I was watching old phone reviews on CNET last night, and upon waking up today I suddenly just thought of listing some of my favorite phones, based on hardware design. Here are five of them, in no particular order.
1. The
HTC HD2: This phone could very well be the most beautiful piece of hardware I have ever laid eyes on. There's something about its simplicity, the clean lines, the brushed aluminum buttons, that whole hugeness-wideness-thinness thing - it's just so beautiful it has got to be the ultimate and purest expression of something, some sort of ideal. Too bad it's running Windows Mobile.
2. The
Motorola DROID: This is one the most daring phone designs I have ever seen. The angles are sharp, the lines are cruel, the design is very unapologetic. It's definitely a statement, and a very powerful one at that.
3. The
Palm Pixi: The Palm Pixi may be doomed to failure (Gizmodo calls its existence a cruel joke) but it will never die unappreciated. The design is so simple, it's almost a no-brainer - and yet no one has done it like this before. It just looks clean and fun to use. I love the soft-touch back, the front...hey, I love all angles of this phone. Easily bests out the Pre, and the best-looking phone from Palm.
4. The
Motorola CLIQ: It may have been permanently eclipsed by its bigger DROID brother, but the CLIQ is still one of my favorite phones in terms of hardware design. It was the first real lust-worthy Android phone (after the European HTC Hero, that is). The keyboard looks fun to use, the glowing Motorola logo on its back is nice. The phone may not stand out too much from the curent crowd of phones, but it is definitely well-designed.
5. The
HTC Hero: And I mean the European version, not the
uglified Sprint version. Who can forget this phone? This is probably the best implementation of HTC's trademark chin. At the time of launch (pre-DROID era), it was super-fresh and super-daring, not something that the world had seen before. Its vicious, sharp chin was really something to look at. Definitely a classic.
That's it for some of my favorite phone designs. There are a lot more, but these are the ones that immediately came to my mind. All images, by the way, are from Engadget.
