This past week, I’ve covered a number of Japnese phone announcements, you know, the really colorful and slightly different, but much cooler smartphones they get in Japan? Like for instance, the Turquoise Xperia ZL2 or the hot pink Galaxy S5, in fact NTT DoCoMo announced their summer lineup of phones this past week and boy, was it colorful. This got me thinking, is color making a comeback when it comes to smartphones? Colored versions of these slates we oggle over have always been available, but it seems that there’s more color floating around when it comes to smartphones. If that’s the case, then it can only be a good thing, at least in my eyes. Sure, we can “just buy a case” as a lot of people keep on chanting, but a little color can go a long way.
I own the Chromebook 14 in turquoise and I love it, it’s colorful and makes a nice change from the black or silver laptops I’ve been using over the years. When I look at my black Nexus 5 I think “why aren’t you colorful?!” For those thinking “Why didn’t you do Moto Maker?” well, it’s not available here in the UK and seeing as I bought a Nexus 5 the day it launched, the red one wasn’t available. This has greatly annoyed me. It seems to me that smartphones in general are getting more colorful and that right now, there are only a few key players. Motorola, HTC and Samsung seem to be the only companies that understand color is important when people choose a smartphone.
The Moto Maker is a brilliant idea, regardless of what you think to the Moto X, being able to choose exactly how your smartphone looks – and even feels – is an excellent idea. HTC has slowly caught onto the idea of color and offered last year’s HTC One (M7) in a nice range of colors, with the M8 getting the treatment in blue and red shortly. Samsung meanwhile, have been offering us pink smartphones and colors such as “Garnet Red” for a few years now, and while they miss the mark a little bit, Samsung has more color on shelves in the West than most smartphone manufacturers.
LG’s upcoming G3 has leaked out in a few colors and certainly ups the game from the black and white versions available for last year’s G2. Motorola’s recently announced Moto E has a range of colorful backs you can replace. So, it would certainly seem that colorful phones are slowly becoming the norm here in the West, and that’s a great thing.
One of the greatest things about Android is choice, and while we can choose from Sony, LG, Samsung, HTC, Motorola and others, we have little choice when it comes to color. It’s normally black or white when we choose our next smartphone and that’s just boring. I wish that the red Nexus 5 was available at launch, I’d have bought it in a heartbeat, but the fact that Google has even offered a color besides black or white for their Nexus smartphone is a big thing in and of itself.
Colored phones can give users a reason to take pride in their device, it’s a talking point and manufacturers can get a name for themselves for just color alone. In the Far East, colorful electronics are everywhere, like the recently announced MiPad which comes in a dazzling array of colors, and it’s about time we got some color over here in the West. Our smartphones are mostly the same, just a dark piece of glass that comes to life when we command it, but shouldn’t we be bringing a bit of color into our lives? We use these devices on a daily basis, they’re often the first thing we check in the morning, and the last when we go to sleep, so shouldn’t we be able to get the color, the look we want? Call me crazy – I’m sure you will – but the next phone I buy will be colorful, I want a device people talk about for more than just specs and screen size, I want a phone I can call my own, rather than black or white.