Whatever happened with these crazy phone trends?

At first glance, it might look like new smartphone trends are often here to stay, however small they might be. Cutout cameras, for example, came and became the norm. One brand removed the headphone jack – now they all do it. Same with the external storage slot. But we won't talk about these, as that's been done to death.

However, there are certain smartphone design trends that came and went so quickly, that we all forgot about them, and how cool and exciting they actually were, or could've been.

Now is the time to remember, and think whether it was a good thing or bad, that these trends didn't stick around…

The pop-up selfie camera phone

Ah, I remember how cool that seemed… Phones that had motorized pop-up selfie cameras, in an effort to make their display as clean and unobstructed as possible.

That was a fun trend that seemed to last a second. Some phones, such as the 2019 Oppo Reno, had a shark fin-like pop-up selfie camera, and made the biggest impression on me, probably because of all the Baby Shark memes spawned.

Other smartphones, namely the Asus Zenfone 6 had some cool flippy action going on, with the main back camera actually swiveling to the front mechanically, also serving as the selfie one. A cool trick to get a better selfie camera, while keeping the front screen clean!

Yet others, like the OnePlus 7 Pro simply had a small, square camera module pop up from inside the phone. On the other end of the spectrum, the Samsung Galaxy A80 had the entire top back of the panel move up to reveal selfie cameras.

So what happened with this trend? Well, motorized mechanisms are just an unnecessary thing that can break, a needless design flaw risk, so pop-up cameras swiftly went away in favor of cutout cameras.

People don't really mind having a small black cutout on their screen, if it means a more durable smartphone. Brands prefer it too, because it's cheaper to manufacture a cutout camera than a motorized one.

Certain smartphones nowadays even feature under-display cameras, like my Galaxy Z Fold 5, on its folding screen. They're not good, to be clear, but they do a serviceable job while staying hidden. So yeah, RIP pop-up cameras, it's been quite fun.

The gaming phone with an actual gamepad built-in

We're going way back for this one. Remember when each phone used to have a wildly different design from every other one? Those were the early 2000s, when having uniformity and some sort of a norm was ahead of us.

Phones like the 2003 Nokia N-Gage and later the 2011 Sony Xperia Play were also fully-featured handheld gaming devices. The Xperia Play in particular still looks quite modern, with its (reasonably large, for the time) touchscreen display, and slide-out gamepad mechanism.

That slide-out business is particularly cool, as you could slide the gamepad portion of the phone back behind the display, and… it was just a regular phone then!

I'd love to see a modern phone do that. Especially nowadays when retro handhelds are booming, and a lot of Chinese manufacturers are finding great success in making Android handhelds.

Why not give those smartphone features and a slide-out gamepad that can be hidden, turning the device into a traditional-looking smartphone, when not used for gaming? One can hope…

Anyway, at the time those aforementioned gaming phones came out, gaming on the go was still a novel concept, not like today with the Steam Deck, Lenovo Legion Go, and similar handheld gaming PCs having set a new norm for triple-A gaming on the go.

However, the likes of the Nokia N-Gage and Sony Xperia Play didn't exactly crush in sales. Smartphones with just touchscreens were the hot new thing in the late 2000s, so…

The modern keyboard phone

Remember the BlackBerry Passport and BlackBerry Key2? Smartphones with physical keyboards, that came out surprisingly recently, particularly the latter – mid-2018.

I always found those really cool, and would've loved to own one, but alas, they didn't exactly reach a global market, nor did they sell like hotcakes, as you can probably guess by not having heard the BlackBerry brand name since about then.

What happened with keyboard phones? Well, people don't seem to want them. We're doing just fine with touch typing, and I personally know a ton of folks who can type faster on a touchscreen than using a physical keyboard.

Plus, physical keyboards on phones is just a trend that's seen as old school. Too business-y and niche too. So keyboard phones, along with BlackBerry itself, went the way of the dodo.

As cool and practical as physical keyboards on phones might look to some even today, including myself, it's something you enjoy as a concept, but not to actually use. We've all moved on from it, and that's fine.

The wide phone

Oh, brother, how I miss wider phones. The 2017 Xiaomi Mi Max 2 was the last one I ever got to use.

I say "wide phone" for the sake of simplicity, but what I mean technically is a phone featuring a display with a 16:9 aspect ratio. Nowadays almost all phone screens have gone more tall and narrow, with a screen aspect ratio of about 19.5:9 (e.g. iPhone 16, Samsung Galaxy S24).

Wide phones disappeared without waving goodbye and never came back, and here's why I miss them – viewing content in landscape was better on them. The extra width (tallness when in landscape) made video playback on their screens look far bigger than on modern phones.

Using wider phones in portrait mode also gave us bigger image previews on social media. It was just lovely, and I really can't explain to myself what made us all move on to narrower screens, besides the benefit of phones now being easier to grip with one hand, however small that hand may be. And that's fair enough…

But yeah, I miss wide phones, which may be why I couldn't help myself but switch to folding phones as soon as those came out. Only to inevitably end up with the narrowest phone ever – Galaxy Z Fold (when closed), but that's an ironic tale for another day.

The curved-screen phone

At one point, standing out with an impressive, seemingly innovative and beautiful phone design was more important to certain brands than practicality, and so we got phones with curved displays.

It truly didn't bring anything practical to the table, in fact it brought harder-to-see screen corners and easier-to-crack screens, but it just looked cool.

With that in mind, I can't exactly complain that curved screen phones are pretty much gone now. Everyone I've seen comment on the subject insists that flat screens are better, and I happen to agree.

In fact, flat phones in general are better to me; that clean, industrial design of the iPhone 5, for example, is still gorgeous today.

The 3D screen phone

Ah, a phone with tons of face tracking cameras, attempting to deliver a 3D screen viewing experience. The most needless concept out of all here. A fun concept, sure, but not only unnecessary and niche, it drives the price up.

Shown above is the Amazon Fire Phone, a 2014 attempt from the conglomerate to enter the smartphone market, and – you guessed correctly again – it didn't go well.

Not only did it not run stock Android, or anything similar enough, instead Fire OS, but it was just too gimmicky and with unsatisfying specs. So – like 3D TVs, it came and went, and Amazon never looked back towards the smartphone market again.

It's doing well with FireOS budget tablets and e-readers, though.

The rollable phone (concept)

Sure, we've pretty much perfected the folding phone, and Huawei even released a tri-folding phone this year (see our Mate XT review here), but what happened with rollable phones?

Those were meant to unroll, as opposed to unfold, and still feature both a traditional phone experience and a tablet one.

Perhaps the LG Rollable phone concept is the one that hyped me up the most at the time (2021), and it seemed so close to release… And then LG quit the smartphone market. And no other brand has tackled the idea since.

Are foldable phones the only ones we'll be getting, or is a rollable phone still possible? Well, it's possible for sure, but will a brand actually release one? I'm still hoping.

Whether or not it'd be less durable than a folding phone (e.g. Galaxy Z Fold 6), is something worth considering, though. A screen that curves all over will surely show wear and tear more so than a screen that folds at just the middle, and even those still have significant creases, so… We'd need some extremely clever engineers on this one.

Would you, or do you use one of these?

Share your thoughts and experiences with your fellow tech enthusiasts in the comments section below – have you used any of the aforementioned phones? Would you, if a modern version came out?

As mentioned just now, I'd love to try a rollable phone in the near future, and the concept is still out there for a brand to polish and attempt to produce. But we'll see, right?