Posted by vertigo
- September 02, 2020, 02:23:09
When the Note first came out, I joked about how people looked like they were holding a tablet up to their heads to talk on the phone. I've since been dismayed to learn that many people actually like having such a massive phone, and unfortunately phone manufacturers seem to cater almost exclusively to those people, ignoring those users that want a phone that's actually portable. And it's interesting that, aside from phablets like the Note, the transition to larger sizes has been gradual, almost as if they're easing consumers into it, like slowly raising the temperature of a pot of water with a frog in it. I wonder if people (those that didn't jump straight to phablet devices) would be so accepting of these massive phones if the manufacturers had suddenly increased by 1-1.5" and a few dozen grams instead of a quarter inch and half dozen grams at a time.
I've also been frustrated by the inability to find many phones of reasonable size and weight; I've been looking for a replacement phone for the past year to year-and-a-half, and none of them have been worth it to me for various reasons, but there have been a handful that I might have gone with if not for being too big and/or heavy. Even my current phone is pushing the limits of both, and almost all the newer ones are even bigger and heavier. I even had to change how I hold my phone, because I used to support the bottom with my pinky to improve my grip on it, but had to stop since the increasingly heavy phones started hurting my pinky.
At least it seems like in the past couple years the screen-to-body ratio has been increasing more to allow for larger displays with less increase in the size of the phone, but even so manufacturers still seem intent on also increasing the phone size to make the screen even bigger, not content to just gain a little extra screen size in the same size body (which I would think would be preferable, since it seems that would require less R&D). Granted, I was hesitant about increasing size even when moving from a roughly 4" to 5" screen, only to find I got used to it and actually preferred it due to increased usability, but I've personally hit my limit at this point (on a 3-4 year old phone), as it still feels a bit much sometimes even after all those years of use. I do find that it feels very small after using my tablet for a while, but I quickly readjust.
I actually looked at Sony a few years ago, more for the (at the time) extreme and unbeatable battery life, but didn't get one, and haven't since, due to their limited availability and concern about warranty coverage (they either come from an unauthorized retailer with no warranty or, if there are any with a warranty, I frankly don't have faith that it would be handled well). I considered the Samsung S10e, but didn't get it for three main reasons: small battery with resultant short battery life (biggest reason), poor power button placement, and I just don't like some of the tweaks Samsung does to Android. I really like what they're doing with folding phones, though, and think that's the future of phones. In fact, I was wanting something like that for at least a couple years before they even mentioned it. It would be amazing to have a smaller, more manageable phone but be able to open it up for a bigger screen when needed. Best of both worlds. Of course, it'll be a few years before they come down in price enough to be even close to mainstream.
And then there are a lot of other annoyances and compromises in phones that I wish review sites would take responsibility and call the manufacturers out on (same with computers), but pretty much every review site just glazes over or completely ignores them, and certainly doesn't make a point to hold the manufacturers' feet to the fire by stating in each and every review when they make stupid design choices, e.g. small batteries, no removable storage, USB 2.0, small amounts of storage/RAM, microUSB (may not be an issue anymore, but there were still phones coming out with this years after USB-C came out), and inability to unlock bootloaders and voiding warranty when doing so. The last one being the primary reason I've been wanting to go OnePlus, but for a company who's motto is "never settle" they require their customers to do an awful lot of settling, such as using USB 2.0 all the way up to and including the 6T, no expandable storage (even worse when combined with limited storage capacity), mediocre battery life, and releasing some versions in the US and not others (e.g. 7 Pro, which is too big, but not 7).
I realize there's a lot of subjectivity in all of this, and different people have different priorities, but I often feel like phone and laptop (and peripheral and other) manufacturers just try to do the same as everyone else, leading to numerous products very similar to each other, many of which are lacking in important areas, instead of being innovative and daring to be different. And that's how we have 99% of phones being either too big/heavy, because they all want to cater to that market, or being a reasonable size and weight but then cutting themselves off at the knees by handicapping important specs. It's like they don't want to make an ideal product. I've read through dozens of laptop reviews over the past couple weeks and probably >50 in the past year or so, and it's a regular occurrence for them to be almost perfect, but then there's a couple poor decisions made that drag them down and lead to a non-purchase. It's really crazy how often this happens, and makes me wonder what the people in charge of these decisions are thinking, and if the companies actually want to sell their products.
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