The 12 Worst Android Phone Gimmicks Once Hailed as Innovations
BY GreenBot Staff
Published 14 Feb 2017
Sometimes innovation is best left on the drawing board
It’s hard for a phone to get noticed by consumers. When it looks like all the other flat black slabs out there. That has led some OEMs to try some particularly wacky things and gimmicks to set them apart. First, because a new gimmick doesn’t mean it’s good. There are a lot of gadgets that look cool at a trade show, but in real life, they’re terrible ideas. Here are some of the worst to make it to the market.
Samsung Air View
One of the many features Samsung toyed around with when it lacked restraint was Air View. This feature lets you preview information on your device without tapping. That sounds cool. But the way you preview it is by hovering your finger (or stylus on the Note) right above the screen. It wasn’t any faster; you could never tell what apps or features would support Air View. It was limited to Samsung’s apps; even then, it was spotty. Today is prevalent in the latest phones and tablets.
The Galaxy Beam Projector
Samsung had tried many things; the projector built-in into the Galaxy Beam Beam 2 ranks among the most gimmicky. These phones were mediocre in every way except for the projector. They were the only game in town if you needed a phone with a projector built-in. The projector added a lot of bulk; the picture was dim; the battery life was poor. You couldn’t even touch the phone without jiggling the projected image. Samsung never carried it into newer phones. The Moto Mod projector from Motorola is similarly lame, but wasn’t permanently attached to the phone.
HTC’s kickstarts
HTC used to love kickstarts. I think we are all partially to blame for that. Everyone seemed to approve of kickstarts, and other phones came out when the Evo 4G came out. Buyers thought they seemed excellent and valuable; no one was using them. The added bulk of a kickstart was unnecessary when you couldn’t hold it.
Fire One Dynamic Perspective
Amazon was rumored to be working on a phone for years; when it was finally unveiled, we got an overpriced plain black slab that was locked to AT&T. But it had head tracking technology. Great? The so-called Dynamic Perspective system uses IR cameras on the front of the device. And follow your position relative to the phone, allowing objects on the screen to move with you. It was fun to play with for a few minutes but was otherwise wholly uninteresting. Developers did not embrace Dynamic Perspective, despite Amazon’s best efforts.
HTC M8 Duo Camera
In 2014, HTC released the One M8, which followed up the reasonably successful One M7. This phone had an exciting gimmick; the Duo Camera. The two cameras worked together to apply depth information to an image, allowing (sort of) post-capture re-focusing. The problem was, it just wasn’t terrific. The pictures looked terrible, and generally, the blur effect was inconsistent. Dual cameras are hot again now, so HTC was somewhat ahead of the time. It just didn’t execute well. Some phones in 2022 will have multiple cameras, with up to 4 cameras.
Another of Samsung’s less impressive gimmicks was Smart Scroll. This feature uses head tracking to let you scroll up and down by moving your head. It used the front-facing camera to watch for these movements, but it didn’t work very well. You had to move your head quite a bit to be anywhere close to reliable. At that point, it was easier to just use your finger to scroll. It only lasted for the Samsung Galaxy 4.
Motorola Skip
The original Moto X debuted some cool features like Moto Display and Moto Voice. Most of the features Motorola added to Android made a lot of sense. The Motorola Skip was not one of them. The Skip was a small magnetic clip with a non-writable NFC tag. After associating it with your phone, you can unlock the screen by tapping it. The idea was you’d clip it on your pocket or bag. Then drag the phone across it when taking it out. The main problem: it was not fast. You had to leave the phone touching the Skip for a second or two for it to work. Eliminating any benefit it offered. Motorola didn’t sell many of them. Eventually, it started dropping free Skips into unrelated orders. You can do the same thing now with Smart Lock and use the wearables to unlock phones.
Motorola Atrix Laptop Dock
The Motorola Atrix was unveiled at CES, drawing a lot of coverage thanks to the crazy laptop dock. When the phone was attached to the dock, it powered a Linux-based computing environment, which was a cool trick. It was not very useful in practice. The phone wasn’t fast enough to make the computer interface usable, and the dock was $500. You could get a real computer for that, even back in 2011.
Nextbit Smart Storage
Nextbit started as a cloud services company, then it decided to make its smartphone called the Robin. The software was based on the idea of intelligent cloud storage. Which sounds very futuristic, but the future is not now. Smart Storage was designed to offload your apps and photos. Up to a private cloud drive when you ran low on space. When you wanted one of them, the data would be restored locally.
Unfortunately, managing all the apps on your phone was buggy and annoying. Sometimes things you wanted access to would end up in the cloud, not on your phone. If you had a poor connection, it was a stroke of good luck opening your apps.
Sony Ericsson Xperia Play
Playing games on phones can be great, but touchscreen controls aren’t always the best. Sony’s solution to this was to slap a gamepad on the phone. The Xperia Play had a slide-out gamepad that was supposed to have full PlayStation games. The latter never materialized in any meaningful way, with just a few titles. A lot of third-party games never supported the controller, either. At any rate, do you need a gamepad attached to your phone all the time? Almost no one does.
Yotaphone e-paper display
The Yotaphone gimmick is another that sounds cool; it certainly looked nice in demos. This phone had a rear-facing e-paper display that could display information, online news, and messages. The goal was to save you from turning on your phone as much. The effect is you’re enticed to use the phone. Because the e-paper screen makes it harder to ignore things. It also made cases completely impractical.
Samsung Continuum Ticker Panel
Ticker screens are a thing again, but Samsung did it years ago. However, it also did it terribly. The short-lived Samsung Continuum had a ticker screen at the bottom of the device, but it wasn’t a separate panel. The same AMOLED used on other Samsung phones at the time. But there was a bezel across the middle to separate the main ticker displays. The ticker could only display content from Samsung’s built-in apps, as if that wasn’t odd enough. Needless to say, Samsung did not make a Continuum 2.
