Where Is This Battle For The Thinnest Smartphone Taking Us?

Nirmal Singh

Consider the following: the Apple iPhone 5, the Gionee Elife S5.5, the Elife S5.1 and finally the OPPO R5... erm Vivo X5 Max. What do these phones have in common? OS? No. Specifications? Meh. Screen size? No way. What is it, then? Well, before you start taking vague guesses, let me break up the suspense: these phones, at one point in time, have been the thinnest phones ever. While how long they stayed on the throne is a completely different matter; the fact that matters is that they have been there.

A couple of years back, it was only the most zealous and the most resource-rich company that could even think of attempting to make the thinnest phone. Times have changed; how many of you even ever heard of Gionee, OPPO and Vivo before reading about the phones that managed to grab the limelight for them? I'd be comfortable assuming that not a lot of you did. But that's not the point. The point is, technology has gotten to a level where even an infant OEM can dare to dream big; and there's more than an odd-chance that they realize their dreams.

Coming back to the battle for the thinnest phone: where exactly is it taking us? I, for one, don't really know of any person who'd want to use their phone as a kitchen knife. At 6mm or less, in my opinion, not only do smartphones start feeling all the more brittle, but they also tend to get extremely hard to use; in other words, the ergonomic factor that manufacturers aim to bind on a phone starts to disappear.

But, there's a positive side to this seemingly sad story. When you come to think of it, these super-thin phones have some really decent specs packed into them. Now, the silver lining here is that if a 6mm phone can hold X amount of processing power, Y amount of battery (and so on...), a slightly thicker, and therefore, more ergonomic phone can do way better. For reference, it can perhaps do X and a ½ of processing and similar amount of battery.

So, while you never bothered to shift to a super-slim phone, understandably so, a little revolution of its own took place. And that's one reason why you should love thin phones, even though you probably don't care enough ever to buy one yourself!