In the year immediately preceding the smart phone there was an increase in gimmicky features among smart phones as everyone desperately tried to stand out from the pack. Perhaps spurned by the Motorola RAZR, the last really popular phone before Apple took control, or perhaps from the looming threat of the iPhone itself, manufacturers stumbled over each other to find the killer feature that everyone had to have. There were changes to the casing of the phone, which included mirrored elements to make selfies easier (before someone had the smarter idea of simply putting a camera on both sides of the phone), a square design that resembled a compact, and various spins on the flip, slide and swing hinges.
It’s fair to say that none of these made a strong impact… certainly not enough to capture marketshare away from the RAZR and not nearly enough to keep Apple at bay when the iPhone hit the market. In the post-Apple years that followed the game became to make a phone as close to the iPhone as possible without stumbling over its patents. As it should have been all along, UI design became more important and we’ve seen plenty of attempts to mix and match Android to varying results. Very quickly it became clear that the real innovation everyone was going to focus on was the size of the device itself as everyone tried to figure out how big was too big… to often mixed results.
Fast forward to 2014 and we once again find ourselves in the position of living with companies who are trying to find the killer feature in an ever shrinking world of possibilities. The advantage Apple has is that they have staked out a position of having some of the best UI/UX and a wide net of third party developers happy to work with their ecosystem. To compete, companies are struggling to find the one “must have” feature that moves marketshare aware from Apple, who has achieved a nice momentum of consistently iterating their phones to be just a bit better each release.
The iPhone 6 is not transformative. It’s a nice device; slightly bigger, slightly thinner, with more storage, more resolution and a nicer camera. Several people complained that it wasn’t the transformative device they hoped for… but they bought it anyway. The alternative was to go to Android, which has a large variety of options in the market place, but despite relentless marketing Android can’t seem to break out of the second class citizen status that they enjoy next to Apple. Loyalists to Android (and to Windows if you find them) will espouse the glory of their devices, but the market has made a pretty clear choice. The best phone is an iPhone. The other phones are wannabes.
That’s why Samsung, HTC, Microsoft, Motorola and so many others are desperate to find the new feature that actually sticks. That helps them take the innovator badge away from Apple and get into the lead in the race. They are desperately trying; Samsung has been relentless over the last few years with new features aimed at every demographic possible… but none seem to stick.
The new Samsung Galaxy Note Edge is an amazing phone. It’s creative, it has a glass screen that curves around the edge and uses that space to do things you’ve never seen before. It’s not a second screen, but more like an extended ticker. It’s something that people will take a second look at if you pull it out of your pocket to take a call or play with an app. It will raise eyebrows. But will it raise orders?
It won’t.
It’s a nice gimmick, but you don’t need to have it. Once the television ads come and go it will most likely be quickly forgotten… like the tablets that could be submerged underwater. Or the one that used facial recognition to unlock the phone. Or the one that had light pulses instead of alarm vibration. Or the one that had a projector lens inside the phone so it could be a table projector. Or the one with the telescopic zoom lends that extruded from the back an inch.
They are all amazing ideas. They make great CES sizzle videos. They don’t sell phones.
More to the point, they don’t beat the iPhone.
Samsung is an amazingly innovative company. Many of the groups developing for Android are right now; arguably far more creative and innovative than the market leader. The only catch is that they haven’t found the innovation that really matters where it counts: the market. The Samsung Galaxy Note Edge is a good phone. It’s fast, it’s responsive, and it feels good (if a bit large) in your hand. If you fall in love with the curved screen then you will love this new “gimmick” But despite all of this it isn’t a phone you have to own, and in all likelihood it isn’t one that you will really remember years from now. That’s the problem, and that’s the killer feature that has yet to be found.
