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What bugs me about this is THEY ARE ALL THE SAME! Flat rectangular phones with no buttons and few ports. Where is the innovation? Where is the experimentation? Where are the different form factors?
Go back to like 2003 and you had all kinds of variety in the market. Some phones had slide out keyboards, some had physical keyboards like blackberries, they were all kinds of different expansion ports and slots and interfaces, and occasionally something totally different like Compaq had a gadget that took different backpacks that bolted on the back to give it extra capability.
Skip 20 years ahead to today, and every phone is the exact same fucking form factor. And so we obsess over millimeters and megapixels and software. There's no innovation here. There's no variety here.
The only even slightly interesting development I see is the new flip and book phones, but that technology is being used in the most boring way possible. I want to phone the size of a Snickers bar where I pull the screen out of it from the side and it unrolls as far as I want it to. I want a phone that flips open like a laptop to reveal a keyboard. Or even simpler, I want a phone that's 4 mm thicker and has a battery that lasts all week. Give that phone a headphone jack and wireless charging, put a little rubber around it to make it indestructible, then you'll have something interesting.
Until that happens, you have like six manufacturers that are basically building the exact same product. Boring.
Part of the issue is that the biggest smartphone manufacturers are all sister companies to each other. Oppo, OnePlus, xaiomi, they're all different companies under the same banner, so they're bound to share hardware specs and manufacturing.
Personally I think nothing phone is the only phone brand that's innovating on design with the candy bar style phone, but even that's hard to justify. Samsung has been repeating the folding phone designs and refining them year after year and Google has been pretty lazy with the pixel phones in regards to hardware.
It's a weird time for smartphones, can't push more power without destroying batteries, can't really innovate with batteries because we've hit a wall that only software can help mitigate. Not only that's we all apparently want bigger and bigger phones, and the only way to realistically get that is with folding display tech, which again chews up battery power.
Yeah but if you make the battery 3-4mm thicker you double its volume and then you have a phone with 5000-10000+ mAh.
You don't think 'this phone battery lasts a week' is a selling point? Trust me, it is.
Xiaomi is not under BBK with OPPO, One plus, Vivo
I am very anti monopolies but your first point isnt really a reason. There are many companies that are sistercompanies which are different on purpose. Like VW and Porsche or Dell and Omen. The different branding is normally used to get to different consumer groups.
I think it's profit margins. They are all the same because it's cheaper to build phones using the same mass produces components. They could release different phones but they would have to do small batches and would make less profit on each unit.
If you're into it you can watch tech youtubers go to those big conferences where they show off prototypes of their newest tech, earlier this year they were demoing rolling and pull out screens on phones and laptops, among other stuff.
For the batteries your outta luck for now due to a SOB called physics.
Companies make what sells, and flat candy bars sell. All the companies you mentioned went out of business (at least in the smartphone sector) due to not selling iPhone clones. I'm not saying that's a good thing btw. I wish we had hoverboards & holograms too dude.
I'm pretty content with my folding phone for now though.
How so? Give the battery more volume. Bigger battery = more mAh = lasts longer.
And would also weigh a ton
Say phones are roughly 8mm thick nowadays & have roughly 20 hours or less screen on time - making them .5 thicker doesn't equate to 7 times more capacity. Duracell brought out a mammoth of a brick that had decent battery in 2019.
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/2/26/18241117/energizer-power-max-p18k-pop-huge-battery-phone-mwc-2019
Yeah that was also just a shitty phone- big heavy phone that's a mediocre phone but only needs charging once every few days.
I'm saying make a GOOD phone, maybe 10-12mm thick, and you can get a phone that lasts at least two full days.
The public voted with their purchases and this is what they wanted.
Eventually most products settle into a baseline normal and innovation slows dramatically. It's not just phones that do this.
There are plenty of phones out there that are weird and different but most people ignore them and they don't get the same attention. Think rog phones, flip and fold phones, fair phone, sony's camera focused phones no one wants to buy.
Not too mention this list is for what you should buy, which is really the word experimental phone.
It's a strange mentality that almost everyone time phone are brought up people so for absolute innovation. A full on game changer. Most of these already do exactly what we want incredibly well. There isn't much room for a game changer. Innovations will be less dramatic, more subtle.
No one is going to buy a round phone, or a squiggly phone, and curved screen edges or curved phones never did well. So rectangular it is.
Enthusiast features rarely stick around cus most people don't need those features or the features get rolled into something else. Headphones jacks and HDMI and so on can ask be integrated into USB C and for most that's good enough.
So right. The last Blackberry I used with BB OS had micro hdmi port, hardware keyboard and completely different OS that was able to run android apps. Fast forward 10 years and you can't get any of those any more except maybe from some weird Chinese brands.