At the Mobile Phone Museum, a collection of more than 2,800 models dating back to the 1980s are on display.
Whether it be the Nokia “brick” or a Motorola flip phone, the online gallery encapsulates an era of technological variety that some enthusiasts fear has now been lost.
“We lived through two decades of intensive device diversity with phones of all shapes and sizes – candybar phones, flip phones, slider phones, phones that spun around,” says Ben Wood, founder of the museum and chief analyst at CCS Insight.
“Then in January 2007, Steve Jobs walked on stage and pulled the iPhone out of his pocket and effectively created what has become the dominant design for a phone. So we live in this sea of sameness now with all phones pretty much looking the same.”
His comments underscore the sense of stagnation in a mobile phone market that, after decades of innovation, appears to have reached maturity.
At the same time, the eye-watering cost of new devices has deterred many buyers from splashing out on the latest gadgets.
As a result, phone makers are now hoping that advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) will revitalise interest in smartphones, reversing a recent slump in demand.
The decline in mobile phone sales has been marked. Apple reported a 10pc drop in iPhone sales in its most recent quarter, while network operators such as Vodafone and Virgin Media O2 are estimated to have suffered a drop in handset sales of around 20pc last year.
Yet this is just part of a broader downward trend. Mobile phone sales in the UK stood at 29.7m units in 2013. A decade later, that fell to just 13.4m in 2023, according to estimates from CCS Insight.
At the heart of this decline is a tendency for consumers to hold onto their devices for longer. Data from Ofcom shows people are now keeping their phones for 5.5 years on average – an increase of six months since 2020.
One of the main factors driving this decline is cost. When the first-generation iPhone was released in 2007, it sold for around £380. By contrast, the cheapest version of the iPhone 15 was priced at £799 on its release last year.
There’s no doubt that the functionality of smartphones has increased radically over this period. Still, they are now big-ticket purchases that are less affordable for most consumers.
“The cost of living crisis is making it harder for customers to afford new handsets – and some customers may not be able to afford the expense of upgrading when they would like to do so,” wrote market watchers at Enders Analysis in a note this week.
“While inflation has come down to targeted levels, it will take some time for wages to catch up and for households to feel well off enough to make big purchases again, and so this impact may wane very slowly.”
More fundamentally, however, the latest generations of smartphones simply do not offer enough new features to entice buyers.
While new iterations previously offered dramatic advances in technology, this progress has slowed in recent years and upgrades are often limited to improvements in camera quality.
Even the more outlandish recent developments – such as foldable phones and screens that wrap around your wrist – are more aesthetic than functional.
“The pace of change as the mobile phone evolved over that period from the mid-1990s to 2007 was characterised by an unbelievable acceleration in capabilities,” says Wood. “The updates on mobile phones at the moment, particularly from a hardware perspective, are very incremental.”
Rising costs and delayed upgrades have begun to have an impact on how smartphones are marketed and sold.
Operators now offer longer contracts, allowing consumers to spread out their costs.
There has also been an increase in phone financing, with manufacturers such as Apple and Google offering 0pc interest on monthly payments.
Most significant, however, has been the rise of the refurbished phone market.
Deterred by high costs and with less urgency to snap up the latest model, people are increasingly happy to tap the second-hand market.
Environmental concerns have contributed to this trend, while consumers have begun to recognise that selling their old phones can help to fund an upgrade.
Second-hand phones accounted for 20pc of the UK market in 2023 with a value of nearly £1bn, according to CCS Insight.
Unsurprisingly, this trend is anathema to manufacturers, who are now looking for ways to win back customers and encourage them to upgrade more frequently.
AI is at the heart of this push. Apple will next month roll out a raft of new features, dubbed Apple Intelligence, that include an upgrade to its Siri digital assistant and the embedding of ChatGPT on iPhones. Google this week followed suit, unveiling its next generation of AI-powered Pixel phones.
Analysts at Enders say this could provide a temporary boost to phone sales, but warn the longer-term impact will depend on how the technology develops.
Wood is also sceptical. “The good thing with AI is it will give them something to talk about, it will introduce some new capabilities,” he says. “But I’m far from convinced that AI on its own will reverse the trend of people keeping their phones for longer.”
So with no guarantee that AI will entice the masses and little sign that prices will start to come down, the mobile market may have its work cut out to win back apathetic consumers.
