The "trial and error" journey of niche mobile phones

If you want to buy a mobile phone now, you will find that almost every mainstream manufacturer's products look similar, with not much difference except the logo. Curved screen, punch-hole front camera and "full" hardware configuration have become the common choice of almost all mainstream flagship smartphones this year.

The system UI and some minor functional differences are the only factors that users need to consider besides price when buying a mobile phone. Because the overall design of each phone is not much different, if you put these phones face up together after the screen is turned off, I believe many people will not be able to tell which model they are.

Against the backdrop of increasingly serious homogeneity, some individual smartphone companies are trying some bold designs, and their every appearance will attract a lot of attention.

According to foreign media reports, LG's rotating screen phone LG Wing will be launched in the US market first, priced at about $1,000. The phone is equipped with a 6.8-inch main display and a 4-inch secondary display that can be revealed by rotating the screen. According to the demonstration video officially released by LG, the rotating screen feature allows it to achieve dual-screen combination operation like the Nintendo 3DS.

Thanks to this "strange" design, although the phone has not yet been launched and is unlikely to be launched in China, it has still sparked a lot of discussion among domestic users, who have given a lot of praise for this innovative design. However, many people seem to be only at the discussion stage and have no great desire to buy this rotating screen.

Differentiation is the only way out for niche mobile phones

In fact, in the past two years, there are many smartphones like LG Wing that adopt bold design ideas, such as Microsoft's dual-screen folding phone Surface Duo, which has been polished for several years and delayed many times, Asus's ZenFone 7 with flip camera, ZTE's dual-screen phone Axon M, and Sony's 21:9 4K screen phone Xperia 1.

Whether it is LG Wing, Surface Duo, Axon M or Xperia 1, all of them use highly differentiated design schemes that are different from the mainstream market style. Many of them are industry giants whose mobile phone business has become a marginalized business segment.

Although there are no specific figures, relevant reports show that the R&D costs of similar new models are often in the tens of millions of dollars. However, judging from past cases, such initiatives rarely pay back the investment and make a profit.

It is not surprising that niche mobile phone brands have such a choice. When the smartphone industry enters a highly mature stage, especially when the innovation of supporting supply chain companies often determines the trend of the industry, a company's ability to control the supply chain directly affects the market competitiveness of its products. Although Luo Yonghao's statement that "everyone is a supply chain integrator" may not be correct, it also reflects the core competition of the smartphone industry at this stage to a certain extent.

Small mobile phone brands have a natural disadvantage in the competition of the supply chain. In this regard, relevant communication industry experts told Dongdong Notes: "This is easy to understand. The control ability of mobile phone brands over the supply chain is largely determined by their own size and sales volume.

To put it simply, it is the relationship between big customers and small customers. The annual shipments of leading enterprises are over 100 million units, while the annual shipments of niche brands or small and medium-sized enterprises are only in the millions. Supply chain companies will naturally give priority to those leading enterprises. In addition to daily supply, the first launch rights and exclusive periods of some advanced technologies will also give priority to leading enterprises. "

This is indeed the current situation in the mobile phone industry, including under-screen fingerprint, super fast charging and Qualcomm's flagship chips every year, which are all launched first in the domestic market by Xiaomi, Huami, OV, etc. Even the under-screen camera technology that ZTE recently promoted was intercepted by Xiaomi.

Although ZTE said it would give priority to mass production and release, two days before its official product launch, Xiaomi announced its own under-screen camera product with the same technical level. This move is actually telling the outside world that Xiaomi also has such technology, but it does not think it has reached the level of large-scale mass production and commercial use, so it has chosen to postpone it.

Without priority in supply chain technology, niche brands will naturally not be able to gain time advantage in a homogenized environment. At the software UI level, without a large user base to obtain user feedback, they will not be able to compete with leading companies with hundreds of millions or even billions of users.

Therefore, for small and medium-sized brands, if they follow the market trend, they will not have any chance. The market is highly homogenized and the voice of the supply chain is weak. In this case, choosing to seek breakthroughs through design differentiation has become the only option.

After all, compared to slowly following the mainstream steps of the market and then being drowned in the red ocean of homogeneity, it is better to make some products that can make people's eyes shine. At least it can attract some users' attention with differentiated appearance.

"Strange" design and high marginal cost

Whether it is LG's rotating screen this time, or the previous dual-screen folding, flip lens, front and back dual screens, etc., they are indeed "weird" enough and attracted a lot of users' attention at the beginning of their release. But we found that many users only stay at the level of attention, and only a few actually buy them.

The reason behind this embarrassing situation of only praising but not buying is that the smartphone market is no longer as tolerant as it was in the era of feature phones. Although users want to see more novel and differentiated products, these designs are unfriendly to developers and supply chains, which are the important components that determine the user experience of the final product.

In the era of feature phones, the operating systems of various companies were relatively simple, and users' requirements for the system UI were far less stringent than today. Therefore, companies can boldly experiment with appearance design. After all, if they do not have an advantage in the system software, they can only compete with external factors such as quality and appearance design.

But things are different now. Software has long been the core competition for various companies. Especially in the case of serious homogeneity, whoever has better system optimization, more convenient use, and more functions will attract more users. This is also the reason why MIUI has always been Xiaomi's core competitiveness for a long time.

For mobile phone products with highly differentiated designs such as rotating screens and dual-screen folding phones, the first problem to be solved is software adaptation. This requires not only the efforts of the company itself, but also the cooperation of third-party application developers in software adaptation of related products. However, it is not easy to get developers to cooperate.

Normally, developers will give priority to adapting to models with high sales and high user activity. However, the final sales of these niche, highly differentiated products may not be very high, and sales of hundreds of thousands of units are unlikely to impress developers. The most typical example is that when the iPhone notch screen came out, most software needed to be re-adapted, but because of the huge user base of iPhone, developers basically chose to follow up at the first time.

But looking at those niche Android devices, not to mention mobile phones, just take tablets as an example, why have many companies given up on Android tablets in the past two years? One of the important reasons is that the sales volume and the number of users are too small. Developers are unwilling to research special applications for tablets. Many applications are directly transplanted from mobile phone applications, which makes the user experience very bad.

Returning to the "special" models such as rotating screens and folding dual screens, the embarrassment is also the same. Many software cannot be well adapted, which also makes it impossible to improve the user experience. Once the most basic user experience at the software level cannot be guaranteed, users will naturally not choose them.

In addition to software, another dilemma comes from cost considerations. There is a scale effect in any industry. The higher the output and demand, the lower the unit cost will be. However, these highly differentiated niche products have low sales volumes, so the marginal cost of mass production itself will be very high.

At the same time, due to its special design, many parts need to be customized, and the cost of these customized parts is much higher than those of the public molds and standard products in the supply chain. This is why some niche brands such as Meizu will specifically mention which parts they customized at a high price because of Huang Zhang's insistence at every press conference.

These embarrassing situations have led to many products that seem to be very innovative in design, but will eventually bring huge losses to the company. For a related case, we can also refer to the Pro 7, the most unsuccessful model in the history of Meizu.

Obviously, it is precisely because of these constraints that many mobile phone companies are unwilling to attempt innovation, especially small and medium-sized enterprises that do not have sufficient funds.

Of course, there are still many "pioneers" in the market. We can still see some companies that are constantly trying such high-cost innovations. Whether it is LG, Microsoft, ZTE, Asus, or Sony, they all have their own pillar industries besides smartphones. These companies themselves have sufficient capital to support their smartphone businesses in this regard.

Unfortunately, from the perspective of industry development, the success rate of these attempts is very low. A truly successful differentiated design needs to rely on a product to lead the overall development trend of the entire industry, just like the first generation iPhone led the capacitive touch screen and multi-touch technology, or Xiaomi MIX triggered the full-screen wave.

However, even when Xiaomi first launched MIX, it had very difficult negotiations with Google over CDD and other issues. Finally, after much twists and turns, Google changed two requirements of the new version of Android CDD. This not only brought convenience to Xiaomi MIX models, but also paved the way for more friendly companies to produce high aspect ratio models in the future.

Therefore, a truly successful differentiated design requires not only "strange" designs such as rotating screens and folding screens, but also comprehensive innovation from hardware to software. With a little bit of luck, companies can make consumers and even competitors recognize their innovations and choose to follow suit.

Conclusion

Since the launch of the first iPhone in 2007, which led the industry into the smartphone era, the only innovative designs that can be considered to have truly changed the industry landscape are probably the iPhone's Home button and the Xiaomi MIX's full screen.

But for large companies such as LG, Microsoft, and ZTE whose mobile phone businesses are marginalized, the arrival of the 5G era makes it difficult for them to give up their smartphone businesses. If they want to stay at the table and make breakthroughs, it is meaningless to just follow others - only by constantly trial and error through these innovative measures can they have a chance to become the next iPhone.

Although this process costs a lot, they just have to persist. As consumers, although it is difficult for them to achieve revolutionary success and we will hardly buy these products, we are still happy to see these products with different designs continue to appear. Because only their constant existence can keep this dull market a little bit of novelty.