In the mid-2000s, Sony Ericsson had mobile phones with a protective lens slider (such as the K800i). Why don’t today’s phones have something similar?

• 4 min read

Sure enough… here’s the K800i with the slider. Yikes! It’s huge, 21mm thick, 2–3x the acceptable thickness of a modern smartphone. That’s a 3.5 megapixel camera with an f/2.8 lens. It’s coupled with a a xenon electronic flash, no LED flash/light as you’d find on a modern phone. You only got 64MB of internal memory, […]