Millet cell phone Refraction design Team Challenge

Millet in the 3rd generation with Lumia similar to the circular border design, indicating that its industrial design team's original thinking met with challenges.

"Hardware, software, services" is well-known millet home of the triathlon, in measuring whether a smartphone is welcomed by the market standards, a simple summary is to do two things: how to do a good job of a breaking mobile phone and how to sell out. In how to sell, millet for marketing understanding and implementation of the domestic manufacturers in the forefront. But in the mobile phone above, can not keep up with the quick action of marketing.

Mobile phone hardware design, in addition to reference to the parameters of performance indicators, the most important and intuitive is its appearance of industrial design. From the video of the launch of the 1~3, I found that no more than 1 minutes of the depth of the introduction of millet for the concept of design, why this design and its industrial design breakthroughs.

M 1 to M 3 design breakthrough

In today's smart machines and the age of the era, hardware and software no longer the gap between the difference is increasingly small. The choice of the user depends on the brand and price/performance. As the only 3 years of mobile phone business, from the brand awareness of millet is not enough and Apple has 30 years of history compared to the international giants, but as the same field of competitors and not around, as the industry's benchmark to consciously unconsciously take it compared. In addition to the performance of cost-effective, the trend of homogeneous, non-Apple machine can also be in where to make a fuss? This is all the mobile phone business facing the thinking, but also millet to face.

Whether it is the industry's hot cloud service or the optimization of the operating experience, everyone is advocating their own design ideas. What difference does it make when these ideas are implemented in the same design as their mobile phones? What can a merchant do when the performance is the same, the software experience is identical, and the appearance is similar? This needs to be built on industrial design, and in the current high-end market, the only apple that can grasp this point is deeply rooted.

Mobile phone industry design of high and low, ultimately depends on the material materials and process standards, material selection of the pros and cons affect the user's feel, which determines the overall industrial texture of the phone. As a representative of mainstream mobile phone in China, millet the first two generations have adopted the traditional plastic process, in the 1 of the normal appearance of the upgrade, M 2 using the black and white color contrast, to highlight the opposite side of pure white plastic polishing, to enhance the palm and mobile contact between the smooth feeling. The polished plastic back plate, held in the hands of the feeling compared to the previous 1 of the matte back to improve.

For the design of the button, the metal material is much better than plastic. The mobile phone's button is usually the most frequently contacted one peripheral function, although the button is only the handset structure the accessory part, but has the vital function to its material craft design. After the IPhone 4 and the ipad Air and the ipad Mini, all of the metal buttons are designed to be more powerful than the previous plastic buttons, because the long friction between the fingers and the metal is stronger than the plastic, allowing the skin to lubricate the tactile sensation on the smooth surface of the metal. This is why the millet fuselage is plastic, the button uses metal material reasons.

Into the rice 3, Millet did not continue in the mobile phone around the corner using a 80-degree fillet, but with a new process face appearance, 3 years to the first major exchange transfusion redesign. The rounded corners around the border are used at both ends of the fuselage, which creates a border that is half curved and no longer a cube. This design is based on the comfort of the fingers and facial grip, this is the standard design of the Nokia Lumia series, millet in the 3rd generation with the Lumia similar round border design, the industrial design team's original thinking met with challenges. Completely overturn the old model before, all redesign from the beginning, to only set up less than 3 years of mobile phone operators, the basis of change is too big. This way of groping, but also need to use a few generations of iterative accumulation, will enter into the final Millet style system.

Size dilemma

In addition to looking at the mobile phone's industrial materials, size design is a puzzle to the industry. Nowadays, all the merchants are trying their best to make the display bigger. For the mobile phone screen after the end of a few inches to calculate the right, the industry has been no standard provisions, most of them according to their own standards, from the market 4.5~5.8 inch of various sizes. The size of this mess, often overwhelmed, the boundaries of tablets and mobile phones are blurred by the dazzling size.

Most ordinary users of the single hand thumb handshake machine posture, contact across the screen about 4 inches, more than this range, you must use the other hand to operate. So the 4-inch range should be the most appropriate size for the design screen. But now, some of the mainstream mobile phone makers except Apple are not fixed on this size. On the contrary, there is a consensus that big and large, it seems to show that they are not outdated.

The size of the clutter behind, you can see that businesses lack of user experience in the cognitive, but also a compromise of self-confidence. Mobile phone as a rich communication tool, once beyond the scope of the single hand operation, the essential meaning of the mobile phone will gradually lose. The 5-inch big screen mobile phone, represented by 3 meters, seems to me to violate the user's one-hand experience.

Design Style convergence

Since the advent of the iphone, Apple has established a phone-style specification: A home key, a 3.5-inch master screen. Now all the businesses in this framework to set the design of the fuselage, which makes all mobile phones in the market are stereotyped, no personality. Before the iphone, you can use a variety of strange shapes, although these physical buttons space operation complex, the entity's buttons can not be compared with today's touch technology, but a variety of models, you can see the business of mobile phone design thinking. Since the iphone's penetration into mobile phones over the years, the industry's overall thinking about mobile phones is less daring than the 2007 "former smartphone era". Can be seen in such an existing model, in fact, is a kind of lazy design thinking.

In the absence of new ideas to break the inherent style of design, then the representative of the domestic business of millet for mobile phone technology performance, you can see from the inside what clues?

From the first two generations of millet shell assembly structure, you can clearly see the front main screen and the back shell two layers of black and white solid docking traces. This has no obvious difference from the process structure of other traditional phones, and to 3 of this positive and negative stamped line is concealed wrapped in the main body of the back shell, the purpose of this process is to make you feel not a separate industrial docking, while reducing the thickness of the fuselage, the overall looks seamless. The process is also seen in Nokia's Lumia series and Apple's iphone 5S, where different materials are chosen differently, and the resulting docking performance reacts differently.

This integration of high-precision technology, will not directly affect the user for a mobile phone view of the good or bad, but the advantage of this process is that no need to use the material of the two modules to complete the mobile phone main screen and back stitching, just set a body as the overall body, and on this basis for processing, This allows the overall thickness of the fuselage to be controlled. When the thickness is controlled, the main screen and the back as a whole, the overall flow of the mobile phone will appear, if the use of high-performance materials, such as: Metal aluminum alloy, then the overall texture of the mobile phone will be greatly improved.

Through the process of rice 3, we can see the domestic mobile phone business to learn the attitude of groping. But for industrial design thinking, it will take a long time to precipitate.