Posted on 02/25/2018 9:08:10 AM PST by Red Badger
The iPhone X is beautiful, no doubt. It's also expensive as all get-out, and the Samsung Galaxy S9 is shaping up to be the same. We're finally reaching the platonic ideal of a smartphone: a big, slick slab of screen that looks pretty, costs a fortune, has a good camera, and runs all the apps. Cool, good, great. Also boring! Extremely, savagely, stultifyingly boring.
Thank goodness for this year's crop of weirdos coming out of the woodwork.
As 2018 Mobile World Congress looms, the new crop of devices make it clear that the titans of phonemaking are still reluctant to fix any of the things that are actually wrong with phones or to meaningfully innovate in other ways. Apple's flashy new "Face ID" exists almost entirely to replace perfectly good Touch ID (though Animoji karaoke is legitimately wonderful). Google's Pixel 2's most interesting feature was that you can squeeze it. The Galaxy S8 experimented with little more than a dedicated button for its awful version of Siri. The upcoming GS9, slated to be unveiled at the show, appears to have no real surprises up its sleeve.
But not everything is boring. Strange new phones from brands like Energizer and Caterpillar (neither of which actually build their own phones, but rather slap their names on white-label hardware from other manufacturers) are trying to push the boundaries of a saturated market with decidedly weird phones. They probably won't be great, but at least they're interesting.
In addition to its mouthful of a name, Energizer's Power Max P16K Pr is rumored to have a comically large 16,000 mAh battery. That is more than eight times the capacity of the battery you'll find in an iPhone 8. It's more than four times the capacity of phones that use giant batteries as a selling feature, like Razer's "gaming phone," which is a weirdo in its own right. Assuming the leaks are correct, the P16K is a chunky powerhouse with multiple days of battery, despite otherwise standard specs. It won't unseat a $1,000 flagship, sure, but at least it takes on the issue of crappy phone battery life.
Caterpillar's new S61 goes even farther with its uncommon features. The company better known for its giant construction equipment followed up last year's S60 with a new phone that not only contains a FLIR thermal camera(!) that can stream Predator vision live to the internet, but also has an air-quality sensor, a laser measurement system, and a military-grade durability rating. No, it won't challenge an iPhone X or Galaxy S9 in terms of fit and finish. Some of its specs, like the meager 1080p screen, are downright bad. And it'll still cost you about $1,000. Unless you have some very specific heavy-duty needs, this probably isn't the phone you want to buy. But it is staking out some strange new ground.
Neither of these weirdos are destined to be blockbusters. Each will be bad in its own way. Good smartphones are hard to make! There's a reason that the most polished and expensive ones are largely the same. Still, strange experiments that push the boundaries stand a chance of making everything better. People might not need a battery as enormous as Energizer's, but maybe the market for that phone will show that batteries could stand to be bigger than they are right now. Livestreaming thermal camera footage is overkill for anyone who's not a professional handyman, but maybe laser measurement is something every phone should have.
As consumer tech careens towards the beautiful and the boring (and the blisteringly expensive), it's good to see there's still some experiments happening out there. So bring on the weirdos. Let's see how wild we can get.
Ping!....................
great article - thanks
i believe the replacement cycle is rapidly moving from 24 months to 36 months
The market is and has been saturated for a couple of years.
The flagship phones are basically all alike, and any new models can’t attract new buyers, and old buyers don’t see a need to upgrade.
At $1000 and up for the latest gewgaws I am not surprised the makers haven’t crashed and burned by now..................
It reminds me of Microsoft slopware: every "upgrade" offers functionality that no one wants and almost no one uses, but MS builds it in to make it look like it's really done something worthy of a new release. And half the time you spend more of your day fighting the bloated software than you do using it for its primary purpose.
I get plenty of upgrade offers from AT&T but I am happy with my Samsung 6. It's perfect for me.
Sounds like somebody hired schlocky old Consumer Reports writers from the seventies .
today's phones aren't phones, they are computers with a phone app... i still run a Trac-Phone cause all i need it to do is make phone calls and nothing more
Are you on top of this stuff, Badger?
I used to carry a Samsung Galaxy S3 mini, quite small, which I loved, but battery problems ended that.
Now I’ve got the Apple SE, a little bit bigger, but still almost fits in my shirt pocket.
Is anybody making small phones anymore?
This is a problem that is ongoing in tech generally. I like to call it “peak geek crap”.
There is absolutely nothing I need or would even like to do on a computer or phone that I could not do reasonably well 5-10 years ago. There hasn’t been a “killer app” for >10 years, that is, something so good that I’d toss my current hardware out and get new stuff just to run it.
New categories of things (home automation, smart TV’s) are basically self funded and installed spy equipment.
“It reminds me of Microsoft slopware: every “upgrade” offers functionality that no one wants and almost no one uses, but MS builds it in to make it look like it’s really done something worthy of a new release. And half the time you spend more of your day fighting the bloated software than you do using it for its primary purpose.”
The sortware languages and tools themselves are also slow bloatware. In some langages “hello world” is a 200 meg install package. As late as the late 80’s, i could write that for a PC in 20 bytes.
One of the fundamental problems with tech is too many mediocre problem solvers chasing down too few problems.
The Droid Mini is quite small, and a company called Blu makes small phones.
I wonder if there isn’t a market for $0.25 public phones?
The cost of vandalism will break you..................
I keep thinking Apple and Tesla are ripe for a fall. Both depend on cutting edge tech to sell, but what happens when that tech is commoditized? Or worse, when no one cares about the new bells and whistles?
I need to buy a new desktop, both of mine are 8 years old. But they are okay. I can buy a used quad core I7 with 8 gigs for $200. Probably 4 times as fast as what I have.
There needs to be something so you can tell which end is the top and which is the bottom. That phone in the picture looks like it solves that problem.
Next, I don’t want a really thin phone with a really thin battery that does not last all day.
I want a fat phone with a fat battery that lasts for days!
And a ridiculous, impossible-to-use interface that makes more mistakes than a blind monkey typing. And then there's the price ...
I hate cell phones. I really do.
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