We’ve seen many wacky Android phones break cover over the years, with mainstream hits and hotly-anticipated flops.
Handsets such as the sci-fiGoogle Project Aramodular phone, and theMi Mix Alphawith its wrap-around screen, sadly never made it to mainstream availability, but plenty of extraordinary Android phones did — and boy, have we seen some weird and wonderful creations over the years.
Here are our favorites among the sea of the wackiest mainstream Android phones we’ve witnessed.
1Sony Ericsson Xperia Play (2011)
The ‘PlayStation phone’ felt like it could shake up mobile gaming, but in reality, it didn’t quite live up to the billing. The sideways-sliding design wasn’t anything new, Android phones had been doing this since the beginning to reveal QWERTY keyboards, but on the Xperia Play there were far fewer buttons uncovered as you spun the handset to landscape and pushed the screen up.
Here you were greeted with the familiar triangle, circle, x, and square buttons on the right and a D-pad to the left — plus select and start keys, and L and R shoulder buttons. Yes, it was a portable Dualshock controller with a screen aimed at offering mobile games cheaper than Sony’s dedicated PSP handheld console. However, a poor game library, uncomfortable grip, weighty design, and high upfront cost saw the Xperia Play fade into obscurity.
2HTC Evo 3D / LG Optimus 3D (2011)
The Nintendo 3DS wasn’t the only handheld gadget flexing its three-dimensional muscles in 2011, as two smartphone giants of the time — HTC and LG — were also getting in on the action. Both the HTC Evo 3D and LG Optimus 3D boasted glasses-free 3D displays, giving you a new sense of perspective when staring at your phone screen — and it was pretty exciting stuff as we were in the middle of the 3D bubble.
The phones could also capture 3D photos and record 3D video, yet few people had larger screens at home to view the media on, so most of the time you were stuck watching it back on the handset’s non-HD screens. Technology moves fast and the 3D bubble burst just a few years later. 3D TVs, 3D phones, and the 3DS are nothing more than historical items now — but for a brief time these wacky Android phones were wonderful as well as weird.
3Yotaphone 2 (2014)
A Russian-designed Android smartphone with a second, E Ink display on its rear. If this isn’t wacky, we don’t know what is. The follow-up to the original Yotaphone which had a more limited release, Yotaphone 2 refined the design and the result was a beautiful looking and feeling phone with a surprisingly usable E Ink second screen.
While the software was a little rough around the edges, the package was intriguing with the low-power display on the rear offering the option for extra-long battery life and a comfortable reading experience. Available in over 20 countries, it did sadly run intotrouble with its North American launch, with backers from its canceled crowdfunding campaign being offered an international model or a refund.
4Samsung Galaxy Beam (2012)
It’s an Android smartphone with a built-in projector. Yep, that’s the phone. One of many wacky Samsung phones of the era (who else remembers theSamsung Galaxy Round?), theGalaxy Beamhad a projector on its top edge. All you needed was a surface to lay the phone on and a flat vertical surface to project onto. You did need to be in almost total darkness to have a chance of seeing the projection, which could beam a display up to 50 inches in size at a less impressive resolution of 640 x 360.
The rest of the handset had middling specs for the time, which was a bit of an issue as it was billed as a business tool that could display presentations with ease. Things weren’t quite that simple, but at the end of the day, the wacky Android phone with a built-in projector did actually work.
5Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom (2013)
Part smartphone, part actual camera, theGalaxy S4 Zoomwas another wacky offering from Samsung’s wild era of handset design. The unavoidable feature here was the whopping 10x optical zoom lens stuck on the rear of the handset. From the back, you’d easily mistake the S4 Zoom for a standalone digital camera — especially the Galaxy Camera launched the year before — while on the front the large screen, navigation keys, earpiece, and Android OS screamed smartphone.
There’s no denying the 10x optical lens helped you get up close and personal with subjects without seeing a reduction in image quality. It did make the handset insanely heavy and unbalanced though. Can’t win them all.
6LG G Flex (2013)
“An engineering concept you can actually buy” is how David Ruddock headlinedour reviewof the LG G Flex back in 2013 and gosh darn it, Dave was spot on. The G Flex felt like a phone that shouldn’t have made it out of the R&D department — but it did, and it was a marvel. As well as being one of the first phones to use a flexible OLED display which allowed the handset to have a distinct curvature, its ‘flexible’ frame meant you could lay it face down and apply pressure to the rear to flatten it out.
The ‘flex’ distance was minimal, and it made an awful creaking sound when you did so — but it did work. And then there was the self-healing back. Yes, really — light scratches would simply just disappear. It was space-age stuff, but also vastly expensive and not the best handset on the market.
7Neptune Pine (2014)
One of the most curious entries on our list, theNeptune Pineskipped being a handset altogether and went straight to an Android phone packed into a smartwatch. While it started life as a crowdfunded project, the Neptune Pine achieved mainstream availability on Amazon and in Best Buy. As you might imagine it wasn’t the most elegant accessory to adorn your wrist, nor was it particularly small. Well, apart from the 2.5-inch screen which made it more than a little fiddly to tap around Android.
Although far from ideal, the novel design saw the Pine feature in the eighth Fast & Furious film, TV series Extant, and Trey Songz’s raunchy music video for Smartphones. If you think about it, the Pine is a bigger star than any of the other Android phones here.
8BlackBerry Priv (2015)
It was one of those “if hell freezes over” scenarios, but after years of resistance, BlackBerry finally buckled under market pressure and gave in to the one thing it had been desperately trying to avoid. It ditched its BlackBerry 10 operating system in favor of Android, and the oddly named Priv was the first offering to bear the famous name.
QWERTY keyboard-toting Androids had all but disappeared from the market by 2015, but BlackBerry stuck to its guns and offered up a sliding phone with its iconic keys. For the die-hard keyboard fans it was a welcome addition to a mundane market, but in reality the world had moved on, and the Priv signaled the beginning of the end for BlackBerry-branded handsets.
9Moto Z / Z Force (2016)
As standalone Android phones, the Moto Z and Moto Z Force were relatively unremarkable. They were off the pace of the flagships of the time — but Motorola did have a pretty awesome ace up its sleeve in the form ofMoto Mods. Moto’s own take on modular smartphones, the Z and Z Force allowed you to attach hardware modules such as a projector, JBL speaker, 360 camera, and gamepad to the back of them.
A fantastic idea in principle, but one which failed to take off fully with limited and largely uninspiring Mods and significant design limitations imposed on future Motorola handsets to support Mods. Fast forward to the present day and no one outside of Fairphone is bothering with modular features anymore. Better to have loved and lost, then to have not loved at all.
10LG Wing 5G (2020)
Born out of what seemed like a Covid-19 fever-dream in LG’s labs, the LG Wing was a bizarre dual screen phone which saw the main display spin 90 degrees to uncover a smaller, second display. The design allowed you to watch a full-screen video on the 6.8-inch display, while browsing other apps on the smaller 3.9-inch screen — but it wasn’t without its issues. A number of apps struggled to load properly on the smaller screen, and there was a disconnect between home screens which made navigation frustrating. It was a lot of fun though, and not many phones get the level of reaction and interest from folks in public as the LG Wing.
