Here are 7 weird phones we saw in the weird year of 2020 — from clamshell foldables to swivel phones to concepts that won’t come out for years.
2020 has been some year – and it’s totally understandable if you missed a few phone launches amid the chaos and headline-grabbing events. That turmoil certainly reached the smartphone industry, but somehow, phones still came out, and some are even weirder than usual.2019 might have been the year that the foldable debuted, but in 2020 we got a rollable phone on our minds (courtesy of TCL) and a swivel phone in our hands (thank you, LG). Of course, we got our first clamshell foldables, too, with the Motorola Razr bringing the iconic flip phone to the modern age – and Samsung hot on its heels with its own Galaxy Z Flip. We also got our first look at the next hot thing in smartphones — goodbye notches and punch-holes, hello under-display selfie cameras. And finally, not all advances are next-gen tech — sometimes all it takes is the inclusion of old features, like styluses, in the most unlikely of places. So here’s our favorite weird phones that debuted in 2020, roughly in the order they appeared — some of which we held in our hands, and others that are still too futuristic to hit the market. The OnePlus Concept One was by far the most exciting phone at CES 2020 all the way back in January. While it was quickly clear the experimental handset would never be sold in stores, the Concept One was a cool approach to fixing something phone makers had yet to consider a problem: hiding the rear lenses on phones using dimming glass. OnePlus referenced sportscar windows as inspiration for the glass; run a current through it, and it goes from translucent to deeply shaded. The Concept One does this switch automatically when you open the camera app, and the glass strip over the rear cameras subtly transitions from opaque to clear. You’d wonder why OnePlus isn’t rushing this into all its phones, but there are some design considerations — namely whether the glass strip would occlude the cameras if it gets scratched or the mechanism fails. We barely had time to hold the phone and try the (very functional) effect for ourselves, but couldn’t say whether this tech is ready for mass market. We hope so: phone design is too stagnant. While we first got our hands on the Motorola Razr in late 2019, delays pushed its release to early 2020 — and while the clamshell foldable captured the public’s imagination, it didn’t seem like it sold too well. Which is a shame given the design innovation it took to get the Razr to work: a hinge that bends the plastic display in such an esoteric way to keep it from creasing, while also integrating micro-brushes to automatically sweep away particles so they don’t gum up the works. And, yes, the Razr did manage to get a fully-functional smartphone to fold into a form factor that’s half the size of a typical phone’s footprint.
