Apple's Gold iPhone Joins The New Smartphone Battlefield of Color And Customization

Well, it looks like Apple 's push into the lower reaches of the smartphone market with the provisional iPhone 5c is going to stand out with five bright colors, while the higher end 5S will have a muted gold handset stocked alongside the traditional black and white options (as always with Apple, this is assuming Taniyama-Shimura). With the addition of these color, Apple will join the new battleground in smartphone retail... color customisation.

Just as Dorothy gingerly stepped out of her house into the land of Oz, the last few years have seen the black smartphone world slowly reveal the beginnings of color in the high-end smartphone market.

For many years now, Nokia have built their lower end handsets around a number of colors. A glance at many of the current Lumia smartphones will see the familiar red, yellow, green, blue, and white handsets. This is particularly noticeable on the 'fashion' handsets such as the low-end Lumia 520 and mid-range Lumia 620, the latter shipping in regulation black, but also is red, blue, yellow, white, and green... A choice of colors which sounds eerily familiar.

But let's not fashion an improbable stick out of the choice of colors by manufacturers. There's a far better stick out there.

Why is it only the cheap seats that are getting to have fun with all the colors? As you move up from the low-end handsets, color options seem to drain away, unit the high end handsets are left with a white/silver option, or a black/slate option. Nokia may have made a great play of their XpressOn covers a decade ago, but they rarely featured for high-end handsets.

With manufacturers unable to leverage specifications to any great extent in their flagship handsets (CPU, memory, storage, and screens, are all very similar when you choose a price point), many are turning towards color to act as a differentiator. Nokia have made a point to promote the yellow version of the Lumia 1020 handset, we're expecting a champagne/gold version of the iPhone 5S. And of course Motorola are throwing the color palette of caution to the wind with the Moto X's Moto-Maker customisation site, where users can choose from 18 colored rear fascias as well as the trim colors on their handset.

Henry Ford famously said any color you like, as long as it's black. I think the smartphone market has passed beyond that point. Color is the new battleground, and with that brings a number of issues.

Modern smartphone design is all about the big black screen on the front of the device, which means any color customisation has to be done in software, and some OS's are going to be better at this than others (I'm looking at Windows Phone here). Styling the edges and the back of the handset is going to become even more important - that's where physical personalisation will make a big difference.

Which colors do you stock, at what levels, and when do you announce them? Established companies will have a far better understanding of the color options and ratios that consumers will react to, but care needs to be taken that customers never feel cheated into taking a color just because it is there. If you launch with a swatch of colors, only to add the long-awaited purple unit three months down the line, you're going to have a lot of disgruntled customers with 21 months left on their contracts.

Then there are stock management issues. Unless you add in the complexity of removable covers to the design (which Nokia have done on the Lumia 620, as have Jolla on their Sailfish handsets due out later this year), you're going to have to keep a lot of SKU's in stock to accommodate the color options, or hope that your customers will accept a few days wait between ordering a new colored handset and receiving the unit.

And at some point you'll need to decide which is the lead colour in your marketing.

None of these problems are insurmountable, but they show a maturing smartphone market that is moving on from grunt, power, 'big numbers are better', and a one size fits all approach. Other customisation areas will follow now that the hardware and software solutions are being settled choices, but fitting in with the consumer is the next undiscovered country. Color is just the first step towards bespoke smartphones.