a design that left an impression on me back in MWC 2008. The first Xperia smartphone but was manufactured by HTC.
Too bad the X1 in black was known to scrape off. It had near Retina Dislplay (312ppi) but who would use it now with "3.2 TFT and Windows Mobile? Those promo shots also makes it look better than in real life. You can see Aly Michalka use the X1 in Sony's Easy A (2010).
^ Nokia N9 cyan in 2011. Then Nokia would continue to rehash that same design for their Lumias.
