Endeavour Partners

Orange UK announced their imminent release of the new TG01 today, confirming the first major debut of the world’s first Snapdragon phone.  The TG01, which runs WinMo 6.1, looks amazing on paper with a 800×480 pixel touchscreen and driven by the monster 1GHz Qualcomm core.  There’s just one problem: it’s too big!

Toshiba TG01

Image via Gizmander

Over the past year or so we have seen the convergence of smartphone form factors to a few dominant designs.  And of course, one the most import important pieces of a design is its dimensions.

While the height, width and depth of a phone may seem like arbitrary design considerations dependent upon internal componentry, it turns out that there a few golden dimensions that make a phone pleasing to use.   Consider the two places a phone is almost always located when on your person:

1. In your hand
2. In your pocket

In your hand the width primarily matters, since you grasp a phone vertically to make use of your thumb.  This ‘golden’ width seems to be around 60mm.  Any wider and it feels bulky and awkward.  Any skinnier and it is hard to manage.

In your pocket height is the limiting design factor, since your leg performs mostly vertical movement.  The ‘golden’ height here is about 105mm.  Any taller than that and the phone begins to noticeably jut into the leg when moving around, sitting down or climbing stairs.

When it comes to thinness, you can be too thin; much below about 9 or 10mm it becomes hard to radius the edges enough to avoid them digging painfully into the pads of your fingers.

With this in mind, let’s see how today’s leading smartphones stack up against the TG01:

Evident from both the 3D and front views of these five phones, the TG02 is simply too tall and too wide.  Even the iPhone is slightly too tall, being 5mm over the ideal 110mm height.

Toshiba can focus on their ultra high resolution screen and lightning fast chipset all they want, but without a design that satisfies the customer’s tactile senses a phone will never be a mainstream success.  This becomes ever so important with almost all major industry players converging on these ‘golden’ form factors.

They’re also not going to be helped in the smartphone wars by shipping as rumored with WinMo 6.1, against devices running iPhone, WebOS or Android which are also good-looking ’supermodels’.