My current phone is a Samsung Galaxy S5, purchased in 2015. I have gotten a lot of value out of the phone. Four years is a lot of time, but I think this year will be its last, for a number of reasons:
- Screen life. For about the last year, when the screen goes to dim, it flickers. This makes the screen difficult to use with auto-brightness turned on. Also, I don’t think the max brightness is as high as it once was.
- RAM and Storage.
- The phone has 2GB of RAM. I find that the phone becomes very sluggish when RAM utilization exceeds 80%. I’ve taken to running a memory optimization app as needed, which when I’m actively using the phone can be as frequently as every few minutes. This has gotten to become a pain.
- I have 16GB of internal memory, and a 32GB SD card. Android prefers to install apps and write files to the internal memory, ignoring the nice big empty space on the SD card. But when the internal memory is filled, performance is terrible. Not only can I not install updates, but the internal storage seems to be used for cache files and so on, and when there’s not enough space for the system and apps to cache data, performance becomes terrible.
- Android updates. My carrier stopped releasing updates about 2 years ago, and I’m still on Android 6.0, which is 3 major releases behind current.
If it wasn’t for the performance issues related to RAM and cache inadequacy, this would still be a very capable phone, and I could maybe live with the screen until it finally died.
The absolute best thing about the Galaxy S5 has been the fact that it has a removable battery, and the aftermarket released some very good extended batteries. Powered by an Anker 7500mah battery, I’ve never had to worry about running out of juice, even when I’ve spent the whole day on the go, without access to a charging break. More than twice the capacity of the stock battery, it made the phone about 3/4″ of an inch thick and weigh almost a pound, but it was without question worth the added bulk.
So what do I want in a new smartphone? It doesn’t seem that the US market understands me. Here’s what’s important to me:
Pocketable
If I can’t fit it in a pants pocket — without it looking like I’m happy to see you — I don’t want it. But phones are still growing bigger and bigger. Now 6 inch screens seem to be the norm. It’s hard to use the phone with one hand when it’s so big. The Galaxy S5 is close to the maximum size that I would want to consider, and nearly everything in the 2019 market is larger.
Direct OS updates from Google
Carriers do not prioritize software updates, and tend to roll them out lagging their actual release by many months, sometimes as much as a year, and that’s if they bother to release the update at all. This is terrible.
Running out of date versions of Android can leave you vulnerable through security holes that have been patched in newer versions, and leave you out unable to install and run apps that require a higher version than is available on your handset.
Google has made a few Android handsets over the years — the Nexus line, the Pixel series, that they release updates for directly. Why can’t the rest of the world get behind that? Well, if they supported the product, then you’d be able to continue using it, and you wouldn’t have to buy the new product every 1-2 years.
Bare Android OS; No bundled apps
Carriers like to customize their phone as a way to differentiate themselves from the competition, and one of the ways they do so is by bundling apps. Unfortunately, much like with Windows 95 computers sold by OEMs, I have no interest in using many of these apps. It’s stupid to waste space on the internal memory by including these apps that I have no use for, and because they are baked into the system, they can’t be removed to free up the space.
Just provide the core operating system and the bare minimum apps needed to function as a phone: a phone app, a SMS app, a Contacts app, and the Play Store app. Let me decide what else I need to install.
If you really must bundle, then maybe offer a “Carrier Bundle” app manifest that you can use to bulk-install all the recommended default apps from the Play Store. Allow users to customize the bundle, giving us a line-item veto to opt out of installing whatever parts of the bundle we don’t want.
Big, big removable battery
My first Samsung Galaxy, the S2, was an OK phone until the battery wore out and wouldn’t hold a charge anymore. I spent a year with battery anxiety. Off charger, the battery charge dropped about 1%/minute, and so I basically spent a year walking from power outlet to power outlet, umbilical to the wall and unable to go out for more than 2-3 hours without freaking out over my dying battery. I didn’t realize at the time that the battery was bad and needed to be replaced, I just thought that the phone had some app that was power hungry and that no matter what I tried to do I couldn’t figure out how to make the phone sleep and save battery.
This taught me just how important battery life is, and when I bought the S5, I immediately went out and found the biggest battery I could for it.
But most phones these days have non-removable batteries in them, meaning that when they wear out, you either have to take the phone somewhere to be repaired with a replacement battery, or you have to buy a whole new phone.
A Li-ion battery will probably be good for 2, maybe 3 years of daily charge cycling, and if the handset is built as ruggedly as I’d like, it should be able to last longer than that. A removable battery makes this simple as buying a new battery and replacing it.
Durable
I want a phone that I can drop onto concrete and immerse in water without fear of damaging it. Usually this is solved by buying a ruggedized case for it, and this is fine, but it does add to the bulk of the phone. So why have two cases — a slim case that the phone is built inside of, and a rugged outer case? Why not just have one rugged case? The space saved by not having an inner casing could be given over to more battery, or cut down on the overall size of the device.
There are a lot of models on the market these days that are water resistant and durable enough not to take damage when dropped, especially when you factor in the afermarket armor. I don’t have a problem finding phones that meet my needs in this area, but this is probably the only area where I don’t see a lot of room for improvment needed.
Performance
I need to explain myself. I do not need blazing fast, cutting edge processor. My Galaxy S5 is a 4 year old design and when it’s not hampered by cache and memory limits, it’s absolutely fine. But the amount of system maintenance that I need to do on a daily basis anymore has gotten ridiculous. Freshly wiped, this is still a fast phone, and that’s enough for me. So Android should build into itself features that keep a healthy amount of free memory and cache storage at all times. I don’t know why this is such a problem, or why it’s gotten worse as time has gone by. During the first year or so that I had the phone, I never had such problems. About every year since then, I’ve eventually had to wipe it and start over, and am shocked at how fast the phone really is. After my last wipe, though, I didn’t want to spend an evening doing this every time the phone started feeling slow, and it felt slow within a week of my last wipe. So I started looking into performance optimization apps, and have been limping along with the help of those. But Android really needs to get its act together and handle its own maintenance and performance optimization, better than it does. Like, at all.
“Features”
Every other neat thing a smartphone does, is, I guess, nice, but I don’t care that much about it for it to sell me on a must-have device. I guess I’m in the minority here. I don’t need to be impressed by magic. I mostly am impressed by stuff that works well, and simply.
A decent camera is of course very handy, but it doesn’t have to be groundbreaking. A GPS radio that works well and doesn’t lose signal when I actually need it would be great.
I dunno, what else is there? Stuff like fingerprint readers, heartrate monitors, and so on, I don’t really use, or care about.