Trends in smartphones that you dislike (or like)?

jjgreenwood

I like all the things you hate apart from the cost. I do wish manufacturers had more imagination though. Every phone this year is glass front and back, personally I prefer a metal finish. I am interested by the ceramic finish of the essential phone, and I did like the old moto x's wood and leather finishes. I know they do it because waterproofing and wireless charging now has to be in the feature list, but I'd happily give both up for a more interesting design.

mike7

I prefer anything that does not have the Apple symbol on it.

garryboy

Very few decent phones at 5" or less.  

I want a phone not a tablet.

My nexus 7 was a tablet. I would never dream of sticking that in my jeans pocket and the attempting to make a call with it. Won't be long till phones are reaching 7"

My hands are pretty small and I'd struggle to use a phone larger than 5" single handed.

Hence why I use a iPhone se.

My nexus 5 was perfect. I replaced it with a 5x and t was just too big.

Johnmcl7

I dislike curved screens as well since they simply appear to use up screen space and make the phone a lot more fragile to drops.  I also dislike the fragile all glass builds these days and I do appreciate some people like, it's annoying almost all the current phones seem to be using that design even the Note 4 despite having the already very similar S8  and the V30 which follows on from the more practical V10/V20 designs.  I don't even understand the point of having a 'nice' body if it's so fragile it needs to be immediately put in a case.

Sealed in batteries are a big frustration as well as fast charging certainly helps mitigate the ease of getting back up to full power quickly but long term a battery will degrade.  I've replaced my Note 4 battery each year as I've found after daily recharges it has decreased.  I've seen that some companies advertise they will replace the batteries in their own phones but I've no idea how long that's valid for, anyone tried getting the battery replaced on a Note 5 or S6 for example?

Johnmcl7

Phone screen size is a misleading way to measure phone size, while it sets a minimum size the huge variance in bezel size means the size of the phones physically can vary considerably for similar screen sizes.  It means that while it looks like phones are getting much bigger due to increasing screen sizes, they aren't actually as manufacturers have recently taken to reducing bezels as much as possible.  The S8's 5.8in screen sounds huge but it's only slightly taller than the Nexus 5 and it's actually narrower which is an important factor for reaching parts of the screen particularly bearing in mind part of the size increase on the S8 is due to it getting rid of hardware keys.

John

garryboy

That's true

finbaar

The move away from including a 3.5mm headphone socket is anti consumer.  The part is small and any decent designer could easily include it.  Apple, Moto, HTC and Google have excellent designers so the only reason to remove it is to rip consumers off.  I appreciate that airpods and other bluetooth headphones can be great but should you have to spend an EXTRA £150?  Many of us appreciate really good headphones that need a good DAC to drive them and you won't get  that through bluetooth.  And others just want to be able to pick up a cheap pair from a shop when we need them.  The whole thing is a complete mental rip off and shame on Google if the Pixel 2 and 2 XL come without a 3.5mm headphone socket, they made a point of its inclusion last year.

everett_psycho

I hope companies up the battery sizes, it's annoying the the Moto Z play has mid range spec with a good battery and goes for days every time, and try included turbo charging. They've now downgraded it on the z play 2 and removed the biggest selling point of the device.

I just picked up a wooden back plate for my z play and is so nice after years of plastic and glass. I was tempted by the leather one but didn't think of change it too often, now I'm using some mods I can see me wanting to put on a different back plate some days just for the hell of it.

I do like that mid range is now a viable option and stable.  Plus more OEMs are keeping android more basic.  I'd still like to see less crap phones and the decent ones supported longer. Do they really need to pump out 10  phones a year, I'd rather see once in each bracket and get out timely updates for 2 years.

Martin68

Cameras that dont shoot in 25 or 50fps video for us video enthusiasts in 50Hz PAL countries, and  not offering a forced landscape video orientation, because of this, we now see lots of thin vertical videos on our wide screen tv's.
Also physical button placement on Samsungs, you cant pick it up without pressing the side buttons.

dts197

What are you doing, squeezing your phone when you pick it up?