We asked, you told us: Your vote for smartphone color isn’t a color at all

If you’ve ever had a color preference for your smartphone, chances are you were forced to grab a phone case to express your style.

While the ubiquitous black and white hue options (not colors!) will always dominate what we get from smartphone makers, we are starting to see more colors and styles. And we aren’t talking about “midnight” vs “titanium” black either. With glass backs increasingly popular, we’re seeing a whole new trend of fancy color shimmers and light bending effects.

I had a great time recently playing with HTC’s shimmering gradients in their U12 Plus range, particularly the flame red style (although translucent blue was the clear favorite for me, if you can call that a color). Huawei and Honor are all about gradient colors in their latest releases, with the P20 Pro’s twilight gradient catching the eye of many fans. It’s happening in flagships for sure, but even the lower end of the market is seeing more variety, including even the polycarbonate Oppo Realme 2.

With all this happening, we wanted to know more about your choice when it comes to that difficult decision. This week’s poll asked what your color preference was, and 40,000 of you submitted your votes in our YouTube poll and in the Android Authority website poll. Here are the results!

What’s your favorite smartphone color?

Black wins! Schwarz, noir, zwart – call it what you want, it’s all black on black. Black won both polls, monstering the Youtube poll with two in every three votes going for it. The rest of the votes were pretty close to evenly split. Now, in the web poll, where we could add more options, black did drop back from an absolute majority to just a strong preference — polling 43 percent. The next most popular was pretty closely split between grey/silver, red, and with white polling about six percent.

Interestingly, once blue was in the bigger poll, it immediately shot to second, winning 14 percent. Twilight, despite being only on one device, managed nine percent which is pretty strong.

Just out of interest, we did look up the general population’s view of their color preference for cars as well. Here’s a split courtesy of Wikipedia data via paint manufacturers DuPont and PPG Industries:

(via Wikipedia)

Is it analogous? Note how popular white, grey/silver, and black are, and in that order. Now, with cars a much more substantial purchase, this could be down to resale value, too. In any case, there isn’t any need to balance a black bezel with a black car.

And your comments told us quite a lot about what drives the need for a black device.

Your comments

Now, we did get a lot of comments — more than 900 comments in often firm, clear disagreement. That’s colors for you though. No one really fights over the best color, but we do like to talk about our preference. And some of these are purely practical — how clearly you see fingerprints on a certain color, and so on. It’s actually just the same as it is when you buy a car — do you want to have a car that doesn’t show dust, something that isn’t flashy, or something that stands out?

Here’s some of what your comments had to say about the smartphone color dilemma:

• Black: Makes the bezel around the screen so much less distracting. My personal choice would be a phone with a black front and colored back though
• Any color is ok as long as the front bezels are black
• I like all shades of blue
• Always black especially matte black as it attracts less lasting fingerprints and is not at all prone to smudges
• It really doesn’t matter when I’m only going to use a case anyway
• My question: is transparent a color?

And perhaps explaining the votes, this was our most popular comment — formatting and all:

M A T T E
B L A C K
E V E R Y
T H I N G

And that’s where we’ll leave it for this week! Thanks as always for your votes and thoughts. Let us know what you think of the outcome here and if black will reign forever, or if it’s likely to lose out as bezels go from fat to slim to almost nothing?

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