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'It's Time to End the Yearly Smartphone Launch Event' (vice.com)
Owen Williams, writing for Motherboard: Thursday, at a flashy event in New York, Samsung unveiled yet another phone: the Galaxy Note 9. Like you'd expect, it's rectangular, it has a screen, and it has a few cameras. While unveiling what it hopes will be the next hit, it unknowingly confirmed something we've all been wondering: the smartphone industry is out of ideas. Phones are officially boring: the only topic that's up for debate with the Galaxy Note 9 is the lack of the iconic notch found on the iPhone X, and that it has a headphone jack. The notch has been cloned by almost every phone maker out there, and the headphone jack is a commodity that's unfortunately dying. However, the fact that we're comparing phones with or without a chunk out of the screen or a hole for your headphones demonstrates just how stuck the industry is.
It's clear that there's nothing really to see here. Yeah, the Note is a big phone, and it has a larger battery too. It's in different colors, it's faster than last year, and it has wireless charging. Everything you see here is from a laundry list of features that other smartphone manufacturers also have, and the lack of differentiation becomes clearer every year. It's the pinnacle of technology, and it's a snooze-fest. This isn't exclusively a Samsung problem: Every manufacturer from Apple to Xiaomi faces the same predicament. The iPhone's release cycle that Apple trained the world to be accustomed to, with splashy yearly releases and million-dollar keynotes, is clearly coming to an end as consumers use their existing phones for longer every year.
It's clear that there's nothing really to see here. Yeah, the Note is a big phone, and it has a larger battery too. It's in different colors, it's faster than last year, and it has wireless charging. Everything you see here is from a laundry list of features that other smartphone manufacturers also have, and the lack of differentiation becomes clearer every year. It's the pinnacle of technology, and it's a snooze-fest. This isn't exclusively a Samsung problem: Every manufacturer from Apple to Xiaomi faces the same predicament. The iPhone's release cycle that Apple trained the world to be accustomed to, with splashy yearly releases and million-dollar keynotes, is clearly coming to an end as consumers use their existing phones for longer every year.
Honestly, a lot of the new features added to iPhones, even several versions back, were relatively small UNLESS they affected you directly. For example, they added phones with the ability to use the additional frequency licensed to T-Mobile. That was a big deal for those of us on T-Mobile ... important enough to justify reselling an existing phone and upgrading, even if nothing else had changed. (I mean, you're paying out all that money each month for the service, so any handset that lets you use more of the service's own capabilities is kind of important.) But anyone NOT on T-Mobile didn't care a bit.
At the end of the day? I carry my cellphone so people from my work can reach me, and for the conveniences it offers me like locating things using GPS mapping applications, or browsing the latest news while standing in line somewhere. It also doubles as my camera, whenever I didn't bring my big SLR along, and for talking to or texting my friends. Yearly updates really aren't necessary to keep doing any of those things with the device. Yearly updates were a sign of a marketplace that hadn't matured yet, so kept throwing more cool ideas out there left and right, as they realized things they forgot to add in previous phone releases.
I'm glad to see it all slowing down.
The main distinguishing feature for me in a smartphone is plain stock Android. No non-removable bloatware from marketing partners, and no manufacturer's customizations for the sake of customizations. I don't want to learn Samsung's way of doing the same thing, and then re-learn Motorola's way of doing the same thing, etc.. You can't avoid Google apps with Android, but I can avoid all other crap on my phone, so until Samsung/etc. can offer a decent phone that runs plain stock Android, I'm sticking with the Pixel line.
Also it has to support Project Fi. Fuck all cell phone carriers combined, the less I have to deal with any of them, the better.
OOOH ! a new shape ! Is this better than their famous rounded corners ?
OOOH ! Face recognition ! Something like Facebook and Google have had for years in their photo suites ?
New high price ! Now there is real innovation ! Proving that people are suckers !
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
They could add infrared cameras, laser distance sensors, air quality sensors, and maybe a better way to adapt accessories to the phone such as a low powered connected hardware keyboard designed and produced by the manufacture.
The Caterpillar S61 phone does a number of those - FLIR camera, air particulate sensor, and a measuring app which does way more than just give you distance. It also has incredible battery life (mine has been sitting for over a week and still has over 50% battery), and is ruggedized to MILSPEC for being dropped (5' to concrete) and being underwater (10 feet for over an hour). In fact, you can even go into "underwater mode" which deactivates the touchscreen, and modifies the camera for underwater use.
Disclaimer: I love that fricking phone!
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
The problem with a "smaller" phone is that most consumers will expect it to also come with a smaller price. a 3" phone basically costs the same thing to produce as a 6" phone
Seeing as how an iPhone X has a 64% profit margin (>$360 to make, retails for $1k), it should be easy for a 3" phone to cost less and still maintain a healthy profit margin. Don't know why people were so excited about Apple reaching $1T, part of the reason they got so high is because they massively overcharge for their products.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil