It makes sense that smartphones have become a part of film and TV; after all, smartphones are what we carry around most. Sometimes, these placements make sense, using some of the best phones available at the time, and sometimes, it feels jarringly random. One of my favorite pastimes is to watch out for weird phones in media, and these are six of my favorites.
The Galaxy Nexus falls into Springfield
As seen in The Simpsons
Seeing any smartphone still feels weird to me in The Simpsons, even with the constant slipping of time surrounding the show. What’s even stranger, though, is seeing specific models. Case in point: on multiple occasions, nearly all of the Simpson family members have been seen using a Galaxy Nexus, even as late into the run as season 29 in 2018.
Later seasons of the show have seen them replaced with generic rectangles or iPhone lookalikes, but I’ll never forget seeing this. The Nexus line has always been niche, and I can’t imagine Google paying for product placement like it has with the Pixel phones. Maybe the animators owned one and liked it. We’ll probably never know, but seeing this legendary Nexus phone in animation made me smile.
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Samsung’s foldables make for some great sci-fi props
As seen in Star Trek: Picard, Alex Rider, Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning
Foldable phones instantly stand out in real life, let alone on screen. Samsung has certainly been happy to pay for product placements, but its devices have also shown up more naturally. In the second season of Star Trek: Picard, the original Z Flip and Z Fold 2 are used as Tricorders and Padds. We know it’s likely these models based on when the show originally shot, well before the Flip 3 or Fold 3 had launched. These devices weren’t chosen due to product placement — after all, that wouldn’t feel very Star Trek, would it?
We confirmed with Dave Blass, production designer on season two of Picard, that these devices were chosen because they were a simple and affordable way to do something cool. The phones were bulked out with custom-made cases to help them fit into the Star Trek universe, but they have to be Galaxy devices given the timeframe of filming; there aren’t many other foldables these could be, especially in the Tricorder’s case. It’s a shame we never saw a Galaxy device on a Galaxy-Class starship, but I digress.
Another place a Galaxy Z Fold 2 showed up is in the Freevee series Alex Rider over on Prime Video. Kyra, a hacker and computer genius, is seen in the show using a Samsung foldable, and the early 2021 filming would make it a Fold 2. We don’t know for sure, but this doesn’t feel like product placement either. Different characters are seen using a wide array of phones from different brands across the season, and there aren’t any of the typical “beauty shots” that most product placements have. Looking at you, GM and Michael Bay.
You can also see Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt flip open an original Galaxy Z Flip in spectacular style in Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning. The way the camera focuses so perfectly on the phone several times during this sequence definitely smells of product placement.
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RED’s misfire of a smartphone hits Hollywood
As seen in Don’t Look Up, Fast 9
We don’t think about the RED Hydrogen One very often, and RED would probably prefer it stay that way, given that it was one of the most disappointing phone launches in recent(ish) memory. That hasn’t stopped the phone from making some notable appearances in movies, though.
In Don’t Look Up, the phone gets a lot of screen time, primarily used by Leonardo DiCaprio’s Dr. Randall Mindy. The most egregious use of product placement appears in a different scene, though. About 34 minutes in, Ariana Grande can be seen surrounded by three other people, all glued to their fancy Hydrogen smartphones. I guess celebrities like holographic screens — who knew?
The phone also appears frequently in Fast 9, where it is mounted to the dashboard of Dom’s iconic Dodge Charger. I wonder if he’s as upset about Google’s killing off Maps Driving mode as I am?
Windows Phone enters an alternate dimension
As seen in Man Of Steel
Back in 2013, the Windows Phone was still a thing, and the appearance of Windows Phones throughout Man Of Steel shows us an alternate reality beyond our wildest dreams. A world of three equally popular mobile operating systems seems almost as unlikely as a successful DC cinematic universe, but I can dream, can’t I? This partnership between Man Of Steel and Microsoft also extended off the screen into the real world, with the official Man Of Steel app being exclusive to Windows Phone. That amounts for one of the only times that platform could ever make that claim about an app.
Of course, I don’t like thinking about this film if I can help it — I feel sad about the lost potential of this once-promising franchise. I still see The Flash’s CGI Nicolas Cage whenever I close my eyes.
Sony makes the most of its cross-company product placement
As seen in James Bond and the MCU’s Spider-Man
I could have filled this entry with any number of Sony movies, but we’ll focus on these two franchises because they stand out more than most. Nokia sponsored James Bond for a long time, but that changed when Spectre arrived in theaters in 2015. You can see various Sony Xperia models throughout the film, but the marketing for the film went above and beyond. The above photo is actually from Sony’s “Made For Bond” ad that played on TV (in the UK at least), online, and at cinemas. In the short, Naomie Harris’ Moneypenny is seen using several Sony products during a mission, from a camera to the special Spectre-edition Xperia Z5.
Another notable appearance is in Spider-Man: Far From Home. This stands out far above the rest thanks to the sheer number of phones on screen simultaneously. At least eight different Xperia devices (including that gorgeous purple Xperia 1) are seen on the screen at once as Peter’s classmates scramble to take photos of him now the world knows he’s our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Not that this is all too surprising — if it’s a Sony film, you’re likely to see some Sony-made gadgets.
A Nokia cell phone transforms into… something else
As seen in Transformers (2007)
I love the Transformers — some say too much — so naturally, I was always going to include the franchise on this list if I could. Thankfully, Michael Bay made that easy, as his Transformers movies were chock full of product placement.
After Barricade loses a fight with Bumblebee about a third of the way through the first movie, Frenzy disguises himself as Mikaela’s Nokia 8800 to keep tabs on Bumblebee and his newfound friends. Later in the film, a Nokia N93i is placed into a sealed container and turned into a new Cybertronian lifeform by the power of the Allspark. It’s a nasty little critter that doesn’t seem to like humans, but it started out as a simple cell phone.
Many more to choose from
We could’ve swapped any of the devices on this list for another, like the Essential PH-1 appearing in Jordan Peele’s Nope, or all of the phones — including the Microsoft Kin! that filled the world of Pretty Little Liars, but these six stood out to me the most. Product placement is a part of how movies and TV are made, but sometimes the gadget stands out so much, it makes it hard not to notice. On other occasions, there’s no marketing involved, and it’s just a clever use of technology to make Star Trek even cooler than it already was.
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