Samsung Champ: Champ or chump, you decide.

There seems to be an almost daily stream of touchscreen handset announcements at the moment. The HTC Wildfire, the soon to be released HTC desire, the LG Optimus have all had the press crawling all over them like dung beetles around, well, dung. So just when the last thing we want to see is some minimalist looking blob shaped thing that promises to do everything but make us a cup of tea in the morning we get the announcement of the Samsung Champ (pictured here).

Now there is nothing especially wrong with the Champ. It has a decent, though not awe inspiring set of features and it very fashionably offers apps from the Samsung app store. The camera looks to be pretty rough at 1.3 megapixels but the phone is designed to be a touchscreen handset for cash conscious consumers. So far so good you might think but our worry at select mobile is this.  Where is the innovation? Every phone these days looks like an iPhone drawn by a three year old. Or it looks like some tarted up Blackberry with a QWERTY keypad about as usable and worthwhile as an app that tracks your bowel movements. What we need is a phone designer with the vision of a Picasso or a Matisse.

Imagine a phone that was shaped like a cube that could only be operated by a tame dove? Or some rhombus shaped affair that changed colour according to your mood? Or how about an old school wind up dial telephone from the seventies that was miniaturized and had to be worn around your neck? Just some sort of spark of invention rather than this endless conveyor belt of poor iPhone clones would be welcome. Consumers are losing aesthetic choice at an alarming rate and although these touchscreen phones are all technically proficient in some way they just don’t have any wow factor that really makes people step back.

We remember when the first RAZR phone from Motorola came out and visually it stuck out like a sore thumb. But people bought it in droves despite the fact that it sucked in the usability stakes. This attitude of flogging stripped down iPhone clones to customers who won’t pay the exorbitant premium for an Apple product is not only patronising but it is dangerous for the industry as a whole. If every phone looks the same then why bother upgrading or changing? Vibrancy in the design process would ensure that the general public are excited by phones. At the moment the sight of a new touchscreen handset is about as exciting as filling in a tax return form. So please Samsung and all you other manufacturers inject some originality into your design and you may just have a chance of slugging it out with Apple.