Goodbye plastic smartphones – All phones are moving to glass and metal

Hyperglaze, raise your hand if you remember what that is. For years, metal and glass smartphones were the exception, and plastic smartphones the rule. However, something has changed in the past year. In mid-2016 we are surprised when we receive a phone, no matter how cheap, whose housing is not made of metal or glass.

Hyperglaze was the marketing name of perhaps one of the most controversial designs in recent smartphone history. Samsung’s Galaxy S III was the first device where the manufacturer used that name. The S III came at a crucial time: Apple had just sued Samsung in dozens of countries because it thought the Galaxys were too similar to iPhones. The S III, with a convex design on the back, convex glass on the front and with shiny plastic, was indeed a kind of ‘anti-iPhone’.

Those days are now far behind us. Last year, the Lumia 950 and 950 XL, the latest plastic high-end phones, and with models from Meizu and Xiaomi, among others, we now also see metal smartphones appearing on the market for under 200 and even 120 euros. The ‘luxury’ material is now also on cheap phones. Now the time has come to say goodbye to the plastic smartphone; it will become a rarity.

A small overview

For comparison, let’s put the high-end smartphones from 2011 to 2016 side by side to see what development has taken place in the use of materials. Then you can see at a glance what has happened in recent years.

The word plastic appears less and less and will probably disappear completely from this list in 2016. A small nuance is that we have looked at the material for the back of the device. Sides are more often made of metal, such as Sony’s Xperia Z series and Nokia’s Lumia 930.

This is only about the high-end models. For those models, metal and glass had been commonplace for years now and then. Take the Nokia E71 from 2008 with a metal back, the HTC HD2 from 2009 or the Samsung Omnia 7 from 2010. Nokia made a lot of metal smartphones, but went back to plastic in 2011, with the N9 and Lumia 800.

Metal and glass have both advantages and disadvantages and the same goes for plastic, of course. The advantages of plastic are that it can be shaped into any conceivable shape, that it bends but rarely breaks and that it does not take over the ambient temperature, so you can leave your phone on a sunny terrace without having to pick up a hot croquette later.

However, metal and glass win the battle mainly because of the look and feel. Those materials feel more luxurious and therefore give the phone a more expensive look. For now, no plastic can compete with that.

One housing is not the other

It was a small announcement, but it says so much; Xiaomi presented the Redmi 3s in June, a smartphone currently priced at 94 euros with a metal unibody housing. The fact that the Chinese manufacturer has managed to use metal in its cheapest smartphone says everything about how the price of manufacturing metal smartphones must have plummeted in recent years.

It is difficult to find publicly available information about this, but you don’t have to have studied economics to see why that is now possible. The demand from manufacturers for the use of metal in smartphones has increased and so more and more factories will be equipped to make such cases. So Xiaomi will not be the only one to make metal budget smartphones. Lenovo is working hard and devices under 200 euros, such as the K5 Note, also have a metal housing.

In addition, one metal housing is not the other. As with all other materials, it is possible to scrape some of the price, for example by using less metal and making the housing thinner. For example, there is a difference between the metal of the iPhone 6 and that of the iPhone 6s, because of ‘ bendgate ‘.

A Lenovo executive said earlier that it is pointless in China to release phones without a metal housing. Chinese customers simply don’t want that anymore. It could also go that way in Europe. Metal has a few advantages over plastic. The first benefit is subjective, but endorsed by many; metal gives a ‘premium’ impression. A smartphone seems more expensive if it is made of metal. That is, so far it has. If cheap and often less good smartphones are also made of metal, the question is how long that image will last. The second advantage is that metal makes the construction more solid. The build quality of the phone is therefore quickly higher.

Another characteristic of metal, usually a disadvantage, is that it takes on ambient temperature more quickly than many plastics. As a result, a phone is faster cold on a winter day and warm on a summer day.

The main disadvantage of metal is that it is unsuitable for transmitting mobile signals. Radiation from 3g, 4g, wifi and nfc penetrate metal housings poorly. That is why manufacturers come up with work-arounds in the design. One of the best known is the antenna lines method, which we encountered on the HTC One M7 and later on the iPhone 6. Another way is to apply other plastic elements, such as part of the back. LG took an even different route with the G5; it added antenna lines to the metal design, but sprayed primer over them to make them invisible.

Glass is another favorite material. That is a logical choice, because almost all smartphones already have glass on the front. So to put it at the back, manufacturers simply need more.

The glass on smartphones is not regular glass, such as in your windows, but reinforced glass. Usually it also has a name, such as Dragontrail from AGC and Gorilla Glass from Corning. Chemically strengthened glass is stronger because manufacturers place it in a ‘salt bath’ with KNO ₃ , in which larger potassium ions replace smaller sodium ions. This causes the glass to contract, so that small fractures in the glass become smaller and the risk of damage when the glass is under pressure is less high. In addition, Gorilla Glass and Dragontrail glass have their own recipe, intended to give the glass its reinforcing properties.

That companies like Corning and ACG put so much emphasis on how strong their glass is says something about the main flaw. Even the strongest glass shatters at times when plastic and metal enclosures can easily withstand a situation. Both companies have therefore become cautious in their claims and mainly focus on limiting the consequences of breaking the glass, instead of claiming that it will never break.

As a result, many people will put a case on any glass phone, whether it’s a Nexus 4 from a few years ago or a recently released Galaxy S7, from day one. But, to be fair, you see covers on all types of phones, not just those made of glass.

Conclusion

The switch to metal and glass will take some time. When we listed seven midrange smartphones earlier this year , there were only devices with a plastic back. In China, that cover has already been largely made, with manufacturers such as Xiaomi, Meizu and Lenovo, who provide almost every model with a metal housing.

Is this an ongoing trend or a temporary fad? You can ask that question now that the first rumors are circulating that Apple is considering no longer using metal for iPhones in 2017. According to an analyst, metal in 2017 no longer feels ” modern and fresh “. It has, you could argue, become too commonplace to distinguish a high-end phone by then.

It is difficult to say in advance what design trends in smartphones will be. With smartphones all consisting of large touchscreens for a few years now, the use of materials has become one of the main differentiators and one of the ways for manufacturers to convince people to buy a new model. Without innovation, smartphones will soon not look new. And in the end it’s mainly about that; a new phone should look new and modern, whatever material it takes.