CES used to be a great platform for phone makers to show off their devices. These days? Not so much. TCL is one of the only companies to announce a phone at CES 2025, and while it’s somewhat interesting thanks to its Nxtpaper display, it’s not exactly setting the show on fire.
I can’t remember the last significant phone that was announced at CES. The handsets we see at the show now tend to be entry-level or midrange fare that fills out the manufacturer’s offerings rather than sets trends or causes any excitement or stir. Most phone makers reserve their biggest announcements for Mobile World Congress (MWC), which is a show dedicated to the mobile industry. It was at MWC that we saw the first Samsung Galaxy phone, where Microsoft launched Windows Phone, and where the world got its first early look at Android, now the dominant mobile operating system worldwide.
The TCL 60 XE Nxtpaper 5G is the only phone “of note” at this year’s show (Credit: TCL)
Beyond trade shows, the top phone makers hold special events to announce their most important products. Samsung, for example, plans to show off the Galaxy S25 at a Galaxy Unpacked event in San Jose on January 22. Apple and Google will hold similar events for the iPhone and Pixel later in the year.
2007: The Beginning of the End
CES 2007 was quite different. We didn’t know it then, but it was one of the last shows that truly mattered for phones. It was full of wonderful, weird, and wacky devices that have no place in today’s market of same-old slabs.
Worse, many of the players of 2007 are no longer here, having given up on making phones entirely. That January, I wrote about phones from Motorola and Nokia (the market leaders back then), as well as LG, HTC, Samsung, Sanyo, Sony Ericsson, UTStarcom, and others. Some of these companies were huge players in the market and have now all but vanished. The industry matured and moved on. Good smartphones are commoditized now, just like big-screen TVs.
Steve Jobs introducing the original iPhone (Photo by Dan Krauss/Getty Images)
It’s worth noting that 2007 was also the year Apple introduced the original iPhone. Perhaps it was telling that, while it happened in early January, Apple held the announcement at Macworld apart from CES—though you can bet it dominated much of the news cycle in Las Vegas.
Looking back, what strikes me most is how specialized many phones used to be. We had dedicated form factors for specific features, like slide-out keyboards for messaging phones, rotating modules for video cameras, and flipping screens for watching videos. Now, many of those hardware features are handled by software.
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Many people say phones are boring now, and they’re not wrong. They all pretty much look the same and do the same things (thank goodness for folding phones, which are shaking things up a bit). We no longer carry around old-school clamshells or sliders (at least, most of us don’t). Perhaps that’s partially why there’s a nostalgia-seeking trend that looks at the devices of yore. My friend Michael Fisher, known as MrMobile, has an entire series of videos on YouTube called When Phones Were Fun that explores the phones we used to get excited about.
Here in 2025, however, there’s very little in the way of excitement at CES when it comes to phones. At least we still have MWC to look forward to.
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About Eric Zeman
Managing Editor, Consumer Electronics
