Dear Smartphone Makers.

Dear

smartphone

companies, continuing my video on the frankly abysmal naming of

smartphone

s, welcome to eight more things that I really think you would benefit from. Number eight, there is such a thing as launching too many models if you imagine all the smartphone users together like this huge group of people here, then you can see how launching multiple phones can make sense if each one has a different selling point, this It allows a company to attract as many of this group as possible, but the problem is that the more phones it releases, the more phones will overlap with each other and what that means for customers is confusion, each individual model loses memorability and importance and The very fact that their company now has to spread its support across so many different phones means that by its very nature that support is Samsung is pretty guilty of this - they released about 40 smartphones in 2019 alone and, for someone who doesn't know If this line is almost impossible to navigate, take the Galaxy Note series companion which used to be a single phone and would be the best company the company makes, period.

If you bought a Note phone, you could rest easy knowing that you had bought one of the most powerful mobile devices out there, but then in 2019, Samsung went from making one Note phone to making four different ones. variants and, to top it off, a fifth a few months later, in which Ashley had very little to do with the other four phones in the range. These are not bad phones, they are just confusing and confusion is one thing, but the most important thing is this division of resources that has to happen then, instead of focused companies like oneplus giving each model of their phones almost three years of guaranteed updates, Samsung has earned a bit of a reputation for providing only one to many of its mid-range phones and that for delivering them up to four months after other Apple companies use this concept, but to their benefit they focus their efforts on a small number of models each year, which means yes, they give up being able to appeal to everyone, but the advantage is that people can at least keep track of the current iPhone lineup at any given time and Apple can afford to keep each one of these phones updated five years after launch number seven to avoid price cuts, since we customers love the concept of price cuts. and the idea of ​​paying less for something worth more, however, putting a phone on sale will sell more units in the short term and price cuts become a bit of a trap.

One of LG's biggest failures was that they would release one phone at a time. price, say nine hundred dollars and then in just four months it would be on sale for half the price now, which might seem great, people will buy thinking they are getting a bargain by getting this $400 phone, but over time this pattern will change. repeat. In itself, no one is going to want to pay the full nine hundred dollars for the phone. LG has implicitly devalued its own products and that is why Apple launches at one price and maintains it throughout the year, it doesn't even matter if your phone is not initially making much profit because over the course of that year the cost of production will continue to fall. as components become cheaper.

If you've ever tried to sell an old iPhone, you'll know that they hold their value much better than Android equivalents and this. Apple's lack of price cuts is part of the reason why number six is ​​hyper-competitive marketing. In recent years, small phone companies have become smarter and smarter and social media is playing a bigger role than ever in generating publicity, but some companies are simply taking advantage of it. Too far, it's one thing to create a great product and then create ads showing how good it is, but a lot of the marketing I see now has boiled down to "hey, your smartphone isn't good enough, buy ours and this one." It's ultra competitive." The behavior may seem a little petty as he mocks his new x2 smartphone with a 120 Hertz display.

Yami's Poker brand created a website that checks the refresh rate on your current screen and basically found a way to tell you that it sucks if you had a standard 60 Hertz refresh rate, literally shaming you into wondering how you feel using one technology that's two decades old like Ouch, and even if you have a phone with a 120 Hertz refresh rate, it then asks you if you feel good about spending too much money on it. Another example would be Xiaomi's VP publicly calling another company copycats, whether it's true or not isn't really important, you want to give the impression that you don't care what other brands do because your product is so good that they don't.

No need to retaliate, it doesn't matter and the worst part of this hyper-competitive marketing is that many times companies can't deliver and make such bold claims that they literally end up eating their own words every year. Then think about how many companies use Apple's removal of the headphone jack to make a quick joke and then do the same thing with the exact same move on the next model or the companies that mocked others for being too faces and then they started. increasing the prices of its own phones, even this next phone little that ridicules the screens of other phones, it is only a matter of time before sharmee finally releases its other regular phone with sixty Hertz screen from two decades old and so so much, they're really going to end. making fun of themselves, I'm not saying that Apple makes some kind of otherworldly smartphone, but their marketing is fantastic, that's why in 2019, even though they shipped less than fifteen percent of the units of smartphones globally, manufactured more than sixty percent. of global smartphone profits, they practically pretend that other brands don't exist in their trailers and videos and that makes their phones seem incomparable and that's profitable strategy number five: a phone in 2020 must have not only a good screen but battery, good camera, but also a set of other services and products that surround it, an ecosystem, in my opinion, almost all people who buy a smartphone have an already existing technological ecosystem: the computer and the air phones that they already have As well as the products your friends and family use, there are many phone companies like Oneplus that offer a smartphone that fits perfectly into their existing product line, but even better would be a phone that not only fits but complements the technology products. that you already own and Samsung is one of them.

Of the few Android companies I could see working with this idea that uses Android are longing for a feature that lets them send things as simply as Apple's airdrop does and Samsung is finally delivering something called quick share, but imagine if this could work not only between Samsung phones but also Samsung phones and your Windows laptop, it will be a great feature and I think it is coming. Samsung recently announced a partnership with Microsoft, which I think means Samsung will start getting exclusive features tied to Windows and the opportunities are endless. here, but just as an example, what if you could use your Galaxy Note smartphone as literal stylus input for your computer instead of spending $200 on a drawing board?

If this phone can replicate that functionality, it dramatically improves the value proposition of buying Samsung phones. They got their own Galaxy Buds earbuds and also their own set of laptops and tablets, so if they really push these into fantastic standalone products in their own categories and then make sure they work great with their phones, then it will increase dramatically. the value of their products together are now 4th place if you are going to give your phone a regional variant then do it wholeheartedly. Many Chinese companies, for example, create both a Chinese version of their phones and an international version.

Xiaomi last year launched the redmi k20 and this was a brilliant phone, but then confusingly a few months later it launched the exact same device in the West, labeling it as Xiaomi me 9t as it stands, this in itself is already a disconcerting move, you have to remember that we live in the age of the internet even though this redmi k20 was only intended for asian markets, this is the phone that everyone ended up reviewing and talking about, so when they finally released it as the me 90 , the most important thing I saw was what people talked about, whether I hadn't seen it.

This before the point I wanted to make here is related to this: if a company is going to create regional variants, then it would be great if the software was tailored to Western taste and not just the name, because let's face it, different parts of the world has different requirements. There are many times when I come very close to recommending a Chinese-branded smartphone to someone in the West because many of them are great value for money, but then I stop because I'm not sure they like the old software. Image processing Due to cultural norms in China, many Chinese phones are built to process images in a way that smooth skin adds saturation and makes your eyes look brighter than they really are, even if you turn off all modes.

Beauty, that doesn't mean this images are bad and in fact on a technical level I would say the camera hardware and Shaumyan Will Always Phones is one of the best on the market but the way the images are tuned makes I personally prefer daytime shots on Samsung or Apple phones, even if it's just The way the user interface looks when a product is launched in a foreign country is important for it to be native and familiar to the people there, so in Instead of using the exact same software scheme that originated in China, it would be great to see something that aligns. better with what Android users want to see here Samsung is a company that has really done very well, it is a Korean company, but customers in the UK and US feel at home with a Samsung device.

Next, pay attention to the haptics, the haptics are simulated. The sense of touch is obtained in smartphones that use small vibration motors inside and this may not seem important at first glance, but it is a big part of what makes premium phones feel premium. I can't even list the number of times I took three to five and the Dola phone started using it. I was very impressed with the screen, the camera, the build quality, only then I started typing and felt this mushy hum under the screen. Good quality haptics don't appear in a specification. sheet so you can see why companies prefer to save some money and go cheaper here, but in the long run by just spending an extra six dollars per unit, a small phone company can make a transformative difference in the quality of experience number two , the future is traced or perhaps textured, you see, glass is a relatively good material to use on the back of a smartphone, it feels quality and unlike a metal back, it doesn't interfere with the wireless charging, but leaving the glass as is has its downsides: Glossy glass shows fingerprints. like crazy and in my experience it swings wildly between being a sticky surface and then a worryingly slippery surface, I would say that oneplus has come to a good compromise with the mapped coating they put on their glass smartphones and to be honest the best What I felt was the backs of the new iPhone 11 pros and let's be honest, now that Apple has done it, we're probably about to see a lot more from other companies, but I'm not complaining, I can't wait for the other really interesting one to arrive.

An example was the emerald green Huawei Mate 30 Pro as we used a textured matte finish towards the base of the phone where you would grip it, which slowly transitioned to glossy at the top. I think it's a great idea and, tied into this, it would be awesome. For a flagship smartphone that can be safely used without a case, meet one that doesn't look like this one. Surveys conducted in the US show that literally 80% of smartphone users are not comfortable without a case. probably the highest of any existing product group, if phone

makers

could use some of the more advanced technologies we see in cases to incorporate protective components into the phone design then they could ensure that the final product still feels premium, they will be in control. about how end users experience theirproducts instead of leaving them up to $2k sellers on Amazon and the protection wouldn't have to be crazy, just a subtly placed rubber ring around the camera module would do wonders for example, or all the little padded dots. on each corner of the back, that would be much better than feeling this constant need to cover the back of your phone with what is effectively a glorified sheet of plastic.

Now for number one, it's the year 2020, why does call quality still suck? I've lost count of the number of times I've been on a call and it sounds horrible, it randomly cuts out all those times when it's delayed enough that instead of feeling like you're in conversation with someone, you feel like you're in a call. If you're playing the game of trying to time your words correctly, modern smartphones try to solve this problem with multiple microphones and noise reduction algorithms. These help, of course, but the very nature of an algorithm means that it can't filter out unexpected sounds, like people talking around you, only the monotonous ones like a leaf blower and then even if your phone can record your voice correctly, the audio is compressed to be sent over traditional voice networks in real time and this is often an even bigger bottleneck.

Telephone companies have created technologies like HD Voice. and volt EE and to be fair volte in particular has potential it uses LTE networks to send its voice instead of traditional voice networks and that's an improvement but it's still not great we are in an age where we can Stream 1080p Netflix shows over data and play complex online multiplayer games, but it's strange that calls are the limit. What can phone companies do? Some options would be to work directly with Qualcomm, for example, the company that makes the communication chips inside many of our phones, simply work with them to build a phone that has the best signal reliability possible and signal strength might mean using less. metal or different types of materials on the back and using more antenna on the inside for more coherence Samsung actually does this quite well and overall Samsung phones score higher in terms of signal coherence or option B would be develop a software solution that doesn't.

Don't compress your voice as much or compress it in a way that doesn't damage it as much. Most internet connections are now fast enough to have a clear phone conversation and if someone can release a smartphone that can ensure reliable core quality. I'd be willing to overlook a lot of things just to use them, obviously a phone company like Samsung can't redesign the entire phone infrastructure themselves, but what they could do is create a calling app just for Samsung that could be tweaked from scratch. To take advantage of where Samsung has placed their microphones and the types of antenna they use, they could definitely create something that would be better than using a generic app designed to work on all devices and that's what I've done for now, let me know if there's anything you can do. need.

I would add it to this list and if you haven't seen it yet, check out the first episode of Dear Smartphone Companies. I think you'll like it, and with that being said, my name is Erin and this is Mr. Who's the boss and will I see you next time?