A brief history of mobile phone "color change"

If today's children choose their own "mobile phone", they can definitely be at ease and be a "face control".

There are endless choices of various colors, for example, black includes Star Diamond Black, Phantom Black, Elf Black, and Infinite Black; gold includes Atomic Gold, Magic Gold, Brilliant Gold, Sunset Gold, Streamer Gold, as well as Ice Silver, Snow Crystal White, Snow White, Mirror Silver, and Element White; the red series includes pink, cherry pink gold, Bordeaux red, burgundy red, and Ferrari red; green includes Ice Jade Blue, Qingchuan Green, and Mint Green; niche colors such as Robin Blue and Jacaranda Purple are also available.

One color is too monotonous? Then check out gradient colors and customized versions.

With so many colorful bodies, applying films and covers has become almost old-fashioned, like something that only grandpas of the last century would do.

It is foreseeable that color will become the most important visual feast to bring vitality to the mobile phone market. This also arouses our curiosity: is the innovation of mobile phone colors really based on the inspiration of designers or "craftsman spirit"?

After some historical retrospection, we think that perhaps the logic of the fashion industry can explain all this.

In the fashion drama, Miranda, the devil fashion editor, said this to Andy, a rookie in a blue sweater:

You thought you had chosen it (blue sweater) carefully according to your own will, but you didn't know that after Oscar de la Rent's show in 2002, sky blue appeared in the show of 8 designers, and then became popular in major high-end stores around the world, and then became popular on the streets, and finally you bought it in cheap stores. Moreover, it is not blue, turquoise or glass color, but sky blue.

In the eyes of ordinary people, the color of a mobile phone is not important, it is nothing more than pleasing to the eye or not. But in the eyes of mobile phone manufacturers, it is of great significance.

Today, let’s put on “tinted glasses” and look for the “invisible hand” that makes smartphones “change color”.

A history of "color change", half of the hardware tears

Looking at the entire mobile phone market, it has long been a colorful world. However, if we go back ten years, the only thing that “face-conscious people” could do was to make a fuss about the design of their mobile phones. If you wanted a color other than black, white, gray, or red, sorry, you had to turn left and buy a landline phone.

We won’t go into details about the old phones, such as the Sharp flip phones that were owned by Yang Mi, Tang Yan and other celebrities. Let’s start with the full touch-screen phone 5800 launched by Nokia, the leader of feature phones in 2008.

The popular Nokia 5800 was launched in three colors: silver-black, red and blue. The "black elite version" was the most popular. The full-screen touch bar design, the "smart" properties of the Windows system, and the entertainment functions such as continuous music playback for 35 hours were enough to make the user holding the 5800 the most dazzling person on the street. What else did he need a bicycle for? In fact, the Chinese version only launched the black option at that time, but the sales were still very good.

From then on, the smartphone market officially began.

Limited by the entire screen, the appearance of mobile phones can only be changed between various touch screens, sliding covers and rotating covers. Therefore, mobile phone manufacturers have turned their attention to color.

Sony, which has always been good at winning with colors, lived up to expectations at the time and launched rare colors such as pink, burgundy, and light blue that fascinated countless girls. There were even green and purple versions.

In 2009, DOOV's female mobile phone was launched, bringing the concept of "female mobile phone" and various bright colors into the feature phone market. Following this idea, relying on color to compete for the female market has also become the core selling point and growth strategy of mobile phone manufacturers.

LG's lollipop and ice cream series, Lenovo's "Water Ripple Four Seasons Rotation", TCL's Gem series, Tianyu's Rouge mobile phone, Nokia 210 series, all kinds of special colors are surging, appealing to the "girls' hearts" and decorating the mobile phone market which has always been dominated by business (lao) business (qi) spirit (heng) and elite (qiu) style with colorful colors.

With the iteration of 3G and 4G, Jobs soon launched the iPhone 4 in 2010. This true smartphone is equipped with a 5-megapixel camera, uses an Apple A4 processor, supports dual-band HSDPA/HSUPA3.5G base, and has a download speed of up to 7.8Mbps.

This real smart phone quickly showed its invincible "surfing the Internet" charm, even though the battery life did not improve significantly, the battery power consumption can only support 7 hours of talk time, the double-sided glass body design is also unique among the plastic color shells. Perhaps it is because "colors are blinding", the "cold style" black and white soon became popular with the iPhone 4.

Since then, Apple has started a fashionable life in the mobile phone industry. Before the appearance of the iPhone 5s in gold, high-end mobile phones on the market were almost only available in black and white.

Sony, which loves playing with colors, has been trying to incorporate red and purple into the glass + metal frame design since the first generation Xperia Z, but it has failed under the huge offensive of the iOS camp.

In September 2013, the iPhone 5s was released, still using the sapphire glass design, and in addition to black, white and gray, it also launched "rich gold". In 2015, with the arrival of the iPhone 6s, rose gold once again became popular around the world.

During this period, gold, as a synonym for "tycoon" and "technology", became the exclusive color of fashion trendsetters. At that time, many similar styles emerged, such as champagne gold, rose gold, streamer gold, etc.

However, it is also quite frustrating for other manufacturers to let Apple always take the spotlight, not to mention that glass panels are too difficult to process and the cost is high. Android manufacturers, who have "suffered from Apple for a long time", are trying to start a fight.

Since there are no more tricks to play with glass panels, consumers always put all kinds of strange shells and colorful films on them to prevent them from falling. So how about changing the material?

Plastic is not acceptable. Although it can be colored in various ways, wouldn't that be a step backwards? Moreover, the texture is indeed a little worse. Therefore, metal materials, mainly aluminum alloy and stainless steel, officially took over. The first to use an all-metal body was the M7 released by HTC in 2013. However, the surprise brought by the change of material to the body color eventually fell on Apple.

The iPhone 6 uses an all-metal shell, which requires two plastic strips to be filled on the top and bottom of the back of the phone. This color design, jokingly called "white strips" by netizens, was soon widely adopted by the Chinese mobile phone market, which is fond of "taking what is useful".

Of course, the metal body also brings the problem of coloring. Apple once tried to use the anodizing process to design the aluminum alloy iPhone 5 in coal black, but it ended in failure due to the "paint peeling door". When the iPhone 7 was launched in 2016, Apple solved this problem and launched the Jet Black (bright black) shell that is comparable to the texture of ceramic, as well as the popular "China Red".

After the "Chinese Red" became popular, OPPO R11, Nubia Z17, Honor V9, OnePlus 5T, etc. also launched red versions. This time, the stereotyped white stripes on mobile phones have disappeared.

Fast forward to 2017, aluminum alloy is still the mainstream material, but the colors have become richer.

In addition to red, OPPO launched a faded version of the R9 in the spring of that year, while Huawei P10 was launched in six colors including gold, blue, black and green. Redmi's "Hatsune Green" also attracted many two-dimensional fans. Sony, which loves to play with colors, also launched Serenity Blue and Ice Blue, which are unique enough.

However, the good days of solid-color mobile phones are coming to an end. 2017 was also the historic moment when 5G began to quietly sprout. The influence of metal materials on the layout of mobile phone antennas greatly hindered the transmission of 5G signals. Therefore, glass materials soon returned to the stage of history.

However, how can the used materials re-stimulate consumers' purchasing desire? The more "outstanding" gradient has become a major driving force to stimulate consumption upgrades. This time, Apple failed to catch up with the trend of "technology is mainly based on shell replacement", and the "fashion icon" became a Chinese mobile phone manufacturer.

The “first experience” of gradient colors was the R11 Honor of Kings special edition released by OPPO in 2017. It used a red and blue gradient color scheme, but because it was a limited edition, it did not become popular on a large scale.

What really set off the trend of gradient colors was the launch of the purple and green Aurora color body on Huawei's P20 in early 2018. Later, Huawei added special engraving patterns to the glass body of the Mate 20 series' Emerald Green color to enhance the aesthetics. Soon, it launched the blue-purple-green gradient Twilight color. After that, Meizu, OV, Xiaomi and others quickly followed suit, sending solid-color mobile phones into the "OUT" industry.

Of course, in the trend of mobile phone "color change", there are also some niche unique designs. For example, Motorola uses bamboo back cover on MOTO X, the rich mobile phone brand VERTU uses various strange leathers, and Xiaomi MIX tries to use an integrated ceramic body and transparent back panel...

So far, we can see from the history of mobile phone "color changes" the transfer of mobile phone discourse power, changes in the consumer market, upgrades in supply chain technology, changes in communication networks, etc. These difficult technical terms and complex industrial changes actually ultimately land on the popular color of a mobile phone.

The secrets of industries connected by colors

To some extent, understanding the key factors that affect the color of mobile phones will help us understand what has been dominating the changes in the mobile phone market in the past 20 years.

1. Influence of material technology.

From the history of mobile phone colors, it is not difficult to see the importance of body materials in mobile phone manufacturing. In fact, mobile phones have been dancing under the shackles of materials science since their birth. From plastic (polycarbonate) to metal to glass, the colorability of the material has played an almost decisive role.

For example, the plastic material commonly used in the old days presented a colorful user experience but with poor hand feel and low heat dissipation. Nowadays, plastic bodies are also used in some low-end thousand-yuan bodies. Glass bodies are prone to breakage, difficulty in processing, and high cost, which has led to rare colors being put at the back of manufacturers' marketing strategies.

Although metal bodies are durable, they are prone to electromagnetic shielding, blocking signals, and fading easily, and are becoming increasingly useless. Other materials such as bamboo, wood, ceramics, leather, rubber, etc. also have their own advantages and disadvantages.

In order to "seek benefits and avoid harm", the mobile phone design and engineering departments have to rack their brains to study the properties of these materials. For example, the first generation iPhone also tried to splice aluminum alloy with plastic to improve the texture of the body. The design department of HTC One also worked hard to control the injection molding antenna within 1.5mm to solve the problem that the metal body will interfere with NFC and signal transmission. OPPO coated the body with a 15μm thick oxide film to ensure color fastness...

In the early days, consumers could make do with applying protective films or wearing condoms to solve visual problems that could not be solved by material technology. However, as more and more consumers choose to "go naked", finding new materials with stronger comprehensive strength and giving them engineering significance has become a technical issue that mobile phone manufacturers cannot avoid.

2. The technological margin reaches its peak.

At the beginning, smartphones could quickly transform into market reputation and sales by relying on technological progress. For example, dual-core processors were used in mobile phones, screen fingerprint recognition just appeared, and AI technology became more and more smooth. However, in the past two years, the "marginal effect" of smartphones has become more and more obvious. Curved glass, integrated metal body, face recognition unlocking, IoT control, etc., no matter how high-end the industrial design is, it is difficult to arouse users' surprise, because similar things will soon appear in the PPT of other manufacturers' flagship phone launch conferences.

In this case, the significance of a new color to a mobile phone is self-evident. It can not only rekindle consumers' enthusiasm for changing phones, but also widen the gap with other manufacturers through unique color matching technology.

For example, the rose gold color helped the iPhone 6s, which was innovative in its design, sell at a new high price, and the bright black color helped the iPhone 7 break Apple's shipment record. However, if this kind of play is used too much, it will easily backfire. Many people ridiculed Apple for following the old path of Nokia (technology based on changing shells) in those years.

3. The transfer of industry discourse power.

Color has always been an accessory to "power". From this perspective, the leader of the popular color of mobile phones also holds the core authority of the industry discourse. To give a simple example, Meizu and OPPO have both launched red versions of mobile phones, Huawei's "Fresh Green" is also very special, and Sony has taken color to a new level. But these cannot change the fact that the 10s generation has always followed Apple closely.

But is Apple really that powerful? The reality is that if technology and craftsmanship are not improved, Apple can only choose mature colors, such as "Space Gray", under the constraints of the industrial chain.

The reason why consumers are willing to pursue and pay for Apple, such as the iPhone 5s popularizing "Gold", the iPhone 6s popularizing "Rose Gold", and the iPhone 7 popularizing "China Red", is essentially due to Apple's first-mover advantage in software and hardware innovation and successful brand building. In this regard, almost no Android phone manufacturers could surpass it at the time, and reflected in the "popular colors", they could only choose to follow suit again and again.

To some extent, the "popular color icon" actually represents a kind of power, an authoritative definition of the smartphone consumer market. Incubating this kind of power requires complex conditions, such as investment in underlying material technology, control and output capabilities of the supply chain, breakthroughs in AI software and hardware experience, exploration of high-end brands, and comprehensive influence in the global market...

With so many influencing factors, the “popular color” of an industry can be finally determined. How to make good use of color creativity to rebuild a new industry logic may be the opportunity and challenge facing all mobile phone manufacturers today.