When it comes to smartphones, huge progress has been made over the last ten years. And the designation of these devices is really appropriate, they really are SMART phones. But unfortunately, it has not only been roses and parades when it comes to the development of smartphones and their accessories, there have also been a lot of real fails. We have listed 5 blunders that smartphone manufacturers have done over the years that we will never forget.
1 Energizer P18K – a smartphone or a brick?
One of the most important things we have in our smartphones is the battery. For consumers, battery capacity is a decisive factor when buying a new phone, so the basic idea of the Energizer P18K was super-smart. Creating a phone with a battery that lasts up to 50 days, in a single charge! Although it may sound like a dream, the phone was a real flop. The phone weighs 3 times as much as a regular smartphone, in addition, the phone is so thick that you need some kind of handbag or giant pockets to carry it with you. Compared to its elegant competitors, the Energizer P18K felt like a real brick and consumers simply did not want it. The company only sold 16 copies in the same time as Samsung sold about 16 million copies of its Galaxy S10. A real smartphone fail.
2 Royole Flexpai – the first foldable phone
Royole was a company founded in 2012 to create the first foldable screen. When they started working on the technology, no other company was even close to creating something similar and the hype around the company was great. Unfortunately, it stopped there, all of a sudden it became 2019 and Samsung was about to launch its own foldable smartphone. Probably Royole got a little panicked by this and rushed to launch what they had – Royole Flexpai. Unfortunately, both the design and the technology in the phone left a lot to be desired. When the phone was folded it had the thickness of a smaller book and the software was full of bugs. Sadly, the bad technology behind this model got people to question why we need foldable phones at all and the company fell into oblivion.
3 Apple AirPower – a charging mat that was never released
When iPhoneX was to be released, in 2017, Apple also showed their dreams for wireless charging. With Apple AirPower, you could charge multiple devices on one mat, regardless of where they were on the mat. Apple users waited with excitement for the new device, it was mentioned in iOS updates and even was illustrated on the back of the second generation AirPods. But the mat was never released. To be able to charge wirelessly, a coil is needed in the mat and a coil on the back of the devices to be charged. In order for the product to keep its promise, many coils were required that could supply power to several units. Unfortunately, Apple couldn’t find a solution where the device didn’t get too hot and the electromagnetic fields didn’t interfere with each other. A cool product in theory, sad that it could not be built.
4 BlackBerry Z10
Today, it can be hard to believe that BlackBerry used to have 50% of the mobile phone market in the US. Blackberry’s fail has really been outstanding and clearly shows what happens if you do not keep up with the times. Their smartphone Blackberry Z10 personifies why things have been so bad for companies lately.
For starters, the company didn’t quite understand why customers wanted smartphones at all. When the first smart phones became popular with their apps, Blackberry misjudged the situation altogether and thought that success was in touch screens. Therefore, they created a touchscreen version of their existing phone, a smartphone model that has many times been named the worst of all time. After that failure, BlackBerry made another mistake, they now believed that what the customer wanted was the best operating system. The Blackberry Z10 finally felt like a real smartphone but still missed the target by a mile. What Blackberry was known for, in the past, was their safety, which is why they had worked hard on this even now. Unfortunately, that did not made the operating system open enough and the phone could not have all the apps the users actually wanted to use. The Z10 was by no means the worst phone BlackBerry has created, but when a company chooses to take the wrong route it can be difficult to recover.
5 Amazon Fire phone
Amazon has become known for producing great products at really good prices, such as Kindle and Echo. The way Amazon has been able to make these products lucrative is that they have in turn served as portals for users to buy more things through Amazon. For example, if you have a Kindle then this is a portal to buy more ebooks. Amazon Fire Phone had a similar concept but did not have the same success at all. First and foremost, the phone was by large just a classy portal to the Amazon Appstore. They removed the Google Playstore to make sure that all digital purchases that went through this phone were purchases through Amazon, something that was not well received by users. The icing the cake for on this phone was that the Fire Phone cost about as much as a regular iPhone. The bargain price Amazon previously offered in its products was a mere memory. In the end, there was no reason for consumers to buy Fire Phone and the project was a big fail.
