Smartphone OEMs may soon face real obstacles to making systematic improvements in their lineup year after year.
Most of us here are Android power users and enthusiasts. We take for granted that smartphones will get better and better every year—we demand ever more from smartphone OEMs, and we get upset when we don’t see
enough improvement on the latest flagship year-over-year. But the past year in the industry has been disappointing for many. Though there are a couple of exceptions, most 2015 flagships have failed to ignite the passion and excitement as those of yesteryear.
The primary problem, this year, is that there have been
compromises—
compromises everywhere. Many OEMs are choosing the Snapdragon 808, which is scantly better (if at all, especially on 1440p) than last year’s 801, because the 810 has overheating issues; internal storage capacity remains uncomfortably low on virtually all phones, micro SD slots keep disappearing, and additional capacity is so expensive you might think it’s still the year 1992; thinness is still widely-prioritized over battery capacity, while few OEMs choose to have a removable battery; and every OEM insists on adding “
value” to Google’s expertly-designed operating system by dumping bloat and ugly skins on top, while the one OEM that delivered a near-stock experience is
currently being gutted by Lenovo.
There seems to be no perfect phone, this year. In fact, I can’t think of any
almost perfect phones, either. For those of us still using 2014 phones—or hell, even 2013 flagships—the minor boost in specs doesn’t seem to justify the major expense of upgrading to a shiny new smartphone.
With this backdrop, I’d like to take an opportunity to discuss the
C-word—
compromise—and why we may be seeing more of it in the future.
We’ve previously flirted with the idea of a coming “
age of compromises,” but the fact is that smartphones can’t keep improving at the pace that we’ve been seeing—and expect—indefinitely. Academics and engineers have been openly discussing the
end of Moore’s Law in less than a decade, but smartphone OEMs are additionally limited by myriad practical considerations. From physical size and battery life to price and performance, smartphone OEMs may soon face real obstacles to making systematic improvements in their lineup year after year. At a bare minimum, annualized smartphone releases may be a thing of the past. Even Apple—once well-known for its annual product cycle on various products—has slowed down. In the worst case, though, hardware stagnation potentially looms before us.
To better see the long-term trends of the industry, I’ve organized data on all of the major OEM flagships—Samsung, LG, HTC, Sony, Motorola, and Nexus-branded devices—and prepared figures. Let’s take a look.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.)
