So the other day I stumbled on a post by Rene Ritchie over at iMore, The difference between Apple and Samsung industrial design, where he touched on something that I consider to be highly important, but also something I didn’t notice at first glance. I recently bought a Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge that I have been using instead of my usual iPhone 6 (yes, don’t worry I also use a Lumia 930), and so far haven’t had any real complaints, other than it doesn’t play nice with the ID3 tags on my iTunes music, and that TouchWiz really sucks (good thing Nokia made Z Launcher for me to replace it with). I hadn’t used Android in a while, and I was ready to be convinced by Samsung that this time they had actually gone and learned something about industrial design, actually producing flagship phones truly worthy of their price tag. And then I saw that article I just mentioned.
Can you see it? If you look closely, can you notice that the USB port, headphone jack, speaker grille and microphone aren’t aligned on the S6 Edge pictured above? Notice how they follow a perfect straight line on the iPhone? And it’s not just on the bottom of the phone that we find this:
Once again, the mic, SIM card slot and IR blaster don’t align.
Same goes for the standard S6 with the power button and the SIM tray not lining up as we can see above.
What is going on here? Apple don’t even run their own factories like Samsung do, and their phones don’t have this problem. Samsung spent billions of dollars and many years designing the S6 and S6 Edge, and yet they failed to notice this very straightforward and simple detail that may appear to you to be very minor, but is a big deal when you consider that this company is the largest manufacturer of mobile phones around the world. Not that I’ve used one yet, but it doesn’t appear that the LG G4 that Ali recently wrote about has this problem.
Safe to say after realising this, I put my SIM card back in to my iPhone 6.
I’ll leave you with a thought – which of these phones has been designed by artists, and which has been designed by businessmen merely out to get a profit?