Samsung spent the first half of this year telling anyone who would listen that the D830 was the world’s slimmest phone. The D830 is four months old. It is no longer even the slimmest phone Samsung sells, because Samsung took the record off itself in June with the X820 at 6.9 millimeters, and the marketing didn’t even pause to catch its breath.
You can buy one unlocked for about four hundred and fifty dollars, which is a lot of money for a phone whose defining characteristic is an absence.
I keep going back and forth on whether this is a real engineering competition or a marketing one wearing engineering clothes, and I have landed on the second. Getting to 6.9mm is genuinely hard; nobody should pretend otherwise, and the people who did it deserve their beer. But they chose the target because it produces a headline number, and a headline number is something you can beat by a tenth of a millimeter next spring and issue another press release about. That is not a roadmap. That is a treadmill with a marketing department at the controls.
What it costs is the stuff nobody puts on a poster. Batteries are the thickest component in a phone, and the one you cannot cheat, so thinner means a smaller cell, which means a device that needs charging more often than the fat one it replaced. Structural rigidity goes the same way. I have not managed to break an X820, and I am also not confident it survives a year in a back pocket, and neither of those is a specification anyone will publish.
The screen puzzles me most. Samsung has laid it out in landscape, 220 by 176, on a phone you hold vertically like every other phone. I have used it for a week, and I still catch myself misreading a menu. Somebody made that decision for a reason, and I cannot work out what the reason was.
All of this is downstream of the Razr, obviously. Motorola proved that thin sells, and everyone else has spent eighteen months trying to out-thin them, and Samsung is currently winning that fight while producing phones that are otherwise unremarkable. The D900 slider is the same story with a different mechanism.
The thing I would actually pay more for is a phone that lasts four days. Nobody is building it, because nobody has worked out how to put four days on a shelf label next to a number that goes down every year.