The Rise and Fall of the "Faceplate"

The term "Faceplate" has been replaced in recent years with "color cover", "skin", 'bling" and more.  Faceplate for cell phones were made most popular by the Nokia 6100 and particularly the 5100 series phones during the late 90's. 

The Nokia 5120, 5125, 5160, 5165, 5190 phones all made it very easy to snap off the front cover and replace it with any of a number of custom faceplates.  The term faceplate related to the replacement of just the front cover of the phone.

The Nokia 6100 series (6120, 6160, 6190) also had a faceplate that could be removed but required a special wrench and Nokia only recommended it be changed by an authorized service center.

As these phone models became extremely popular, the market for faceplates became big.  Many companies began producing faceplates with any color or design they could think of.  Nokia began hitting aftermarket producers with patent infringement lawsuits as they had patented the shape and design of the faceplate itself.  As a result, a number of companies pulled out of the faceplate market but by the time this happened, the popularity of these phones was diminishing as new and nicer models had been introduced.

Nokia has not released a model of phone since with the same type of cover setup allowing easy replacement of the faceplate.  Motorola and Siemens briefly jumped into the faceplate market with one or two models of phones but neither became very popular and both discontinued models with replaceable faceplates almost as quickly as they tried them.

So what happened?  While no manufacturer has ever come out and explained, based on our experience, we think there were a number of reasons.

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