Good morning,
Something I’ve been thinking about. After seeing the iPhone 5 today, this is without a doubt the best looking phone on the planet, hands down. The shape, the feel, the quality of material, it just screams high quality. It screams elegance, photogenic, beautiful for heaven sakes. Apple somehow made the gorgeous looking 4S even better with the 5. Google could REALLY learn a thing or two, hell even three about design. It just sucks that every Nexus device looks like crap, plastic crap. Just all one color, a slab, It feels cheap and like an after thought. Design should NEVER be an after thought. It should be progressive, especially with a great mobile OS.
What Google lacks, and Apple excel is hardware design. What Apple lacks, and Google excel is software design. Here is to hoping the next Nexus (or whatever Google device lands stateside) will have better hardware design, and not cheap plastic from [insert manufacturer here]. Also beef up the internals, and stop getting out shined by your competitors. The Nexus should be the iPhone of Androids, the creme de la crepe. It should have great hardware and software design…from Google. Not one or the other. It should use high quality materials, and not from your trash bag or coke bottle. If you’re gonna pay X amount of money for a phone, you want it to be of a high spec. I credit Apple for that, they just GET design, inside and out. As a graphic designer, certain things matter to me, the feel, shape or material elements. They way it captures attention, light or just general curiosity. Also as a mobile designer, I want my visual flair to be just as good as the phone it is on. This just hits home to me. I can only think of 1 good looking – designed Android phone, the HTC One X. It’s by far the best build, material quality and easily ahead anything else out there for Android, but still not in the iPhone 5 territory.
Google, wake up. You have zero excuses. Design is just not the OS, it’s the phone too.
/rant.
Amphitheatrum Flavium MMXI 