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Slashdot Asks: Does It Matter That We've Reached Peak Smartphone? 197

Posted by msmash from the food-for-thought dept.
Gizmodo, in its typical sensational voice, ran a story this week in which it argues that smartphones are in a "ridiculously boring place" right now. Alex Cranz with the publication expresses her discontent with some of the recently launched smartphones such as the iPhone SE, the LG G5, and the Galaxy S7. "These devices have not redefined the way we phone, nor have they blown us away with unprecedented speeds, or wowed us with extraordinary battery life. Each of these new phones is merely a marginal improvement over last year's model." I agree with most of what Cranz has to say. In the past one year, we've seen QHD display panel, Snapdragon 810/820 SoC, 3 to 4GB of RAM becoming a norm. Nearly every manufacturer has reached that point, and then sort of stopped there. Compared to the Nexus 4, for instance, the Nexus 6P offers a significant improvement. But when compared to anything you purchased two years ago -- in the echelon of your choice -- the latest offering isn't going to leave a big impression on you. The industry is currently making small noises about what it thinks could be the next big thing. Some players including Samsung and Lenovo believe that it could be the virtual reality addon. We will have to see how much traction that gets.

My contention with Cranz's story is that it doesn't talk about how these devices are impacting people's lives, hence missing the big picture. I believe that it doesn't necessarily matter if our smartphones aren't going to get any smarter. The first-generation Moto G, from a few years ago, can also help you quickly get information from the Web, and it can also allow you to book a cab using Uber app, and do pretty much everything that you do on a flagship smartphone. As Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson pointed out last month, the next "second smartphone revolution" could enhance the lives of millions of people in places such as Asia, where most of the population still doesn't have a smartphone. When you look at that, it becomes unnecessary to talk about the top-of-the-line specs and the rate at which these smartphones are receiving incremental improvements. The vast majority of people in the emerging world are in a desperate need of a bare-bone smartphone that allows them to make phone calls, even if it doesn't do it in a "redefined" fashion, and works with speeds that don't blow them away, a couple of things that I think we are taking for granted. Wilson wrote: The first 2.5bn smartphones brought us Instagram, Snapchat, Uber, WhatsApp, Kik, Venmo, Duolingo, and most importantly, drove the big web apps to build world class mobile apps and move their userbases from web to mobile. But, if you stare at the top 200 non-game mobile apps in the US (and most of the western hemisphere) you will see that the list doesn't look that different than the top 200 websites. The mobile revolution from 2007 to 2015 in the west was more about how we accessed the internet than what apps we used, with some notable and important exceptions. The next 2.5bn people to adopt smartphones may turn out to be a different story. They will mostly live outside the developed and wealthy parts of the world and they will look to their smartphones to deliver essential services that they have not been receiving at all -- from the web or from the offline world. I am thinking about financial services, healthcare services, educational services, transportation services, and the like. Stuff that matters a bit more than seeing where you friends had a fun time last night or what it looks like when you faceswap with your sister.At this moment, it does seem to me that over the coming months, our smartphones are unlikely to get a major hardware boost. The biggest milestone we have on the horizon is what happens when everyone has these smartphones, and how does it impact our businesses, culture, and social lives. What's your take on this? Do you think we are yet to reach the peak point in the smartphone world? What's the big picture in your opinion?Update: 04/23 18:55 GMT by M :Robotech_Master's take on this is pretty insightful.
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Slashdot Asks: Does It Matter That We've Reached Peak Smartphone? More

Slashdot Asks: Does It Matter That We've Reached Peak Smartphone?

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  • By this argument... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 23, 2016 @01:35PM (#51973007)

    ... we reached peak laptop 5 years ago and peak desktop almost 10 years ago. Mature products, mature market. I'm not certain people would pay for a release that just improved stability and battery life, so expect some dodgy "features" over the next year or three.

    • And for neither of the two, we've made any actual leaps [vpri.org] as to what we're running on those things. Besides that, people will surely continue to buy new phones... To replace the old ones that got broken. That's still a huge market. Like over a billion units per year.

    • I would not say that's true from any point of view.
      For desktop market, for example, compare 2006-era GPUs with 2016-era GPUs.

      2006 GPUs:

      - Nvidia GeForce 7950 GX2:
      Core: 48 pixel pipes (24 per GPU), 500MHz
      Memory: 1GB (512MB per GPU), 600MHz
      - ATI Radeon X1950 XTX
      Core: 16 pixel pipelines (48 pixel shaders), 650MHz
      Memory: 512MB, 1GHz

      2016-era GPUs:
      - nVidia Pascal:
      15.3 Billion transistors;
      64 SPs per Compute Unit
      3840 CUDA Cores (60 CUDA Units)
      FP32 Compute: ~12 TFLOPs (Tesla)
      FP64 Compute: 5.5 TFLOPs(Tesla)
      RAM: 16 / 3

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jedidiah ( 1196 )

        Overpriced video cards aren't driving the market. They aren't compelling enough to enough people to keep the bottom of the market falling out.

        Most PC users are content with whatever default resolution that Windows gives them. They've been underutilizing PC hardware since at least 2006. So LCD vs LED is not a big deal either.

        • Hardware accelerated, stutter free HTML5 1080 HD video now drives the market.

          The majority of consumers couldn't care about the latest Vulkan/Direct3D/OGL support as long as their media doesn't choke.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Altrag ( 195300 )

        While you're not wrong, you're kind of answering the wrong question.. We're not really looking at peak performance (never mind limiting ourselves to one specific component,) but peak sales.

        A decade is probably a bit too long, but any PC that could handle Win7 reasonably well -- so ~7ish years -- will still handle the vast majority of today's applications reasonably well.

        Sure if you're into high end gaming (or a few select GPU-heavy industries like 3D animators) then the improvements over the past decade are

  • The Purpose of a Phone (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Maclir ( 33773 ) on Saturday April 23, 2016 @01:35PM (#51973009) Journal

    Is to talk to another person, and be able to hear and understand them. Maybe the smartphone manufacturers could concentrate on the audio quality and intelligibility of phone conversations using their equipment...

    • Re:The Purpose of a Phone (Score:5, Insightful)

      by transami ( 202700 ) on Saturday April 23, 2016 @01:51PM (#51973121) Homepage

      +1,000,000

      Mind boggling isn't it? Here we are well into the 21st century and I feel like I am talking through a string an tin can most of the time.

      • Re:The Purpose of a Phone (Score:5, Insightful)

        by inode_buddha ( 576844 ) on Saturday April 23, 2016 @02:21PM (#51973273) Journal

        THIS. If you really want to be amazed at the audio quality, try an old rotary dial phone on a landline... it totally blows away anything since. Oh, and lets not forget that the POTS landline system set the world standard for reliability... five 9's is a joke compared to POTS.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Maybe POTS was different in your country, but in the UK audio quality is nowhere near the "HD voice" available for many years on mobile. Reliability is far from five 9s too, depending on where you live of course, and getting faults fixed is usually slow and painful.

        • If you really want to be amazed at the audio quality, try an old rotary dial phone on a landline...

          Doesn't that require NLA "pulse" service?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by schnell ( 163007 )

          try an old rotary dial phone on a landline... it totally blows away anything since.

          I love the shout out to old school POTS, but it really doesn't blow away anything since, not by a long shot. You may not have had an opportunity to try it, but if your phone and carrier support VoLTE calls using the AMR-WB codec [wikipedia.org] (often marketed as "HD Voice,") you will hear a immediately noticeable improvement in audio quality over traditional 64 kbps uncompressed circuit-switched voice.

          The catch is that you have to have a LTE phone which supports VoLTE (most premium smartphones made in the last two years d

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Dahamma ( 304068 )

          No, not really. It's limited to 3KHz. While it might be very intelligible for a conversation (which is the most important thing!) it's definitely not a benchmark for "audio quality". Try a good "HD Audio" VOIP service - when done right it's practically CD quality audio.

    • "Is to talk to another person, and be able to hear and understand them. Maybe the smartphone manufacturers could concentrate on the audio quality and intelligibility of phone conversations using their equipment..."

      Why? Nobody phones anymore, people use texts, Whatsapp and Skype for free and paying only for data, nobody cares about audio quality of the phones themselves.

    • Re:The Purpose of a Phone (Score:5, Insightful)

      by buchner.johannes ( 1139593 ) on Saturday April 23, 2016 @02:04PM (#51973201) Homepage Journal

      These devices have not redefined the way we phone

      The Purpose of a Phone Is to talk to another person, and be able to hear and understand them

      Lets not be so narrow-minded. Smartphones are communication devices - and they have redefined the way we communicate - world-wide, nearly free, with a mixture of instant texts, emoticons, images, gifs, short videos and, yes, voice.

      It is not solely the phone network anymore, and it is not just telephoning that a phone does -- although you still can use it that way.

    • Re:The Purpose of a Phone (Score:5, Informative)

      by friedmud ( 512466 ) on Saturday April 23, 2016 @02:07PM (#51973211)

      Already being done. Voice over LTE (VoLTE) is a HUGE step up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] . It's been supported on iPhones for a few years now (and I'm sure Android as well, I just don't have any experience there) and it makes an enormous difference when you're talking to someone else that has the capability.

      The next version of it is Wideband Audio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] . It's already available on Sprint and T-mobile in the US.

      • My last few t-mobile phones have supported using my current data connection for calls. Not sure if that's actually VOLTE (it works over wifi too).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Agripa ( 139780 )

        The digital audio itself should be a major improvement over analog assuming lossy compression is not overused however taking advantage of it requires a good microphone and speaker on both sides. The old analog handsets were pretty good for this but current hardware has poor performance if only because of its form factor.

    • Yes grandpa, we'll only use our smartphones for voice calls and we'll make sure to stay off your lawn.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

        It is obviously not the only use for a smartphone but it is an essential one.
        And now that smartphones have enough power to run everything we need to waste time, that cameras can take pictures where you can recognize what it is, people are starting to consider sound quality more seriously.

    • The Sprint logo is designed to resemble one of their most famous ads from when they were a long-distance company: this [youtube.com]. It's the bouncing pin. And yes, you really could hear that level of detail. We have gained a lot in flexibility, but quality has gone to hell. 1990s long-distance circuits sounded like you were in the same room. 2010s local calls sound like you're at the bottom of the ocean.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dahamma ( 304068 )

      Actually, there is nothing wrong with the equipment. Try using FaceTime instead of a cellular call, it's crystal clear. The problem is the network providers who refuse to get into the 21st century and update cellular voice technology...

    • Is to talk to another person, and be able to hear and understand them. Maybe the smartphone manufacturers could concentrate on the audio quality and intelligibility of phone conversations using their equipment...

      Yeah in 1995.

      I NEED IT for google maps, finding out if places closed via "Ok. Google when does x close", bluetooth to get directions while I drive, post on slashdot, check in at the airport, text message, and many many things.

      A phone is a computer and the new computer for everyone with the exception for work content creators. But you can do light content creation on a phone fine for a tiny task.

  • No, it doesn't. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PhrostyMcByte ( 589271 ) <phrosty@gmail.com> on Saturday April 23, 2016 @01:38PM (#51973035) Homepage
    At this point I don't upgrade to a new phone until the battery on my existing one becomes useless and I can't find a replacement. There hasn't been a compelling phone feature to me for quite a while. Screen resolution, camera, CPU, data speeds are all at a good enough place. The last really cool feature for me was wireless charging.

    • and that's why it matters, cost and contracts (Score:5, Insightful)

      by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Saturday April 23, 2016 @02:04PM (#51973195) Journal

      It's long been true that one could buy a phone similar to last-year's model at a reasonable cost. Since there haven't been any radical improvements for a few years, there's no longer any reason to spend $650 on the hottest new thing. No reason to replace a phone that works fine, and when you do need a new phone the $120 model will do fine.

      That shift has several effects, one of which is that carrier subsidies on phone purchases, in which the buyer pays for the $650 phone through a higher monthly bill on contract, have become kinda pointless. No reason not to buy a $120 phone up-front, then get $30 service with no contract.

    • Yeah I'm in the skip-a-year club. But that be the skip-two-or-three-years club in the near future.

  • Write-up is exactly right. It's a good thing. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Robotech_Master ( 14247 ) on Saturday April 23, 2016 @01:40PM (#51973045) Homepage Journal

    I said much the same thing on TeleRead [teleread.com]. There are many, many devices and things that haven't "advanced" in decades but are a such a quiet everyday part of our lives that we couldn't imagine doing without them. Smartphones (and their close relations tablets and e-readers) are becoming just like that. Not everything in our lives has to be replaced by something shiny and new every couple of years.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nethead ( 1563 )

      Good article. Thanks for turning me on to the site.

    • Re:Write-up is exactly right. It's a good thing. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Saturday April 23, 2016 @02:33PM (#51973331) Homepage

      And there's also the question if they got better, would we really need it and use them for more? For example you can now get 64GB DDR4 (4x16GB) [newegg.com] for mainstream desktops for $239, but is there any normal use case? Even with all the bells and whistles I'm struggling to hit 10GB (of 16 total), so it's like sure I could but why. I think it might be more that, the smartphone you have already have "enough" to do what most people want so even if you could make a smartphone with desktop-class performance it wouldn't really have much more it could do.

      • Yeah, we've basically hit the point where computers are good enough to do everything the average person wants them to do. The only people who want high-powered stuff are gamers and number-crunchers. I put 32 GB of RAM in my wife's iMac, but only because I didn't want to take the damned thing apart to put in an SSD, which is what it really needs. My iMac has the SSD+HDD combo (forget what they call it, but it works like a charm). Is it as perfectly customized as the PC I had before it? Hell no. But it surfs

      • I would think that there is.

        Here's a possible use case, but it feels awefully retro:

        Use one of the many free ramdisk drivers out there, and have it load a minimalist ntfs image on boot. (usually only 1 to 3mb, depending.) This image is then junction mounted in all the places windows wants to write temporary files. Just keep in mind that the usual places where this would get the most benefit (CBS.log and pals) were designed so horribly that softlinks and junctions will break windows, because microsoft does n

      • Re:Write-up is exactly right. It's a good thing. (Score:5, Funny)

        by radarskiy ( 2874255 ) on Saturday April 23, 2016 @05:49PM (#51974295)

        "I'm struggling to hit 10GB "

        Switch back to Firefox

  • Maybe not peak, but a plateau (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Todd Knarr ( 15451 ) on Saturday April 23, 2016 @01:43PM (#51973067) Homepage

    I don't think we've hit peak smartphone, but we're at a plateau. The next steps will be three things:

    1. Reduced cost and improved durability, bringing smartphones to those areas of the world that currently can't afford them.

    2. Improved battery life. That's going to come from battery tech, not the phone side.

    3. Augmented reality. Not virtual reality, but something like Google Glass that can use the entire surface of the lens as a display instead of just a small chunk in a corner.

    • Re:Maybe not peak, but a plateau (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anne Thwacks ( 531696 ) on Saturday April 23, 2016 @02:40PM (#51973373)
      We have hit a plateau cos the manufacturers - perhaps at the behest of carriers, are wilfully failing to deliver what most people want (as opposed to the reviewers - who want iPhones).

      Real people want:

      • Indestructible plastic backs that let the signal through - NOT aluminium ones that shield the signal, and get bent - as well as costing more. We put our phones in cases to protect them - cos we go out into the real world.
      • Replaceable batteries - when I leave the house, I change the battery. When I return, I change the battery. I keep spare batteries in the desk, the car. A lot of other people do the same.
      • Removable SD cards. We want one SD card for work, and one for home - and a lot of people have to take them out to move data to computers, cos some idiots, somewhere, have screwed up the USB protocols something wicked, and a lot of older versions of Android, still in use (Gee thanks, carriers), appear not to be thread safe and trash your SD card.
      • We want dual sim. UK carriers wont sell dual sim phones, and make them hard to get here, except ones with appalling performance (and pre MS Nokias).
      • We want waterproof, and dust proof, child proof, hell we WANT idiot proof and NSA proof (but I know we wont get it).
      • We want software that does not change the UI unless we decide to download a new one from the dark side of hell.
      • We dont give a stuff it the phone is 1.3mm thinner. We managed to use Bakelite housephones that weighed 2kg, and I had an analogue mobile that weighed about 10kg cos it had a car battery in it. At least the bloody thing did not keep needing to be recharged.
      • We need a camera that takes pictures. Most people are hopeless at taking pictures, and a better camera wont help them. We do not need 4M pixels, 8M Pixels, 16, 32, 64 - we know about binary arithmetic and exponential increases. Those that don't, never will, and, regardless of gamers and people who buy monster cables, 24 frames a second works fine for most people, and 60 fps for everybody else.
      • We also need the option not to have a camera. Some people actually work in places where you cannot take a camera for reasons of security or privacy.

      There are probably loads of other features we could have all of which are better than 0.6mm thinnner and less than 150 hours of talk time.

      But the reviewers keep saying the Android phones are not Apple! Hell, GM is not Ford, McLaren is not Mercedes, either.
      And if I want a 44 ton truck, don't even bother trying to sell me a Volkswagen Caddy, even if it does have the same pollution ratings.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Alumoi ( 1321661 )

      1 and 2 are not going to happen. You must buy new bling every year (6 moths would be better) so that the manufactures won't starve. Think of their children!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AK Marc ( 707885 )
      They change them enough to be new. Smartphones have converged with PCs. I know people that create and give presentations on their phone, using their phone as a PC replacement. That it can be done doesn't make it a PC because most wouldn't do it.

      Cheaper isn't new. The Raspberry Pi phone, with a $20 price tag for something usable would be an improvement, but wouldn' be "new". Battery life isn't useful. Wireless charging, faster charging (go google VOOC) and other improvements in availability will be th

      • For AR I don't expect the phone to be the display. As I said, something like Google Glass which uses the phone as the processing and communications unit and simply displays on effectively your entire field of view. No need to bind the phone permanently to the display, because displays will improve (just like right now we don't bind the phone permanently to a headset, we connect them via Bluetooth and we can replace the headset with a better model without needing to replace the phone in the process).

  • Volume Controls Still Suck (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Michael Coleman ( 4288707 ) on Saturday April 23, 2016 @01:47PM (#51973099)

    After all of these years, volume controls on phones still suck ass. The physical buttons are on the edge of the phone and you either butt-mute and butt-blare your phone all day long, or they're stupid hard to press and you can't tell without looking at the phone whether your change has even taken. On top of that, some apps "steal" the buttons, so you're never sure whether you're actually adjusting the volume or talking to the app.

    On top of that, there are actually multiple settings, i.e., for ringer volume, media volume, etc. And some apps seem to have their own "private" volume setting that is only adjustable when the app is in the foreground. Or when the app _thinks_ it's in the foreground. Or when the OS has stopped lagging and gets around to thinking it's in the foreground.

    And don't forget about headphones. Various things behave differently if headphones are plugged in. Some sounds go to the headphones and others continue to come out of the phone, for no obvious reason.

    All of that assumes that you haven't tripped over the various OS bugs that make the volume unchangeable, etc.

    So yeah, I still have a few hundred $$$ burning a hole in my pocket for any manufacturer that can solve this problem.

  • QWERTY regression (Score:5, Insightful)

    by short ( 66530 ) on Saturday April 23, 2016 @01:53PM (#51973141) Homepage
    There already were smartphones with QWERTY (incl. arrows, numeric row etc. - suitable for programming/VIM, not just for SMSes). There is no longer any single one QWERTY manufactured. There is probably still a long way ahead before we can see a usable phone when they still cannot get the QWERTY there.

  • Realistically, what more do you want one to do?

    Peak smartphone may be here for people willing to stump up the moolah, but the world's becoming more and more connected because of cheaper, better devices. For most of the seven billion people, $700 isn't what they can splash on a nice phone, it's over half their annual income. Better value smartphones are bringing capable computers to the masses.

  • If they are stuck on how to innovate, then they can give me call.

  • Updates (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Stephen J Sweeney ( 3389523 ) on Saturday April 23, 2016 @01:56PM (#51973161)

    As an Android user, the main thing I want now from a smartphone is regular updates (chiefly, security). As far as I can tell, only Google is committed to regular security updates for all their recent devices. Actually, I think Samsung might be doing so as well, but only for the S6 and S7. Stagefright was a major wakeup call for Android partners, but it seems that, after the dust settled, the OEMs have returned to the old "just buy a new phone" approach to solving the problem. Mind you, Joe Sixpack really doesn't seem bothered. Or maybe just not clued up.

    I'm planning on grabbing the next Nexus when it arrives, hopefully with a 64GB option or an SD card slot, so I can benefit from the monthly security patches. I can only see attacks against smartphones increasing both in volume and sophistication, now that we've peaked and almost everyone has one.

  • New media is always pitched as an opportunity for education, health care knowledge, and global understanding. But it always gets used for porn, reality shows, and mindless entertainment. Now with more cat pictures.

  • These devices have not redefined the way we phone, nor have they blown us away with unprecedented speeds, or wowed us with extraordinary battery life. Each of these new phones is merely a marginal improvement over last year's model.

    Why is no one saying the same things about PCs? Modern smartphones are excellent at what they're doing, sans their poor battery life. Why would you want to switch your phone every 12 months, and why would you expect every generation to bring something new and incredible to the table?

    Modern smartphones are already as powerful as 5-7 old PCs yet they consume roughly 100 times less power. I mean for all intents and purposes they are a miracle! You basically have a supercomputer in your pocket for fuck's sake

    • Re:Who the fuck cares? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Dutch Gun ( 899105 ) on Saturday April 23, 2016 @02:50PM (#51973419)

      Actually, tech writers all but wrote off PCs a few years ago, declaring it a dead or dying platform. From what I can see, PCs just settled into a more specialized role as content creation platforms, contrary to phones, tablets, and consoles, which are more suited for content consumption.

      Still, it's probably only the tech media (and manufacturers, of course) that are really worried about this, because they're the ones who write about smartphones. So, there's a built-in bias regarding the desired interest in seeing new and shiny devices coming out each year, because that interest is tied to their ability to earn a living writing about those devices. How many people get all excited about a new model of oven ranges or refrigerators? It must terrify tech writers to think about smartphones becoming as mundane as other appliances.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Modern smartphones are already as powerful as 5-7 old PCs yet they consume roughly 100 times less power.

      Pure bullshit. Try compressing 1 gig of data using LZMA compression and watch a 7 year old PC leave the smartphone in the dust. Smartphones still don't have the data processing power and bandwidth of even a machine that's a decade old. You just don't notice that when you're playing Angry Birds or surfing Facebook.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by erice ( 13380 )

      These devices have not redefined the way we phone, nor have they blown us away with unprecedented speeds, or wowed us with extraordinary battery life. Each of these new phones is merely a marginal improvement over last year's model.

      Why is no one saying the same things about PCs?

      Because it is no longer news. PC's have been stagnant to declining for some years now. In the 80's and 90's PC's were the engine behind the electronics industry. That started to peter out in the 2000's so everyone hitched a ride on the mobile boom. Now, smart phones are cresting. Without rapid advancement consumers will delay purchasing new phones. Volume and margins will fall. Now attention is being turned to wearables and Internet of Things. There is still a great deal of uncertainty of either tre

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jedidiah ( 1196 )

      > Modern smartphones are already as powerful as 5-7 old PCs

      No they aren't, not by a long shot.

      People only manage to do simple PC tasks with mobile devices. The really interesting things are offloaded to some server in the cloud or a local desktop like Siri or Plex.

  • If this means that the market has finally matured (i.e a new phone isn't obsoleted in 6 months since a next gen is being released) then it's great because that would open the market finally for a long term phone. You know a smart phone where you still in 10 years time get updates, can get cheap replacement battery and so on. I know that this won't happen ever since the manufacturers want to keep creating new cheap shit that we should buy and trash in 6 months, but still this would at least make room for one

  • These devices have not redefined the way we phone, nor have they blown us away with unprecedented speeds, or wowed us with extraordinary battery life

    And yet people are happy to buy these devices and seem to be content with the level of performance they offer. It's important to remember that the "phone" is merely a platform. On its own, it's nothing - useless. When the apps come along that need more powerful phones, the manufacturers will develop them.

    But for the time being, unless you're addicted to better, faster, bigger / smaller - just for the sake of having something a tiny bit better to brag about - then making phones faster or more capacious see

  • Hardware can't proceed because the software sucks. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Smartphones made a leap with installable apps, now they need to enable installable operating systems. We're currently in a phase where large parts of the OS are reinvented with every generation of smartphones, much how previously features like phone book, sms entry, and synchronization were new in every new phone (and came with new oddities and bugs), even from the same manufacturer. The ARM world needs to become a platform instead of a loose arrangement of components. Until you can buy a phone without OS a

  • I'm reading a science fiction novel set a hundred years into the future and corporations have colonized space. One of the characters made an observation that the toaster as a kitchen appliance hadn't changed despite all the advances in space travel. In short, your cellphone is another appliance.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sims 2 ( 994794 )

      We can only hope but they are doing more and more gimmicky things to sell stuff nowadays like selling laptops with no mouse buttons. Or curved tv's with no buttons so you can't change the channel when you loose the remote.

      I'm sure its only a matter of time until I'll walk through the appliance aisle in Walmart and hear:
      Howdy doodly do. How's it going? I'm Talkie, Talkie Toaster, your chirpy breakfast companion. Talkie's the name, toasting's the game. Anyone like any toast?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sims 2 ( 994794 )

        I'd settle for one that just toasted evenly on both sides...

      • I'm sure its only a matter of time until I'll walk through the appliance aisle in Walmart and hear:
        Howdy doodly do. How's it going? I'm Talkie, Talkie Toaster, your chirpy breakfast companion. Talkie's the name, toasting's the game. Anyone like any toast?

        http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Genuine_People_Personalities

  • I think Gizmodo has reached peak clickbait (Score:4, Insightful)

    by JoeyRox ( 2711699 ) on Saturday April 23, 2016 @02:32PM (#51973327)
    Time to actually write something of substance.

  • Just bought an S7 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 23, 2016 @02:34PM (#51973339)

    I agree with the story. I'm a die hard corporate blackberry user. The only other phone I've ever owned is the iphone 3GS and that was because at the time _everyone_ in the office had one. You couldn't attend a meeting without someone talking about it.

    Fast forward to the S7 and Android. The phone itself is sleek, and looks nice, but it ends there. Ergonomically it's a nightmare for me. Security is also a nightmare. RF is weak. For a phone costing over $1000 Canadian, I'm not impressed.

    I'm still not sure where to post this, dumping a wall of text on Slashdot isn't exactly ideal but the phone has never seen the public network. Since the day I got it (last Tuesday), it's had a sim with no data and on a completely isolated wireless network for observation. What I've found is absolutely absurd. It's not only call home happy but it's like the neighborhood hoe. It won't stop broadcasting for benign things (DNS and multicast for the most part). I've disabled everything I can short of rooting the phone and I've not accepted _any_ TOS or license for anything (including Google nor Facebook), yet it persists. In a futile attempt to further isolate the phone it's now sitting on a VPN.. which it's ignoring for some hosts like connectivitycheck.android.com, but also more disturbingly external DNS. A lot of the call home garbage appears to be Samsung and Google, there is also some to odd places like Broadcom.

    Phones out right now are largely snakeoil. It's no wonder so few sites "review" anything but how the phone looks or the stupid cameras. I couldn't find any doing even basic reception tests. Few show Email clients or the phone UI much at all. Some even consider the abysmal battery to be normal. Charging a phone nightly is NOT NORMAL.

    • Re:Just bought an S7 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M ( 4212163 ) on Saturday April 23, 2016 @03:03PM (#51973475)

      I don't know where you work, but from the information I gathered in your short comment, you are the kind of guy who should be writing product reviews.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by AK Marc ( 707885 )
      Reception is a carrier's problem, not a phones.

      And people would rather have a big battery with 2 hour life than a small battery with a 2 week run time. At least, that's how it looks from reading reviews.

      The endgoal for battery life is 0 battery life, and chargers everywhere. A wireless charger everywhere. In the car, at home, at work, stores, for guests in offices, everywhere. You don't need to have a battery if it's powered everywhere, and for camping, you take a power pack.

  • Maybe things are wildly better in the Android world (probably?), but as an iPhone user, I'd just like to see more disk space so I can carry around my whole mp3 collection and actually use the super high rez cameras they put on these things for video. 128GB seems really small for 2016.

    You could probably keep me on the upgrade treadmill for another decade (the every 2-3 year treadmill, I'm not interested in anything shorter), if you simply doubled the flash memory every 2-3 years.

    No, I'm not intereste

  • Smartphones are dealing with a problem that PC's had to conquer. I haven't felt like a PC I run has bloat for ages. (True, I mostly run Linux and Mac, but even Windows 7 and 10 have felt responsive).

    Contrast that with Samsung and it's night and day. I've held off upgraded because despite the faster processor and more ram, reviews (http://www.techtimes.com/articles/137991/20160302/samsung-galaxy-s7-bloatware-takes-up-massive-8-gb-of-internal-storage-from-the-get-go.htm, http://www.tomsguide.com/us/sa... [tomsguide.com]).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AK Marc ( 707885 )
      TouchWiz sucks. Sense, ColorOS, and just about every other one out there, including "pure" Andriod, are better than TouchWiz. Nobody wants Samsung's restrictive app store. Deals with apps to run only on Samsung (and only through their App store), locking out side-loading of apps that would otherwise work.

  • >"Compared to the Nexus 4, for instance, the Nexus 6P offers a significant improvement."

    Because you skipped over the Nexus 5.

    Some of us (me included) don't really need any tons more speed or 1,000,000 DPI displays. We don't want 3D. We don't want iris scanners, virtual keyboards, 100 megapixel cameras, or other gimmicks..... We want LONGER BATTERY LIFE, reliability, modern memory and storage options, in a SMALLER phone without losing any features, for a reasonable price.

    I am a Nexus 5 owner and love t

    • your one concern is actually the coolest thing, tremendous improvement in lifetime for all batteries is around the corner, we can just shove a better battery into our existing good-enough pocket phone/texting/portable browsing appliance.

      But this stupid Alex C cunt with her whines, who the fuck wants VR from their fucking pocket telephone? for what?

  • I picked one up when they came out and there is simply no reason for me to upgrade to anything else for the foreseeable future. IT works. Its only true weakness is the camera.

  • Does it matter that we've reach Peak Toaster? (Score:5, Funny)

    by rubycodez ( 864176 ) on Saturday April 23, 2016 @04:50PM (#51974019)

    Toasters are in a ridiculously boring place right now. I'm expressing my discontent with the leading Cuisinart, Black & Decker, Hamilton Beach and Kitchenaid models. These have not redefined the way we toast, nor have they blown us away with unprecedented toasting speeds, or wowed us with extraordinary extra settings knobs. Each of these toasters is merely a marginal improvement over last years or even last four decade's toasters. The latest offering isn't going to leave a big impression on you. The industry is currently making small noises about what it thinks could be the next big thing. Some players believe that it could be the IoT addons. We will have to see how much traction that gets.

    • I have yet to figure out what this IoT is good for (I think I'm agreeing with you). So my toaster can text me to tell me my bagel is done? That's not high on my priority list... I suppose I could get a odor-of-rotting-food detector for my refr that would text me, but I can smell that just fine when I open the door. And I recently replaced the smart thermostats in my house with dumb ones, because the smart ones (not networked) were too hard to program. (I program computers as part of my job, so no, I'm

  • What's so bad about that? Hardware stability, software performance, all of these are good things.

    Oh... riiiiight, the fucking shareholders. That's the problem. They expect the gravy train to always run run run. It won't. Get used to it. The number of available scams (er, new product "innovation") are dwindling.

    I expect smartphone makers to refine what they have, listen to customer feedback, and forget about trying to out-do each other.

    This is why my next phone will be the iPhone SE, or its descendant.

  • What I want is my next phone to operate in PAN mode (personal area network), in which I wear the SIM card / "${new_shiny}G" transceiver / shared-storage-volume on my belt, and then I use any peripheral I wish to use in conjunction with it (dumb phone, smart phone, tablet, smart watch)—possibly several at the same time.

    As I see it, each device would have essentially it's own installation and software profile (with the majority of storage local), but there would be enough on the belt blob that you could

  • What I would love is a $50 smartphone where I can at least partially upgrade it. A few things such as a better battery would be nice if. The simple reality is that while I have an unlimited everything package, I don't use my phone for that much. I use the maps, occasionally surf the web, run a few apps of no particular hardship on the CPU, listen to lectures and audiobooks, listen to podcasts, listen to music, and check simple things such as the time or weather. Oh, and I take non critical pictures and vide

  • Anyone seen or played with one of those tiny spectrum analysers that Texas instruments sells for $1000 a pop?
    Smaller than a mobile phone and runs on a mobile battery.
    That, I think, given the speed of miniaturisation is the next big thing in technology to come to our smart phones.
    The value really won't be in the hardware but in the reference databases and software that make it useful.
    Imagine going out to eat and scanning your food for calories, additives, nuts (for allergies) before eating?
    That's real power

  • We're at peak Smartphone when each device has 2TG of storage, 64GB of memory, some 3GHz something 8-16 core CPU, 50 hrs. of battery life and enought gfx power to be used as a PS4 replacement and a desktop workstation. At the same time.

    Give, we could already be there, but convergence hasn't caught on yet as an overall concept with the general populace and phonemakers are still making plenty a buck by inching out increasingly smaller upgrades to strange early-adopter flagship markups of 2-3 times the price fo

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