Unlike with past other Samsung Galaxy flagship launches, the Korean electronics giant took a different approach with the Samsung Galaxy S3 and created a very ‘zen like’ environment for the official launch of the device. Everywhere we would see their slogan, ‘designed for humans’ and a very surreal/relaxing overtone to the show.
Simplicity is key: Samsung Galaxy S3 and Motorola DROID RAZR HD
While many criticize the Samsung Galaxy S3 pebble design for being lackluster and the S-features as gimmicky, Samsung has stuck by its guns and continued to push how important simplicity is compared to just powerful hardware. This thinking isn’t of course new and we have seen it with the iPhone which puts hardware second to creating a simple and intuitive product that ‘just works’.
Now Motorola maybe following suit as can be seen with their recent RAZR designs. The Motorola DROID RAZR first came to the market as being the thinnest smartphone on the world. Nothing flashy or gimmicky, just a thin smartphone with solid hardware and its own iconic design which shared traits from the original RAZR. The RAZR MAXX followed suit with a larger battery and eliminated one of the biggest complaints with Android aside from fragmentation, we are talking about battery life. As simple as adding a bigger battery may sound, this was enough for the RAZR MAXX to beat the iPhone 4S in terms of sales on Verizon last quarter.
Now the next Motorola successor is the DROID RAZR HD which continues to stick with the iconic design but goes further with the ‘less is more’. Originally we reported that the DROID RAZR HD would feature no soft buttons row and instead rely completely on ICS on-screen keys like the Galaxy Nexus. Now in addition to removing this bottom row, we even saw a sneak peek at what the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich update would look like on the RAZR phones. Unlike TouchWiz in the Samsung Galaxy S3 which has been heavily modded and still looks a lot like 2.3 Gingerbread (Samsung retains the green tones for its status bar), the RAZR gets the cool blue ICS colors we see on stock Android 4.0 devices like the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and appears very close to stock ICS.
If that was following the ‘less is more’ philosophy enough, we may see the speakers disappear as well. What do we mean? Read on.
Motorola Mobility has come up with an interesting new use for a phone and have a patent currently filed for it with the US Patent and Trademark Office. This ingenious new idea is to use the screen of the device as a speaker, which you could use both for speakerphone, and also for normal calls.
As discussed in Extreme Tech, in the patent, the technology that would make this work is a “free-floating display lens” which is connected to the phone using a “’stiffener ring’ that is supported by a piezoelectric structure”. This means that the sound is transmitted through an electrical signal which causes vibrations which then make the sound. Not only this but haptic feedback will also be able to be given by the screen.
We hope this patent does get approved and the technology created, as it will be a massive step forward for manufacturers and more specifically Motorola and Google, whose sales have been slowing down a lot of late. It would change the traditional mobile phone layout in which usually the screen and separate operate entirely separately.
This is part of a trend for creating additional uses for mobile phone screens, following in Apple’s footsteps, as 6 years ago they also filed a patent for a screen which had pixel-sized cameras covering the screen, so it always looked as though you’re looking directly in to the camera when you are on video calls, even if you’re actually using your phone for the internet or apps. However unfortunately the technology has not actually been created yet and therefore no devices, neither desktop nor handheld, actually have this feature. Then again, smartphones were not such a big deal back then.
Whether we will see this particular feature in the Motorola DROID RAZR HD or its successor however remains to be seen.
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