New Delhi, April 8 -- Around 2016, India's smartphone market started taking a leaf out of an earlier era when Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and BlackBerry ruled the industry. They started trying to innovate on designs, albeit within the confines of smartphone factories trying to eke out every penny of efficiency out of industrial standardization.

That craze to create outlandish designs in smartphones died quickly, and what followed were years of a race to cram the most amount of silicon power and high-resolution displays into everyday devices. Something, however, changed in 2025, when both Apple and Samsung, which account for two of every five phones sold worldwide, launched ultra-thin flagships.

These 5mm phones, somehow, didn't resul...