We Miss These Quirky Android Phone Experiments - Gizmodo

Being an Android user can be a clunky experience sometimes, but it can also open you up to a bunch of new device quirks you won’t find elsewhere.

Made by Sony Ericsson, the phone was based on Android, but it was a handheld gaming machine at its core.

The phone featured a slide-out controller with “joystick touchpads” so you could play any of the 50 pre-formatted PlayStation games, plus whatever was on the Android Marketplace at the time.

The round phone trend.

Samsung attempted it in 2013 with the Galaxy Round, a smartphone with “the world’s first commercialized full HD Super AMOLED flexible display.” The phone’s 5.7-inch display curved vertically when you were holding it in portrait mode, and it didn’t lay flat on a table on its backside.

Back then, you could navigate through Android home screens using the touch-swipe mechanism or by rolling left and right on the rollerball, placed in the same area as the former Home button on the iPhone.

Other Android phones adopted this feature, including my first ever Android phone, the HTC Incredible.

Google’s modular smartphone made me hopeful for a future where smartphones weren’t contributing to the massive piles of e-waste sequestered from immediate human view

Unfortunately, those tiles cost way too much to produce for a phone that didn’t yet have mainstream appeal, and Google ultimately killed the project in 2016

We now have a version of the modular phone with the Fairphone, but it requires a bit of a tinkerer’s touch to change components comfortably