Car and Phone Design Abuse

It was once said that Detroit updated the shape of American cars every couple of years so that others could immediately tell how old of a car you were driving. 

This was in contrast with German car companies which tended to keep an effective design with only minor changes. The VW bug looked the same for decades while the shape of Cadillac tail-fins changed every other year. This was apparently done to make the car look dated and out of fashion thus encouraging customers to purchase a new car more often.

A similar manipulation is currently happening with cell phones. 

While they worked to make the glass face more scratch-resistant, they still break all too often. You see the result in public as most people continue to use these cracked phones.

Even worse, phone designers have decided to wrap the entire phone in this glass material instead of more durable plastic, again, in the name of some fashion. I believe the real reason is to encourage their customers to buy a new phone every couple of years. This new glass-back design has resulted in a phone that's not only as slippery as a bar of wet soap, but also as fragile as, literally, glass. It's like trying to hold on to a live fish.

Years ago, the Japanese company Sharp sold a clam-shell calculator made of durable plastic that had a surface that was soft and easy to grip. Dropping them was rare. 

Unfortunately, I guess we didn't consume enough of them.

And while I'm at it here are a couple of other "enhancements" to cell phones that have turned out to be worse than what they replaced.

Wrap-around screens - why have phone designers become so obsessed with getting rid of borders? Frames for pictures have a reason. They keep the picture from blending into the background, whatever that might be. It's the same for phones, but in a much more physical and controlling way. Those rounded screen edges make it difficult to use keyboards that go all the way to the edge. Those keys are hard to activate. At the same time, other unintended functions for various programs tend to activate when you don't want to. This fashion violates function!

Fingerprint Readers - why all the rush to put fingerprint readers in the screen when they worked so well on the back of the phone where you could find them by feel? Plus they seem to work far better than the screen versions. Then there's the problem of exactly where your finger goes when the screen is off. I'd take the Pixel 2 fingerprint reader over the new Pixel 6 any day.

Both of these "upgrades" are definitely downgrades in my opinion.