The 10 Worst Smartphones Of All Time

Smartphones are incredible inventions that have changed daily life for people the world over. We have seen the widespread adoption of them from the busiest streets in Manhattan to remote and isolated mountain villages. They have opened up opportunities to have information and communication at a fingertip's length, in ways inconceivable just a decade or two before and today they are seen to be indispensable parts of daily life.

While some advanced cellular phones with multiple abilities and features existed before it came along, the iPhone is widely considered to be the most important smartphone of all time. With its total touch screen operation, integration of a completely internet-focused operating system, and ability to modify it by adding and deleting software, also known as apps, the iPhone was, at a minimum, a trendsetter. The iPhone's history is full of industry-transforming moments, good and bad — but important in any case. 

But the iPhone isn't the only important smartphone — over the years we have been treated to a plethora of smartphone models of varying forms and functions, some far more important than others (for better or for worse). While the smartphone has surely enhanced our life, some of these models have been a disaster to live with. From terrible interfaces to awful build quality, any number of bad decisions can make a smartphone feel kind of dumb. Here are ten of the most notoriously flawed (otherwise known as Some Of The Worst) smartphones of all time.

Keep in mind — this list is subjective, not objective, and is thusly filled to the brim with the opinions of its writers. As you'll see, some companies fixed their issues and came through their messes victorious — others simply crashed out completely.

Samsung generally makes quality products. The company often raises the bar for quality and innovation for Android devices, and the Galaxy line is its flagship model. The Galaxy Note series came out at a time when screens were gradually growing up from the standard size set by the original iPhone, about 3.5 inches. Its unusually large size appealed to consumers and fit into a new category of larger mobile devices, dubbed phablets, a portmanteau of phones and tablets.

The Note sold well and was among the best-selling products for a time until around 2016 when Samsung initiated an investigation into reports of Galaxy Note 7 units starting on fire (from within). One could argue about the many merits of any given phone, but fire is generally not in the top three, or even the top five. In fact, fire is not supposed to be a feature of any phone at all. Samsung recalled them all, and the smartphone remains a noteworthy blemish on an otherwise largely incident-free history when it comes to Samsung and Android devices — for the most part. 

HTC made a huge portion of popular Android phones when the operating system was still new, including the first Android phone ever released, the HTC Dream. Soon after the widespread adoption of Android, companies with a longtime presence on the web developed mobile-optimized websites and later created full-fledged apps to run on iOS or Android devices. By 2013 Facebook had already established itself as one of the most popular websites, and its app was installed on millions of devices worldwide.

It would be difficult to speculate as to why and how this developed, but it appears someone around the Facebook offices thought users wanted to have a more immersive Facebook experience at the ready 24/7. They developed a mobile home screen experience dedicated to the social media site and had HTC integrate it into what would be colloquially known as the Facebook phone.

This was not the first attempt to integrate Facebook more fully into a phone, as the HTC ChaCha, which added a dedicated button to access Facebook directly, and the HTC Salsa, which had a similar function, came before. Looking beyond the Facebook Home integration, SlashGear's HTC First Review concluded that the faults of the First lay in its middling hardware and stiff competition. 

It may have been introduced at the wrong time and underdeveloped, but, as popular as Facebook is, it seemed that nobody wanted it to be involved so intimately in everything they do. It is for good reason we have not seen another attempt from Facebook to dominate our devices.

Lasting just one year, Amazon's first foray into the mobile phone market did not end well. It also provided lessons in how not to break into the market — or if a company should even try at all.

Amazon saw great success with its line of readers and affordable tablets. Building on that success, Amazon chose to enter the smartphone business. The Fire Phone entered the scene in 2014, offering an Amazon-centric offshoot of Android, Fire OS. SlashGear writers and reviewers found the pricing to be problematic at the time and this may have been its downfall, but it was not pricing alone to spell its doom.

The Fire Phone was introduced at a price of $199 with a contract, or $649 off-contract, as other phones were sold at the time. However, that was a departure from the low-cost loss-leaders that the fire tablets were up until then, which meant Amazon had directed their phone to a different buyer not motivated by a low price, but premium features. 

Also, the Fire OS was not integrated with Google services, forcing users onto the Amazon Appstore. This offered far fewer apps than the competition — a major limit — and reviewers across the industry suggested this was a key reason the phone failed.

When a company leads its market in providing innovative products and, consequently, becomes a sales leader in its field, it does not want to get caught off guard by new products. However, that is what happened to Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry mobile device. The BlackBerry was so popular, especially among business users, that it became a news story when incoming president Barack Obama needed to forego using his per Secret Service security standards. But a couple of years before the 44th President was sworn in, the iPhone came out and sent RIM scurrying.

What it came up with was the BlackBerry Storm, the first touch screen BlackBerry. We originally announced the coming Storm in 2008. This means BlackBerry had less than two years to develop the hardware and write the software to transition its OS from a keyboard-based design to all touch. To an outside observer, this looks like a fairly short development window and when the product arrived in stores, it showed. 

In the SlashGear BlackBerry Storm Review – which was so important that it needed a SlashGear BlackBerry Storm Review part 2 – its many flaws became instantly clear. The biggest seems to be that the touch screen was inaccurate, insensitive, and unrefined. Additionally, the software lagged in development compared to the iPhone and the general experience was subpar. The battery wasn't great, either.

Usually, when a company must play catch-up to a competitor, it only gets one shot. BlackBerry missed, and it should come as no surprise that RIM is gone and the last BlackBerry phones were released with Android. BlackBerry is dead — for now.

Kyocera has never been the biggest player in the international mobile phone market, but it has been producing them for more than two decades. Many of their phones over the years have relied on being unique or niche offerings to differentiate them from the competition. One such attempt at offering a novel device that fits into its own category is the Echo, a dual-screen smartphone released in 2011.

SlashGear's first impressions of the Kyocera Echo showed the device to be a big of a mixed bag. Sure, the dual-screen system was novel, but the hardware supporting the phone was not necessarily premium level for its time. Furthermore, Android had not yet been developed to run dual screens natively, so the OS and a few apps had to be tweaked to run on it. Therefore, the performance of the software ends up being mediocre and with plenty of room for improvement.

Perhaps the folks at Kyocera were a bit too forward-thinking, bringing to market a device before it was ready. Battery technology couldn't keep up with two screens, and nobody wanted a thick line in the middle of an image if an app was capable of making use of the bigger "full" space. It was out of place and ill-conceived and, in the end, few bought it. The Kyocera Echo's legacy is mostly to be a placeholder on lists of Strangest Android Devices Of All Time.

The Galaxy fold accomplished what seemed impossible, to fold a screen in half. Part of the way Samsung made a bendable display possible in a consumer-grade smartphone was to include (what seemed to be) a plastic screen protector pre-installed on the device. We reported on problems when early reviewers and members of the press started peeling off what looked like protective film, typical on new devices, only to find out they were pulling away the top layer of the screen. Others found their units with peculiar bulges along the seam and more still discovered thick black lines running from hinge to hinge.

Having pre-release press review models appearing in such a fragile state before the official launch date was not a good look for Samsung. Despite the efforts of the brand, the initial (pre-launch) press coverage ended up being largely negative due to several shocking failures in the most key component of the device. We found the Fold to appear to be rushed to market, leaving little time to discover its flaws.

Since the initial launch of the Fold in 2019, Samsung's turned their fortunes around with several generations of Galaxy Z Fold devices (and "Flip" devices which fold their displays where a traditional "flip phone" would otherwise bend. In 2025 the SlashGear Review of the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 showed the device to be a top-tier winner, and this generation of Fold has convinced more than a few people that it's time to move into the future.

Sometimes a company comes along with novel applications of existing technology to create something exciting. Other times, a company comes along with novel applications of existing technology and utterly fails, providing a product that nobody wants, doesn't work, and costs too much. This is the story of the RED Hydrogen One, a phone created to meet a demand that didn't exist using technology that didn't work.

The company RED had established itself as a premier maker of digital cameras, so those in the know had high expectations for its first foray into the mobile phone market. Instead of building on their stellar reputation in cameras, RED introduced a phone with a weird holographic 3D-like display. In a Verge review of the phone, it was said to be wonky tech that, when it did work, could make the viewer feel a little sick.

Furthermore, the "4V" tech, as it was called, only worked with a few apps developed specifically for this phone. It is also heavy and had side buttons that were all too easily depressed by accident, but those are minor flaws compared to the rest. All in all, it is a phone that nobody wanted with features for which nobody cared, and all of this was done poorly and for too much money, around $1,600. SlashGear reported that RED would ultimately stick to making ultra-high-end cameras and leave the phones alone, a good decision.

Apple's iPhone 6 flaws began to surface as users reported the phone bending while being handled under average/moderate stress. The issue (often called "Bendgate" by the press) became amplified when Unbox Therapy picked up on it and created a video specifically testing the phone with dismal results. While the phone does not always break, moderate stress can cause it to have a permanent bend centered in the frame around the location of the volume buttons. 

Furthermore, iPhone 6 touchscreen issues (often called "Touch Disease" in reports aplenty) were reported by users in above-average numbers. This flaw can also result from moderate bending, causing the chip to become dislodged and, preventing touch response to a part of the screen.

To make matters worse, internal documents from Apple showed that Apple knew the phone was susceptible to damage from bending. Furthermore, Apple's preferred fix for either issue was a total replacement of the troubled unit. Apple has not seen such significant (or widespread) issues in any iPhone model since.

Three-dimensional "3D" entertainment is one of the oldest novelties of the modern era. Victorians fascinated with the outside world marveled at far-off locales through special viewers called stereoscopes that used rudimentary dual images creating a 3D effect. The fascination with 3D persisted through the decades with 3D horror movies in theaters, 3D displays for gaming PCs, 3D laptops, 3D TV sets, and your occasional mobile phone, like the HTC EVO 3D. Produced at a time when HTC was at the top of the smartphone game, the EVO appeared forward-looking, innovative, and potentially very fun.

The EVO featured dual lenses split apart such that they could take images to be transposed into a single piece of media that'd be visible in "3D" with the EVO 3D's special display technology. For its time, most of the smartphone hardware was comparable to other similar phones, but nothing extraordinary. According to our HTC EVO 3D review, the inclusion of the 3D camera meant ordinary picture quality was lacking. It also had a shortage of apps that made any real use of the 3D-capable display, and the 3D imagery the device actually displayed was... lacking in quality as well. 

HTC didn't end up making any other 3D phones after that. But they DID end up being one of the biggest names in the Virtual Reality Headset game by teaming up with Valve to make the HTC Vive in 2015 and continue to make VR headsets over a decade later. 

Most people will not recognize the V-Mobile name and there is a good reason for this. However, in 2019, the company sold smartphones. Whether it manufactured them or not is up for debate, and surely nobody would take credit for it. In fact, finding information on it is difficult.

Yet, the N8-N was available and could be purchased from Amazon at one time. It is difficult to find the specs listed anywhere, but the user reviews are where it's at. First, it earned only 2.9 of 5 stars and there are more 1-star than 5-star ratings. In fact, nearly half of the ratings are just one-star. Some gems from the reviews include "it sucks" and "garbage." One user said, "This is a piece of garbage, it worked for one month and shut down completely."

Perhaps the best review of all is done by popular tech review channel Unbox Therapy on YouTube, where the phone came brand new out of the box and shut itself down after five minutes of use. The review itself is rather entertaining, and only gets better when it turns itself off a second time before the video ends. If it cannot even remain on for the first five minutes of use, it may well be that the V-Mobile N8-N is the worst phone ever.

A list claiming to contain "the worst smartphones of all time" will always have subjectivity. You may have owned a borderline paperweight that made the risk of death that came along with something like the Galaxy Note 7 a worthy concession. However, to keep things objective, SlashGear compiled the list based on the following criteria:

To qualify, a phone either had to have glaring and well-publicized faults such as iPhone 6's bendability, or it had to be so ill-judged that it was doomed from the start — like the Amazon Fire Phone. Following this criteria, SlashGear produced a concise list which — of course — remains largely subjective nonetheless.

Anything with a lithium battery can theoretically catch fire — but it was a widespread problem with the Note 7 and not simply a one-off. The Fire Phone might have done well if it targeted a different segment of the market, but throwing something like that into the mix with Samsung's Galaxy series and the iPhone means the same standards will judge it.