As I tilted the phone back and forth, admiring the iridescent artwork -- a vivid electric blue with a billow of gold inspired by Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night -- I was thrilled by the audacity of the design. I wasn't looking at the screen but at the phone's rear panel. And no, it wasn't a case.

You've probably never heard of the Nubia Z80 Ultra. This high-spec Android phone is among several devices from the Chinese company ZTE sporting a unique look, unlike anything else on the market. 

I got my hands on it this month at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. It was just one of many phones that made me, for the first time in a long time, feel excited about this new wave of design.

To find these phones, you have to look beyond Apple and Samsung, the two brands that dominate the market. For a long time, smaller companies tried to compete with these behemoths by emulating their phones at a more affordable price. And they followed the same bland formula. Each was a uniformly slim slab of plastic or metal in black, silver or white. Dull, dull, dull. Dull to look at and even duller to review.

Sure, phone-makers sometimes took a playful approach to color -- blues, greens, pinks -- though these tame experiments still played it safe. And sadly, modular concept phones such as Google's Project Ara and Motorola's Moto Z died out before ever really taking off.

To my delight, as someone who has had many of these boring phones pass through my hands over the years, it looks like those days might be over.

For one, the foldable revolution has introduced book-style folding phones and a modern reinterpretation of flip phones. It feels like the first time companies have questioned what a phone can do, be or look like -- beyond the template Apple set with the first iPhone.

Over the past few weeks, we've seen a glut of new phones announced from brands big and small, making it an ideal moment to pause and take stock of the current design landscape.

Phone design: the current state of play

First up, the big dogs. Apple launched the iPhone 17E in the first week of March. Available in black, white, and one color (the palest of pinks), it follows the slab template the company has relied on for around two decades. 

At the end of February, Samsung refreshed its flagship lineup with the Galaxy S26 series, which is largely indistinguishable from last year's. Then, just this week, the company announced it will no longer be selling the Galaxy Z TriFold, its most ambitious design in over a decade, with three panels folding out into a tablet-like screen. (The Galaxy Z Flip and Fold are still available.)

At MWC, where the smaller brands came to play, the story was completely different. The modular design of Tecno's phones and ZTE's vast array of Nubia phones, which varied from the Starry Night Z80 Ultra to the Neo 5 gaming phone, all left a lasting impression.

I was enamored with the craftsmanship and the soft, strokable vegan leather used on the crimson Honor Magic V6. My colleague Patrick Holland noted that the luxurious, silky feel of the Motorola Razr Fold could be its biggest selling point. Motorola has, in retrospect, been something of a pioneer in interesting phone design, experimenting with materials such as fabric and even wood over the years.

The biggest crowds I saw all week at MWC assembled at Honor's booth to admire its new Robot Phone in action. Not surprising. The Robot Phone, with its pop-up, self-aware, gimbal-mounted camera, is a collision of robotics (an emerging technology) with mobile (an established product category). It is, essentially, a reinvention of the phone as we know it. 

"For decades, the form factor of the smartphone remained the same," Honor's Robot Phone expert Thomas Bai told me. "As the technology evolves, we need a new species of device."

Honor hasn't yet put the phone on sale, and it's unclear just how popular it might be when it does. But at the very least, it signals the company's willingness to imagine and execute a daring and unique phone design.

Be glad for bold swings from small players

It's clear that larger, more mainstream companies are less likely to take design risks, while the smaller companies, fighting to differentiate themselves in a sea of sameness, are taking some bold swings. It feels like a reverse of the heyday of experimental phone design, when market leaders Nokia and Sony were launching all kinds of outlandish phones: sliding, swiveling, bulbous contraptions with bizarre keyboard setups.

No phone-maker understands using design as a differentiator quite like the British startup Nothing, which leans heavily into the nostalgic Y2K aesthetic and away from the prevailing minimalism, exposing the architecture of its products through transparent casings, playful lighting and pixelated interfaces.

Nothing's Chief Brand Officer Charlie Smith, who was formerly at fashion brand Loewe, describes a culture of fun and "rebellious creativity" as the essence of the company's design philosophy. That's allowed Nothing to make a splash as a late entrant to a mature and established market.

It's both future-looking and nostalgic, harking back to the era preceding the boring phone days. "All of that personality kind of got sucked out," said Smith, speaking to me ahead of the launch of the Nothing Phone 4A. 

The company has started embracing color, too. "If we want to make technology fun," Smith said. "We can't do that by things just being gray, black and white."

Nothing's devices feel like the antithesis of the quiet luxury that seems to crystallize most prevalently in Apple's approach to design -- whether that's through the company's elegant, slim-edged devices, or the Apple Stores themselves, with their inset, perfectly curved marble bannisters that seem to disappear into the walls.

Even when Apple brings color to the iPhone (think its orange effort last fall), it doesn't hit as hard as when bold color choices combine with unique design experiments. For years, the tech giant has been unwavering in its phone design and, to be fair, it's been a profitable (and predictable) strategy that keeps iPhone owners around the world satisfied. If Apple does, as expected, introduce a foldable iPhone at some point in the next year or so, it shouldn't be lauded for its bravery.

Primarily, it's the Chinese smartphone makers -- Honor, Oppo and Huawei -- we have to thank for pushing the boundaries of what a phone can take. Everything they, along with Samsung and Motorola, have achieved over the past five years in the foldable space will have laid the groundwork for Apple to take what will be a heavily calculated risk.

If it's a risk that pays off, it will serve as validation for the phone-makers we already see making bold moves. And, hopefully, that will continue to usher in this new era of phone design, which is a whole lot less dull, and a whole bunch more fun.