[POLL] What color is your phone?

For many years, smartphone manufacturers stuck to traditional and somewhat boring colors when designing their smartphones, but over the past 18 months, we’ve seen a shift in the norm. Where Black and White smartphones used to be the colours most widely used, now we have Gold, Silver and plenty more, but which is the color to have?

Over the past 12 months, we’ve conducted numerous color comparisons showing off everything from the obscure to the familiar. We’ve seen companies like Samsung show off “black” phones that are actually blue and the likes of HTC, Huawei and even LG, dabble in pink phones that go by a plethora of names.

From Rose Gold to Mystic Champagne; Sterling Silver to Whisper White; and Sapphire Black to Platinum Gold; what color is your phone? Which company has inspired you to buy a non-traditional phone and have you bought a phone that you thought would be one color by the name but turned out to be another?

The traditional colours

Smartphone colours have mostly settled upon five major colour groups: Black, White, Silver, Gold and Pink. However, just because it is a “black” phone, doesn’t necessarily mean it is actually “black” when you use it. Here’s 3 colour sets that companies love to create new inventive names form, and at the same time, play mind games on the customers that use them.

Black

Black may have been around forever, but it is only recently that companies have started being inventive with the definition of what makes a smartphone, actually black. Taking Samsung for example, the name of the black Galaxy S6 family was Black Sapphire, but in actual usage, the smartphone shined a midnight blue as you twirled it under the light.

On the other hand, many companies have adopted black as actually meaning black, and at the same time, we’ve started seeing companies introduce flecks and other tweaks to the material to give off a unique feel. Black is definitely a safe choice for a smartphone color, and for the most part, it can be very useful to prevent fingerprints from showing up.

Gold

Gold; everyone’s favourite color and, according to Norm Franz, “it is the money of kings.” Gold is a relatively new smartphone color to the market, having only been widely used for the past few years, but it proves to be one of the most contentiously-named color options out there.

After all, what is the difference between Champagne Gold, Platinum Gold, Gold and all the other names that companies can think of? There’s also Rose Gold, which is a mix of Gold and Pink and plenty more, where OEMs have stretched the boundaries of what is gold and what isn’t.

Pink

Of the three picked for this highlight, pink is the newest entrant to the smartphone market, and is now widely used on smartphones thanks to Apple adopting it for the iPhone. To clarify, pink was used previously but only became truly fashionable after it was used by Apple in the iPhone 6S (see Josh’s thoughts on Apple’s flagship in the video below).

Apple calls that special blend Rose Gold, and in actual use, it’s where Gold, Pink and White combine to create a splurge of elegancy and fancy. Gold has been somewhat adopted on the Android scene, with HUAWEI and LG both offering their latest handsets in the peachy-color.

What colour is your phone?

If there’s one thing that’s clear, the name of your smartphone color isn’t always a representative of its actual color, so on that note, what color phone do you have and is its name representative of its actual color? What’s your favourite color for that matter? Vote in the poll and let us know your thoughts in the comments below!