Android Smartphones Are Growing Up

        The morning after Samsung debuted its newest flagship Android smartphone, The Samsung Galaxy S4, rival company Apple did something unprecedented: it released a mini-website that specifically pitches to potential smartphone owners to choose the iPhone over “everything else.”

         

          

Whether or not Apple had intended it, the mere presence of this website elicits an admission that the company, confident in the iPhone’s dominance in both technology and user experience since its release in 2007, believes that it now has some competition. And it’s not that much of a stretch: the most recent generation of Android smartphones have taken a design aesthetic that is decidedly more elevated in materials and quality than ever before.

         

           Android smartphone design is making leaps in industrial design more than ever before, paving the way for bolder looks in the future and establishing a reputation that the phones are just as pretty as they are functional.

       

          Android manufacturers are making their boldest statements in the size of their handsets, pushing the average size of the phone beyond the standard four-inch model to five or even six inches. But the public is eating up the big phone trend, In fact, Samsung’s biggest phone to date, the Samsung Galaxy Note II (which measured at nearly 6 inches), not only outsold its predecessor but also helped boost the company to the highest selling Android phone vendor.

     

           And all of that real estate is becoming utilized more and more, thanks to eye-popping HD screens with razor-thin bezels. Gone are the days of the HTC Nexus One or the Samsung Behold: thick, clunky phones with huge bezels that betray the software’s smartphone capabilities. Or, heaven forbid, the old school Android flip phone.

      

          For example, HTC’s newest entry into its flagship One series is a five-inch phone with 4.7-inch screen, putting the phone’s Super LCD 3 display center stage. It’s a design that clearly plays to HTC’s strengths — the vivid colors and tight pixel density of the screen — and makes the phone look cutting edge and expensive.

     

         Of course, the arms race is heading towards the ultimate in smartphone design — a large phone that is nearly all touchscreen. It’s still far away, but at the rate that smartphone manufacturers are pushing their designs from generation to generation, it’s not far off.