Smartphone market trends are generally driven by the high-end, as this is the space that requires the most innovations year after year to encourage customers to buy new devices at such high prices. This happened with high-performance chips, then with cameras, with displays, and most recently with locally executed generative AI.
All of these great innovations came to premium devices first, but what if I told you that an affordable brand is looking to create a new trend? And we’re not talking about a technical aspect, but rather a sensorial innovation. Scented smartphones are just around the corner, as Infinix is preparing to bring scents to your Android.
Infinix created a smartphone with its own scent and scored a point in its quest to create a new trend.
To this day, I don’t know the first person who cares about how their phone smells. It’s common for it to have a neutral scent or some trace of whatever perfume you use, but nothing more. We all focus on other elements like the cameras, the screen, sound, or performance. Meanwhile, on a sensory level, we only care about whether it feels good, grips well, and has a nice design, but that’s as far as it goes.
However, Infinix wants to change that and take the sensory experience to the next level. The Chinese manufacturer wants its phones to have scents, and that will be the differentiating factor for its upcoming Note 50s 5 G+.
This phone will feature a microencapsulation system in its vegan leather back cover, which will give the device a scent. It won’t be rechargeable, and the scent will disappear over time, but Infinix claims it will last about six months.
This feature is quite a novelty in the smartphone market, especially since it comes from a manufacturer of affordable devices. However, it’s a trend that seems to be spreading throughout the tech sector. In fact, we’ve already seen it in the ASUS Fragrance Mouse and more recently in the new RX 9000 Sakura Atlantis graphics cards from Yeston (another Chinese manufacturer).
The fact that an electronic device has a fragrant scent isn’t exactly a big deal, but it’s still interesting. Furthermore, if this becomes a trend, it would be even more striking, because it tells us that the market may be running out of ideas.
However, at the same time, this could be a new step toward something bigger and truly brilliant, although it’s unlikely to be implemented on smartphones. What are we thinking? A more complex system that generates scents based on what’s displayed on the screen (while watching a movie or playing a game), like the one Sony is working on through PlayStation. This would require frequent refills of these scents, but it would be a truly innovative and immersive experience.
That said, for now, the Infinix Note 50s 5 G+ is limited to the Indian market. There are no plans to bring it to other countries, so it’ll be a wait-and-see situation in Spain. In the meantime, you can buy a scented case for your phone, just like the Xiaomi Civi 3 Disney Lotso Limited Edition, whose case smelled like strawberries.
