Why does the Hammer phone have three physical buttons?

Smartphones are in great demand today, and all manufacturers are flocking in. In the world outside of Apple, no matter how deeply each manufacturer customizes its Android system, it presents the same face. Passively facing various choices brings a lot of trouble to buyers.

Among the dazzling array of mobile phone brands, what motivates us to buy a mobile phone brand? Price? Appearance? Function? Brand? Or design? ... Without any professional knowledge, the general public has no way to judge whether a mobile phone is good or bad, but the first impression is innate to everyone: appearance. No matter how bad a mobile phone brand is, if the appearance is not too ugly, it is still likely to be purchased. So for a mobile phone brand that does not make people like it at first sight, how should we judge it?

The unsatisfactory sales of Smartisan T1 does not mean that it is not a good product. On the contrary, it has a very independent character in industrial design and software vision. This is both unexpected and extraordinary for a new mobile phone brand, because no one dares to enter a fairly mature industry with a non-professional background and challenge the traditional consciousness of the industry with a critical mindset. To establish a foothold with this perspective usually means that you have to do things that others oppose or disdain. This is a product attitude that I have seen in Smartisan that others do not have or rarely have.

When making a product with such a strong critical spirit, it is easier to form something original from the inner product form. The direct feeling it brings is that it is different from other products. An experienced consumer will easily find this difference. For example, the mouse has existed for decades, but it seems that no one has carefully studied how to combine the user experience of the mouse with the design. It was not until the launch of Microsoft Arc Touch Mouse that I realized that the back half of the mouse surface can be used to improve the design and functional experience.

symmetry

Smartisan T1 is not out of touch with reality. Many people think that its sandwich structure is imitating the iPhone 4. When T1 was released, I also thought that it was ridiculous that someone would still imitate a structural design that has been around for 4 years, and there are also those 3 ugly physical buttons.

Based on my years of experience of judging products based on appearance, my subjective consciousness has led me to make many negative judgments about a product that I have not yet taken over. However, when I actually touched the product, a completely different picture appeared, and all previous doubts were overturned by an unprecedented touch. How many products give people a very bad feeling at first, and then they are understood, accepted, and shocked... If you think about it more deeply, you will find that this is actually an excellent product designed by independent thinking without being influenced by the market. This reminds me of what Steve Jobs said about the difference between fashion and art when he was alive:

What looks beautiful first and then ugly is fashion; conversely what looks ugly and then beautiful is art.

Many of the physical hardware structures and designs of the T1 are not in line with the ideas of other mobile phones on the market. For a mobile phone with a 4.9-inch display, the power button is placed on the left or right edge to meet the usage habits of most people, but the T1 does not do this. The Home button for the main menu, except for the physical buttons of iPhone, Samsung, and Meizu MX 4 Pro (set up for fingerprint recognition), is almost unseen today. No one presses a physical button on the front of the phone, but the T1 puts 3 at once...

Why does T1 continue to stick to its own logic despite violating the conventions of mobile phone development?

When I started to trace its source and combed through the design history of various domestic mobile phone brands over and over again, I found that although the market is full of mobile phone brands of all sizes, it is difficult to pick out a satisfactory one from a designer's point of view. For example, some will make the distance between the display screen and the corners almost a plane (line) to achieve the requirements of narrow bezel or no bezel. Does this really meet the functional requirements?

If the aesthetics of the display ratio of length, width and main screen are taken into consideration, then the idea of ​​merging the display screen and the frame into a narrow frame is not appropriate, and the actual effect shows that these products have not reached the standard of being close to no frame in the true sense. Some will follow up with a new technology to open a button hole on the back of the fuselage, and some will put the speaker on the front or back of the phone to realize the auditory function. When you hold these products controlled by technology and the market in your hands and play with them, can you still feel the creator's emotions from them? The machine itself will not have emotions, but as its creator, you need to give your own reason, sensibility, etc. to the machine. When no one does this well, the product that can do it becomes particularly important.

Although the double-sided glass and middle frame structure of T1 is inherited from iPhone 4, if you look closely at the layout of some local hardware, you will gradually understand that T1 follows the path of iPhone 4 but does not copy it completely, but creates another fork of its own. The symmetrical structural concept is consistently implemented on T1 from the inside out. For a 4.9-inch mobile phone, where should the power button be placed to be reasonable? Usually we see that most of them are either on the left or on the right, but T1 puts it at the top and aligns it with the headphone jack.

The volume buttons on both sides of the frame complement the brightness button, and the speaker hole on the bottom has no practical use. It is a decoration to achieve symmetry with the left side. To make the phone have a perfect proportion, symmetry and beauty, the extra positioning function hole on it will increase the cost of the process during the manufacturing stage. If it is not a leader who cares about design, he will not do this.

If the industrial design of a consumer electronic product can achieve a balance between personal emotions and manufacturing structure, any product designed with this combination of sensibility and engineering is very remarkable. In another place, the screw holes for fixing the back panel and the speaker are placed in a groove, and the two sensors and the earpiece are placed in a groove, which is also memorable.

Paranoia

When the word "craftsman" is used in the field of consumer electronics, it is often a high praise for the craftsmanship and design of a product. So what kind of product would be associated with this reputation from tradition? T1's design idea for the SIM card is very special. When you look through the positions of all the SIM cards in the 3-layer structure of smartphones, you will have a different curiosity about T1. In addition to Luo Yonghao's explanation, you can also not rule out that this is Smartisan using differences to show the commercial selling point of the product, but this selling point is unique.

The SIM card is installed in the removable motherboard on the back cover, which is common on Nokia and some other Android phones, but in a case where the back needs to be fixed with screws, instead of the common directly removable back panel, consumers need to push open the back cover and install the SIM card and then fix it with a Smartisan screwdriver. If it is not out of impeccable confidence in the product itself, no one dares to put this design into mass production.

Focusing on the three long physical buttons of T1, those who are used to the iPhone's Home button or Android phones that use virtual buttons instead of physical buttons will always question the strange idea of ​​T1. If the intuition brought by the installation and removal of the SIM card makes you feel a bit cumbersome or redundant, then how much can you tolerate its three buttons? But from the designer's point of view, if these three buttons are removed, can the blank space at the bottom still highlight the tension of its physical buttons?

Before I touched the T1, I had always been opposed to Smartisan's design of these three buttons, but since its designer is from Ammunition, you have to reconsider it, because this studio has designed products for many well-known electronic consumer brands in the United States, and the quality of their products is not bad.

As an industrial design studio with rich experience, we will never be careless when designing the buttons of T1 for Smartisan. So when I got the white version of T1 and observed the three buttons, I saw that the cooperation between Smartisan and Ammunition was not so amateurish in the design of the buttons. The three buttons all use a layer of transparent plastic material to form an overall mirror surface with the glass main screen. If the buttons are made of the same non-transparent solid plastic as the left and right ends, the smoothness brought by the mirror surface will not be visible. A tiny indicator light is hidden in the inner layer of the middle button as a reminder of the Home button. So from the production perspective, this is a design that has been carefully considered.

Today, the space left for designers to design a new highly recognizable smartphone is not as big as it was in the era of feature phones. The space left for designers has gradually expanded from the surface to the inside, so designing a highly recognizable smartphone can only be done in a different way. For a consumer electronics company that has no history of product design accumulation, what can it rely on to launch a product that is different from all similar products? I think this is the significance of Smartisan T1 entering this market with the entrepreneur's personal emotional paranoia and critical thinking.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.