Red and yellow and blue and green, purple and orange and pink... unless you own a smartphone, in which case it's probably grey, black, or white. Krisse takes a closer look at why this is the case.

The Colour of S60 Smartphones

What do you think about when buying a phone?

Battery life? Ease of use? Extra features such as MP3 players or radios? Smartphone operating systems?

Chances are that, as well as some or all of these things, you also think about how it looks, and for many people that's their primary consideration. For some, if a phone looks nice enough they'll overlook any shortcomings in the way it works, and if it looks bad enough they'll ignore any useful features it has. If you manufacture phones or other portable gadgets, you have to provide at least some models that have a pleasing appearance as well as a useful function.

The trouble is that what one person considers good-looking, another considers boring or even ugly, so a variety of different looks is required in order to appeal to a wide audience. That's why this writer was disappointed with The Invasion Of The Greys over the past few years: as if by magic, the S60 world has been taken over by models that are either silver, black or white, and anyone with a taste for colourful devices is left with nothing.

It wasn't always this way. In the beginning S60 had a wide variety of official colours, but since the introduction of the Nseries and Eseries ranges, S60 models have almost entirely adopted shades of grey. However sleek or ergonomic the designs, once you take colour out of the equation they tend to look more and more like the electronic gadgets that they are, and less and less like the kind of thing you want to take everywhere as a representation of your tastes.

 

The older S60 models are on the left, the newer S60 models are on the right:

 

Going Overground...

Clearly there's certain audiences that the steely solid colours of the Nseries are designed to appeal to: technophiles, gadget lovers, people who want to be constantly reminded that they're holding a piece of high technology. And in the case of the business-oriented Eseries, a boring neutral colour scheme is exactly what's required, these phones need to project an air of reliability rather than quirkiness, to match the serious smart suits and efficient pressed shirts and blouses.

But S60 is no longer just for technophiles and businesspeople, for many different reasons it's becoming more mainstream than ever. The price of new S60 hardware is falling, thanks to developments which allow it to be manufactured using fewer microchips, and the cheapest new models are launching for as little as $300 before subsidies. Many phone network operators now offer a wide selection of S60 devices free when you sign up for a long term contract, some even marketing Eseries devices to consumers. Ordinary people are in the market for S60 in a way they've never been before, and there's going to be ever more overlap between the smartphone and feature phone market as manufacturing costs drop further.

Nokia seems to acknowledge the mainstream nature of S60 in their publicity and official web sites for the 5500 and 6290, which don't even mention the fact that they're smartphones and make no reference to S60 or Symbian at all. Unless you're interested in smartphones anyway, you'd regard these as just a couple of feature phones and judge them just like you would any other model, with just as much emphasis on their looks. They're not aimed at the technology or business crowd, so they don't need to stick to grey, yet they remain distressingly close to their monochrome Nseries and Eseries cousins. Why?

A Coat of Many Colours

How would newer S60 devices look if they became more colourful?

Obviously the readers of All About Symbian are going to be largely made up of technology fans, so if the marketing people at Nokia, Apple, Sony, etc. are correct then most of them will be quite satisfied with devices that are all grey, black or white. But even if grey is your thing, the colour schemes in these AAS unofficial mockups might well appeal to someone you know who would never normally even look at a smartphone. It's that appeal to new users that makes a non-techy outward appearance so important if S60 wants to become a mainstream standard.

The first mockup depicts the Nokia 6290, which is officially only available in black and light blue, the second mockup depicts the Nokia N80, which is officially only available in silver and black:

 

 

Colours of Money

"Ah," the marketing people cry, "but colours just aren't in at the moment, they're so 1990s! They make gadgets look like cheap toys!"

It's easy to see why the marketing departments are concerned, technology magazines seem to be full of successful gadgets that are black, white or grey, and seem to shy away from anything else. The problem is that the technology media by its nature is skewed towards those with a particular interest in it, but technology itself is something that everyone uses, even those who have no particular interest in its inner workings. Far more people use technology than read about it, especially when it comes to mobile phones.

There are many pieces of evidence that the current market does want to mix technology with a splash of colour. Here are just a few:

Sock It To Me

Even people who buy monochrome devices often seem to want to add colour to them, and one of the clearest examples of this are the very expensive socks and tubes that Apple and many many third party manufacturers supply. In theory they're just for protection and don't need to be any particular colour, but in practice they're used to turn the dull black or white iPods into nice-looking accessories.

Pretty In Pink

One of the most popular portable devices at the moment is the Nintendo DS handheld console, especially its slimmer DS Lite variation. When the DS first launched in 2004 it stuck to the safe silver-grey colour that was so common among portable devices, but when a pink edition was released in late 2005 the buying public went bananas: you couldn't get a pink DS for love nor money, and there were pink DSes changing hands online for hundreds of dollars above the recommended retail price. Even when the DS Lite replacement for the original DS was announced, Nintendo UK made it very clear that the pink original would continue to be manufactured. When the DS Lite received its own pink version it had similar success, and Sony aped the move in 2006 by releasing a pink PSP and a pink PS2.

 

Paint the whole world with a rainbow!

Clearly there's a place for black and white and grey phones, lots of people like them, but if Nokia and other S60 manufacturers are serious about broadening the platform into the mainstream, they might be wise to start putting out some models with radically new looks, including new colours. One step in this direction seems to be the shiny red version of the recently announced N76, as shown below. Whether we'll ever see any other bright S60 colour schemes remains a mystery...

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Big In Japan

Incidentally, the Japanese are far more receptive to brightly coloured devices, as you can tell by looking at some of the Japanese phones that run the MOAP version of Symbian OS:

 

Krisse, 10 January 2007