The iPhone-killer from BlackBerry that killed BlackBerry. The Facebook phone nobody asked for. The Amazon phone that had five (yes, five) cameras on the front. The Samsung flagship that literally went up in smoke. These are just some of the examples of phones that were supposed to be groundbreaking but flopped miserably. Some failed because they arrived too early. Most failed because they misunderstood what people actually want from a phone, and they came from companies scrambling to out-iPhone the iPhone.
Samsung Galaxy Note 7
The (twice!) recalled phone that was a fire hazard
While the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 was highly praised for its stunning design and impressive capabilities, ultimately the phone was recalled twice, then canceled, because it was a fire hazard and there were numerous examples of the Note 7 spontaneously catching on fire due to a flawed battery design.
This was because Samsung tried to cram a too-big battery into the sleek Note 7 frame, causing welding burrs to pierce the insulation tape and the separator layer inside the battery. Samsung released the above video to explain in detail what caused the fire hazard. As a result, the phone was recalled (with Samsung sending fire-safe shipping kits with gloves to all Note 7 purchasers) and replaced with new units. The new units were reported by some to be catching on fire (again), when Samsung just gave up and canceled the Note 7.
HTC First
The Facebook phone nobody asked for and nobody needed
Facebook made its own phone for some reason in 2013. It was simply a smaller HTC phone with a Facebook launcher — to make friends’ status updates front and center — called Facebook Home, and it had Facebook Messenger chat-heads enabled by default.
Otherwise, the HTC First had a forgettable camera and boring hardware. This phone just begged the question: why did Facebook want to make a phone, when you can just install the Facebook app and launcher on any other Android phone and have pretty much the same experience? Fortunately, the phone was only around $99 on AT&T, but it didn’t sell because no one wanted a Facebook phone.
No one wanted a Facebook phone.
Nokia Lumia 1020
Windows Phone’s demise
The Lumia 1020 was one of the first phones to result from Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia, and it was a really nice phone, with the highly acclaimed 41MP PureView camera, a beautiful polycarbonate design, and the sleek Windows Phone 8 operating system.
The Lumia 1020 had a major flaw present in all Windows Phones of that era that ultimately led to the demise of the Lumia 1020 and caused Microsoft to abandon its mobile operating system completely.
What killed this phone was the lack of apps. Microsoft was late to the smartphone platform wars because it took too long to abandon its Windows Mobile platform to switch to Windows Phone with its beautiful Metro UI. As a result, Windows Phone never had the breadth of apps that Android and iOS had as Microsoft failed to woo developers that were already focusing on iPhone and Android; in fact, the Windows Phone app store lacked a lot of major must-have apps, like Instagram, Snapchat, and every Google app.
The Windows Phone app store lacked a lot of major must-have apps, like Instagram, Snapchat, and every Google app.
I brought Windows Phone tiles back on Android and it’s awesome
Bring back the iconic design of a Windows Phone with this easy-to-use smartphone launcher.
RED Hydrogen One
The “4D” screen on this expensive experiment caused motion sickness
The $1300 RED Hydrogen One, which would cost $1655 in today’s money, was born from acclaimed high-end camera maker RED and came with high expectations that were not met. It was positioned as the world’s first “Holographic” phone. It had big speakers, a heavy, industrial design with rubber side grips, and a large battery. It had been under development for so long that it shipped with a previous-generation Snapdragon processor that was already behind the curve when it launched.
But the gimmick was the Holographic display that offered glasses-free 3D with its “4V 4-View Display”. Users could enjoy low-resolution depth with compatible content, but with a lot of eyestrain and blur. When not viewing 3D content, the Hydrogen ONE suffered from low screen brightness, dot-matrix artifacts from the 4V display layer, and huge speakers that didn’t make it any louder than a regular phone like the Pixel 3. Overall, it was the bad display that killed the ONE: the holographic gimmick caused motion sickness, and when using the phone regularly, the screen wasn’t bright enough.
Finally, the cameras were a huge miss. The dual 12MP cameras, despite RED’s color science and technology, were no better than those of other, much cheaper smartphones at the time. The One was supposed to come out with expandable modules like the “Cinema Grade” Camera module, a storage module, and battery accessories. Because the phone flopped, no modules came out.
Amazon Fire Phone
No Google apps and a screen with too much novelty was a bad combination
Amazon made a phone in 2014 that had a few too many party tricks. In an attempt to answer the question, “How is this different?” Amazon came up with a user interface that relied on five front-facing cameras to track the user’s eyes and head movement, called Dynamic Perspective. It was a gimmick, according to many who tried it, that would let you see depth in certain situations. It could allow you scroll lists and pages without touching the phone, or view your homescreen with layers of depth if you moved the phone a bit.
The Amazon Fire Phone didn’t have any Google apps or the Play Store. At a time when app selection was one of the most important considerations for smartphone buyers, it was unacceptable that any phone of the era would not have access to Google’s app store, even though the Fire Phone technically ran Android (with Amazon’s Fire OS on top). The Amazon App Store, at the time, had just 240,000 apps (most from independent developers), while the Google Play Store had five times as many at 1.3 million. This was a huge difference, and I remember how frustrating it was not to be able to use the apps I wanted on my Fire phone (especially Google apps like Gmail, Hangouts, etc.) because Amazon’s app store was so limited.
However, the Fire Phone did have a cool technology that predated Google Lens and Apple Visual Intelligence. It was called Firefly, and it could recognize anything you pointed the camera app at and let you buy it on Amazon.
At $650, which is in 2025 money is $880, the Fire Phone was a tough sell. The Dynamic Perspective screen was unnecessary, and the other Amazon features, like Firefly, could just have been standalone apps.
BlackBerry Storm
The “iPhone-killer” that killed BlackBerry
Research-in-Motion (RIM), much like the entire phone industry, was taken off-guard by the release of the iPhone in 2007. Prior to the iPhone, all business phones had a hardware keyboard so that they could be good messaging devices. But in 2007, Apple invented the multi-touch keyboard, and users quickly found out the truth: typing on a multi-touch keyboard was faster than any hardware keyboard with just a little bit of practice.
At the time, RIM’s only main point of differentiation was the acclaimed keyboards that BlackBerry users loved. Often combined with a trackball, BlackBerry devotees could utilize buttons to get more done and whiz around the operating system quickly. RIM had never made a touchscreen BlackBerry before the Storm because they wanted to do it the BlackBerry way — with tactility. So RIM invented a ridiculous technology called SurePress, which made the entire screen into a physical clicky button that you could depress when typing. Before the Storm came out, early rumors indicated that RIM had figured out how to make a glass touchscreen keyboard that could emulate the feeling of typing on real buttons, but on a flat surface. In theory, each button could sink into the screen when pressed, so that the screen’s movement would be localized to the user’s press. But they never cracked the code on that technology — instead, their SurePress screen was a cheap way to try to make glass feel like a button. The problem was that since the entire typing surface would move after every key press from the same location and require a lot of pressure to trigger the mechanical “click” of the screen, people found the Storm laborious to type on. It was far worse than just using a multi-touch software keyboard like the iPhone or like the Androids of the day.
RIM had never done a touchscreen BlackBerry prior to the Storm because they wanted to do it the BlackBerry way — with tactility. So RIM invented a ridiculous technology called SurePress
The Storm had several other major problems, like no built-in Wi-Fi (it was a Verizon exclusive, and at the time, Verizon wanted to force people onto its new 3G network, so excluding Wi-Fi meant people had to rely on cellular connectivity). Also, the BlackBerry platform was far behind iPhone and Android from an app perspective.
Because of these issues, the BlackBerry Storm had a nearly 100% return rate (seriously!), and ended up costing RIM hundreds of millions of dollars. There was a Storm 2 that came out a year later, but that too was a flop for most of the same reasons.
Different is not always better
Ultimately, there’s a formula for what makes a good modern smartphone. But whether RIM, Facebook, Amazon, Nokia, or RED, many attempts were made to deviate from this formula, and they failed. Different for the sake of different is not always better, and while OEMs should continue to innovate and try new things, sometimes it just doesn’t pay off to attempt groundbreaking features when people just want a great, well-rounded phone.
