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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.
You could just ignore new product launches. If you're happy with your current phone, keep using it. The reason they do the yearly updates, is because people buy them.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Surprised it's lasted this long. The reason we're not seeing "innovation" is because a smartphone is a smartphone is a smartphone. We're pretty much topped out on what the useful purpose a smartphone is for. Everything else is just maybe nice to have, but not absolutely necessary. However, I'd like to see more advancement on the camera side. Like a real optical zoom in a reasonably sized package.
The smartphone manufacturers have been "out of ideas" for years. Since the advent of around the 801 snapdragon (and others) every year we get faster, more cameras/megapixels, flashy colors and overly expensive phones. But, as long as consumers are ignorant enough to continue year after year of dumping good phones for new ones, you think the manufactuers will change?
that's now how selling stuff works. You sell new stuff each year so people will buy it. You make it an event because that's what marketing is. You wouldn't say "It's time to end yearly car launch events" because cars are only seeing incremental improvements.
It's bad enough somebody wrote this let alone greenlit it.
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I need to know when a phone gets a notch, or moves the clock to the left side of the status bar.
wow / so innovate / much phone
[insert picture of shiba inu]
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Awesome! Sound like the perfect phone for me ;-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
If your phone needs to be exciting, you need to get a life.
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.
I think we're about to see a hasty retreat in the average smartphone price.
My girlfriend recently picked up a Nokia 6.1 - it's fast enough, it's got a good enough camera, a good enough screen, enough memory and it's a pretty good looking phone. It's $250. Certainly there are people who'll have some need for the top-of-the-line, but for the vast majority of people that's a perfectly good phone.
I really think that's the direction things will trend. The "entry level" phones will steadily advance and the "flagship" ones will argue about screen notches and stuff like that. I can't see myself buying another flagship one, and I'm sure i'm not alone.
... you could try competing on price. Lower price, not higher price.
You could try competing on user freedom. "Hey, buy our phone, you can actually delete crap apps that you never wanted in the first place."
... that only works, and even then only for a small percentage of its user base, as long as ridiculously stupid things keep happening like companies successfully trying to sell people new smartphones (new cars, new TV's, you name it) all the time, without the new item being better than the last one, without that person really needing a new item, possibly without needing any such item at all.
(Personally, by the way, I've just prolonged my aging Motorola phone's life by paying a local repair shop a very modest sum for a battery replacement which my aging self didn't volunteer to do himself.)
How about releasing a smartphone with a removeable battery (include a spare with the cost of the phone), a headphone jack, and *gasp* a clamshell slide out keyboard!
What's old is new and what's new is old!
Good- I don't want any more of what is recently called "innovation." I am ready for CHOICE instead. Give me a SMALLER, not LARGER phone. I don't care if it is a bit thicker because I want better battery life and serviceability.... and would be happy to have a replaceable battery at that. Give me a headphone jack and no buttons or sensors on the back. Give me regular UPDATES to fix annoying bugs and security flaws.
If giving me that is "boring", the boring is great. Bring it on.
I don't want to lose all my connectors, nor have a huge phone, nor a fragile/ultra thin phone with poor battery life and impossible to service batteries, nor a 100MP camera, nor notches, nor stupid OS mods and forced bundled crapware, nor something that costs twice as much as it should.
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.
I'd argue that they mostly have. You can get a reliable new car for around the $20k mark. Land has certainly gone up a lot, but i think the actual cost of building a safe well insulated home has been pretty stable.
Obviously against a background of controlled inflation they've continued to rise in absolute dollars/euros but that's true of everything.
But it's not entirely true. Last year, Apple came out with FaceID, a phone that has a unique screen shape, a phone with no home button that normalized gestures as the primary input method, and they raised the bar on prices and proved that people would pay for more features in the iPhoneX.
Oh, and it had more cameras, a faster CPU, a better battery, and all the rest of the usual stuff. And that was the most recent keynote. People are upgrading, which is why in its last earnings report, Apple posted record sales for the quarter, to the tune of 40+ million sales of iPhone, the new one (X) being the most popular.
Just because Samsung is in a me-too funk with the rest of the android ecosystem, doesn't mean the industry is done innovating. Evidence points out that Apple certainly isn't. Their last keynote was a smashing success.
Is this post cleverly disguised as a troll to get yet more comments going about a anddroid/iphone religious war?
LOL.. Yea, I miss the Emacs / vi debate too. Nothing lasts forever, but many things just have the names changed when they get recycled....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Can we get a high-spec phone with a plastic back so the damned thing doesn't feel like a hot brick if you happen to have the GPS on or be recording video?
Perhaps we can get one once you provide a robust answer to the following question: Where else, other than the back, should the SoC be dumping the waste heat from processing related to GPS or recording video?
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?
The Motorola Z is the only interesting hardware out there. The shatter-proof screen and the mods make it a wildly under-rated device.
All of the rest are barely innovating on anything hardware wise.
Whatever happened to those infinitely variable liquid lenses that were supposed to give us wide-angle to zoom adjustments with no extra thickness? About 10 years ago they were just "a couple years away" from market.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
It's interesting how you can date a TV episode or movie by the tech. My wife and I have been working our way through all twenty seasons of "Midsomer Murders" and have reached the point where their cars look more modern than ours (they have built in GPS touch screens) but they're still using flip-phones. I'm pretty sure that season was shot in 2008.
The phone form factor thing is fashion, not function. I wouldn't be surprised if the huge, razor thin, bezel-less phone looks as dated as 1970s bell-bottoms in a few years. They're not really comfortable to use or carry, and the thinness drives all kinds of design limitations.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Just unable, yet, to deliver
Folding screens, for instance, will transform the industry's high-end, but since they have priced current top of the line phones at the market limit (which is after all economics in action), and is there a market for folding-screen phones that makes them feasible? I dunno, I wanted one but the probable price makes me say 'wait'.
A truly capable desktop-able phone is within reach probably, though the software may not be. Samsung keeps trying.
Most of the innovation will be in software. When I can get our my car, disconnect the display from the dash screen, walk in my front door, and my phone takes a corner of my TV to announce 'it's home', voice commands move to my in-home assistant, and it all works without me having to say or do anything, then we're getting some innovation. Let it ignore my kids' voices, even better, and take only mine, perfect...
Software. Phone shape is a battle won.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
There's a shit ton of stuff that can still be added to a phone, but it's not "innovation", rather "improvement".
Some time in 2017, mobile phones have reached a point (in terms of power) where they can indeed be used as "pocket desktops". There's enough raw power in them to act as such. All we need is the required improvements, and most of those are software-based, rather than hardware-based.
A couple months ago I played with a Samsung S9+ for a couple of days, and when I needed to charge it I once plugged it into the USB type C of a Lenovo port replicator. It so happened that I had an USB stick connected to the port replicator, and I was amazed to find out the phone detected the port replicator, knew it had audio output capabilities and also detected the USB stick. It could read data off the USB stick but errored out when writing on it.
That got me thinking: the protocol worked. The hardware was compatible. The proper software implementation of all the possible features was missing. So there's the slew of opportunities right there: develop software to leverage your phone's power in the desktop application area. Yeah I sound like a marketing dude but I'm not, I just really look forward to see that happen. Unfortunately, politics and agendas might get in the way, but wouldn't it be cool to come hone, slam your phone into a dock and have a mouse, a keyboard and a couple monitors linked to that dock, complete with Internet access, LAN access, etc.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Surprised it's lasted this long. The reason we're not seeing "innovation" is because a smartphone is a smartphone is a smartphone. We're pretty much topped out on what the useful purpose a smartphone is for. Everything else is just maybe nice to have, but not absolutely necessary.
However, I'd like to see more advancement on the camera side. Like a real optical zoom in a reasonably sized package.
I can't wait for the innovation of the thicker phone. Give me a thicker phone- give me more bezel... if it means you can fit a battery in it that actually lasts a full 24 hours- give me a nice thick bezzelly phone WITH A REAL CHUNKING HUNKING POWERFUL BATTERY.
That's the innovation I want.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Is this post cleverly disguised as a troll to get yet more comments going about a anddroid/iphone religious war?
LOL.. Yea, I miss the Emacs / vi debate too. Nothing lasts forever, but many things just have the names changed when they get recycled....
Ya, but at least vi died a well deserved death of obscurity.
You know what I really miss on Slashdot? John C. Dvorak articles. Here's one: The Traditional Laptop is Dead