This year, smartphone consumers have been really spoiled for choice, as the big OEMs released their flagship devices. From the complete overhauls of the iPhone X to the stylish design of the Samsung Galaxy S8. This year has also been the year of dual camera, bezeless displays, and metallic or near-metallic casing.
These features have been all find and dandy, but at the end of the day, your phone is not a model to be walking up and down the run way all day, every day. You want it to do stuff, be practical and useful in your day-to-day activities.
That said, we hope the big OEMs like Apple, Samsung, Nokia, Google, and Huawei among others do weigh in heavily on the following features. As they retreat to the drawing board for the 2018 flagship phones.
Long lasting Battery life
OEMs have made quantum leaps when it comes to smartphone design, display, processor, storage, and software integrity. However, the evolution of the battery is at a snail space. Year after year, there is minimal to zero improvement of flagship phone’s battery life compared to their predecessor.
If they need to make the phone somewhat a bit thicker and heavier, that is fine for most people. We really hate having our phone die on us at 4:23 PM when we busy during our day hustle, then having to take a pause to juice up the device, which has grown to become an integral part of our lives. While making the battery thicker and heavier seems like an immediate option, the OEMs should invest more in R&D to come up with better battery technologies.
More onboard storage
OEMs are quite something, they have immensely increased the power of camera phones to capture HD still and motion images, increased internet connectivity speeds to incorporate 4G LTE that supports HD and 4K video streaming. Yet they don’t feel the need to increase the storage on these devices proportionately. These HD multimedia do take up a lot of space on our phones. Besides that, our smartphones have become our desktop computer replacements, we sometimes do work on them and handle multiple really huge files. Some bigger ROM would be nice, and better yet, allowance for microSD Card support.
Top notch Camera
We want to capture life memories and cast them in stones in the form of pictures so we can reminisce the good old days every now and then. Plus, there are those of us drunk with flaunting our fabulous lives on social media and show our miserable friends just how awesome our lives gets every minute of the day. OEMs we need you to up the tempo really high on this one, we got people on social media we gotta make them eat their heart out of jealousy of our ‘lit lives.’
Tougher Displays
So you (OEMs) have finally managed to convince the whole world that we need to touch our phone and not press them with a physical keyboard. We are firmly convinced too, but some smartphone screens are quite brittle. A little fall and the glass shatters and cracks. Whether that is by design, so we can come back to your shops to buy another phone, is something for pundits to discuss! Bottom-line is, we need the display to last longer by better surviving the daily shocks it will be getting while in our hands.
Bigger is not necessarily Better
Taking the iPhone X as an example. Apple managed to squeeze killer features on a smaller version of the modern iPhone than what their other flagship phones ‘iPhone 8’ has to offer. Don’t take this wrong, big screen is fine as it gives us better typing, video watching, and mobile video game playing experience, but it shouldn’t not come at the expense of battery life, design, and overall performance of the phone.
The above are the basic feature in a smartphone we hope the OEMs will give heavier weight the next time their design team sit on the drawing table to come up with future phones.