Phone designs are boring, never. I see a new wave of new looks for 2026

As I tilted the phone back and forth, admiring the iridescent artwork — a bright electric blue with a wave of gold inspired by Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night” — I was thrilled by the boldness of the design. I wasn’t looking at the screen but at the back panel of the phone. And no, that wasn’t the case.

You’ve probably never heard of the Nubia Z80 Ultra. This high-spec Android phone is among the many devices from Chinese company ZTE that have a unique look, unlike anything else on the market.

I got my hands on it this month in Mobile World Congress In Barcelona. It was just one of many phones that made me, for the first time in a long time, excited about this new wave of design.

To find these phones, you have to look beyond Apple and Samsung, the two brands that dominate the market. For a long time, small companies tried to compete with these giants by imitating their phones at a lower price. They followed the same gentle formula. Each was a uniformly thin slab of plastic or metal in black, silver, or white. Boring, boring, boring. Boring to look at and even boring to review.

Sure, phone makers have sometimes taken a playful approach to colors — blue, green, pink — though these simple experiments still maintain their integrity. Unfortunately, phones with a modular concept e.g Google Ara project and Motorola Moto Z He died before it really took off.

Fortunately, as someone who has passed through many of these boring phones over the years, those days seem to be over.

For example, the foldable revolution introduced book-shaped foldable phones and a modern reinterpretation of foldable phones. It feels like the first time companies have questioned what a phone can do, be or look like — beyond the template Apple set with the first iPhone.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen an abundance of new phones announced from brands big and small, making it a perfect moment to pause and take stock of the current design landscape.

Phone design: Current mode of operation

First, the big dogs. Apple launched iPhone 17e In the first week of March. Available in black, white, and one color (the hottest pink), it follows the tile template the company has relied on for nearly two decades.

At the end of February, Samsung updated its flagship phone lineup with Galaxy S26 A series that is largely indistinguishable from last year. Then the company announced this week that it would do just that No longer sold the Galaxy Z Tri-Foldits most ambitious design in more than a decade, with three panels that fold out to form a tablet-like display. (Galaxy Z Flip and Fold are still available.)

At MWC, where smaller brands came to play, it was a very different story. the Modular design of Tecno phones And ZTE’s wide range of Nubia phones, which ranged from the Starry Night Z80 Ultra to… Neo 5 gaming phoneall of which left a lasting impression.

I was impressed by the craftsmanship and the soft, brushable vegan leather used in the crimson colour Honor Magic V6. My colleague Patrick Holland noted the luxuriously silky texture of the Motorola Razr Fold That could be its biggest selling point. Motorola has, in the past, been a pioneer in designing interesting phones, experimenting with materials like fabric and even wood over the years.

The biggest crowds I’ve seen all week at MWC gathered at Honor’s booth to enjoy their new product Robot phone At work. Not surprising. The robot phone, with its self-aware, gimbal-mounted pop-up cameras, is a collision between robotics (an emerging technology) and mobile phones (an established product category). It’s basically a reinvention of the phone as we know it.

“For decades, the smartphone form factor has remained the same,” Thomas Pei, Honor’s robotic phone expert, told me. “As technology improves, we need a new type of device.”

Honor hasn’t put the phone on sale yet, and it’s not clear how popular it will be when it does. But at the very least, it indicates the company’s desire to imagine and implement a bold and unique phone design.

Be happy with the bold swings from the little players

Clearly, larger, more mainstream companies are less likely to take design risks, while smaller companies, struggling to differentiate themselves in a sea of ​​sameness, take some bold twists. It feels like the opposite of the heyday of experimental phone design, when market leaders Nokia and Sony were releasing all sorts of weird phones: sliders, swivels, and bulbous gadgets with weird keyboard setups.

No phone maker understands using design as a differentiator quite like British startup Nothing, which leans heavily into the nostalgic 2000s aesthetic and away from mainstream minimalism, revealing the textures of its products through transparent casings, playful lighting, and pixelated interfaces.

Nothing’s chief brand officer Charlie Smith, who previously worked at fashion brand Loewe, describes a culture of fun and “rebellious creativity” as core to the company’s design philosophy. Nothing is allowed to make a big splash as a late entrant into a mature, established market.

It has a futuristic and nostalgic look, harking back to the era before the boring days of the phone. “All of that kind of personality has been absorbed,” Smith said, speaking with me before the product launch. Nothing Phone 4A.

The company is starting to embrace color as well. “If we want to make technology fun,” Smith said. “We can’t do this by just having things grey, black and white.”

None of the hardware feels like the antithesis of the quiet luxury that seems to be taking shape more prevalently in Apple’s approach to design — whether it’s through the company’s sleek devices with thin bezels, or the Apple Stores themselves, with their perfectly curved marble balustrades that seem to disappear into the walls.

Even when Apple brings color to the iPhone (think about that Orange effort Last fall, it’s never been more powerful than when bold color choices combine with unique design experiments. For many years, the tech giant has been unwavering in the design of its phones, and to be fair, this has been a profitable (and predictable) strategy that keeps iPhone owners around the world happy. If, as expected, Apple files a Foldable iPhone At some point in the next year or so, he should not be praised for his bravery.

First and foremost, we have to thank the Chinese smartphone makers – Honor, Oppo and Huawei – for pushing the limits of what a phone can handle. Everything these companies, along with Samsung and Motorola, have achieved over the past five years in the foldable space will serve as the foundation for Apple to take what will be a hugely calculated risk.

If this is a risk that pays off, it will serve as validation for the phone makers we’re already seeing making bold moves. Hopefully this will continue to usher in this new era of phone design, which is a lot less boring and a lot more fun.