Recent Pixel smartphones have garnered a lot of interest as Google has gotten more serious about selling its own phones instead of simply working on the Android operating system and letting other companies use it on their hardware. As the popularity of the Google Pixel brand continues to rise, there’s no surprise that we see more and more of the Pixel smartphones these days.
And, well, every time I see one of the latest Pixel phones, and even phones from some other manufacturers, it reminds me how I hate one aspect of Samsung’s current smartphone design philosophy: the placement of the cameras on the back.
Death to wobbly smartphones please!
For the longest time, Samsung used to put the camera island in the middle of pretty much every phone’s backside. But that has not been the case these last few years – the Galaxy S10 was the last Samsung flagship with the rear cameras centered in the middle, for example. Nowadays, Galaxy smartphones come with the rear cameras located on the top left corner, and it’s something that irritates me (and at least one of my colleagues) to no end.
The primary reason it irritates me is that having the camera island centered used to be much better for stability, particularly when you would place the phone on a desk or other solid surface and use it without picking it up. Doing so with a phone that has the rear cameras/camera island offset to the corner, on the other hand, makes for a wobbly design and a poorer user experience (something Galaxy Note users in particular might have noticed when using the S Pen).
Frankly, the centered camera island design also looked better, at least to me. The Galaxy S10 has been on the market for four years, and it still looks great. It’s not that devices like the Galaxy S22 Ultra or the Galaxy Z Fold 4 are ugly by any stretch of the imagination, but in my eyes that change in the location of the rear cameras took the sheen off Samsung’s smartphone design a little.
But, again, the reduced stability when the device is sitting on a hard surface is a bigger concern. Unfortunately, I don’t think Samsung cares or will go back to the old design any time soon, or ever, so it’s a concern I will have to live with, especially since the only solution would be to switch to a non-Samsung phone, and that’s something I don’t see myself doing.