Poll results: Your least-favorite gimmicky phone hardware features

How do you know when an idea’s a good one? If you had the resources, you could probably design a great smartphone unlike any that’s been seen before, but would it be a success? Manufacturers roll the dice just like that all the time, and while they’ve got plenty of market research and user groups to help steer their decisions, not every effort’s going to land.

A couple weeks back, we took a little stroll down that branch off memory lane where some of the silliest phones ever live, from the who-asked-for-this LG Wing to the wildly ambitious (and utterly unnecessary) Red Hydrogen One. While we’ll always fondly remember the latter for its inexplicable Fast & Furious 9 product placement, most of these phones are well on their way to being distant memories, fated to fade.

There are probably a lot of reasons why some of the handsets on our list didn’t make more of a splash, but when a phone has a gimmicky feature at its core, it’s going to be hard to look much past that. In the effort of getting to the bottom of which of these weird, silly features had the biggest negative impact on the hardware they arrived with, we set you up with a little poll, and now our results are in:

Which of these Android phone features do you think is the worst?

There was a lot of hate to go around, and for the large part it was pretty evenly distributed. This editor takes some solace in seeing you go relatively easy on Motion Sense and Soli, which actually seemed half-useful and might have had a chance it its implementation on the Pixel 4 weren’t so darn inconvenient. But you seem to have no tolerance at all for any nonsense messing with your phone’s screen, whether that’s 3D-at-just-the-right-angle gimmickry, curved displays that mostly looked half-melted, or screens that are pretty much impossible to read all the way to the edge.

We also got some custom replies in our poll’s comments, like one about “RF remote control” that we’re pretty sure isn’t about RF at all, but the instead the infrared remote blasters we’ve seen on several phones over the years. These let you control TVs, air conditioners, and more — often through a preposterously ugly app. There’s also some nostalgia for FM radio reception capabilities on phones. This one’s maybe less “silly” than outdated, especially as it would often require wired headphones to be physically plugged into the phone’s analog jack, using the wire as a makeshift antenna. We even see a little love for Moto Mods, the more practical alternative to LG and its friends modules.

Do you think these gimmicks got their fair shake? Does one still deserve some extra lambasting? Go ahead and express your frustrations in the comments.