In this era of shoving digital electronics into consumers’ faces, a trend is more like a war. War between brands. And the aftermath is sometimes greater , but most of the time pointless and straight painful.
I’m talking about smartphone trends. You see, the world of smartphones is getting better and better with lots of improvements and historic changes. Well, most of the time.
Another part of the story is just copy pasting and playing catch ups. Stupid trends that ran a long time and trends that did not need to exist in the first place.
While we need all these new stuff and they are cool, but making it into a trend and all of the brands rushing to enforce these stuff is too much. Here I listed some of the smartphone trends that we never asked for and need to die quickly.
1. The “Go wireless and buy this instead” trend
While it’s definitely not a bad trend, reckon that we do want to have an option for not having entangled headphones in our pocket. It’s good to have the option for just putting down your phone on the table and getting it charged up. It’s good to have these as options but, not as the only option. I still want to hook up my high quality wired headphones to my phone and listen to music.
I don’t want to buy expensive wireless earbuds that are being pushed by phone manufacturers. I want to use my existing wired earphones or headphones.
I don’t like it. Is that too hard to make place for a headphone jack? I mean they are putting bigger charging coils, loads of cameras and lots of other stuff. Not only are they removing these ports, they are also forcing their expensive wireless earbuds to consumers. This trend needs to die.
2. The “notch” trend
Some of us love big displays with less bezels. This looks nice. But when you put a notch on it , it looks terrible.
Recently some brands tried to hide that notch while keeping the full display. But the thing I don’t get is, why do we need full displays? It’s not a tv, you don’t watch movies with family on a tiny 6 inch screen. Most of us watch our favorite content or shows on our big televisions. Smartphones have cameras on the front and you can never hide it, so why put so much effort on starting a trend that we don’t really need?
Do you know what we really need? A good pair of low light + wide angle selfie camera and dual front firing speakers. Those are the things we really need for good video watching and gaming experience on mobile. And make the monitors and tablets bezel-less instead.
3. The “face unlock” trend
In some cases, face unlock can be more beneficial than fingerprint unlocking. But it’s not an efficient method for unlocking your phone. Some of you will instead opt in for good ol fingerprint unlocking. But haha. Some manufacturers don’t think you should have any option for that. You have to unlock only by holding your phone up and showing your face, every time, everywhere.
You wanna pay with your phone? You have to be a dork and FACE it. Got up in the morning and need to quickly unlock your phone? How about no. Dirty road and you have your mask on? Good luck unlocking your phone. Im have serious vision problems and I have to wear glasses, and guess what, I had a hard time unlocking my phone with face unlock.
Also it’s not secure. Many companies harvesting that facial data without consent. Some of them do tell you that they are using your facial data for their benefit, but you can’t opt out, cause its the only biometric unlocking option in your phone.
Having face unlock is cool. But not having a fingerprint unlock option is terrible. Really terrible.
4. The “Larger RAM size” trend
How much RAM do we really need? With good processor and software optimization, 3GB of RAM will be enough to accomplish day to day tasks like browsing the internet, social networking and media consumption. And 4GB is enough for the same task but more frequently.
If you are into intense mobile gaming, 6GB will be enough. More than that much RAM is unnecessary. Squeezing more and more RAM won’t make your device perform better if it does not provide power:performance ratio and bad processing performance. Some apple smartphones have less RAM yet they outperforms some phones that have double the amount of RAM those apple smartphones have.
Also manufacturers shoving more RAM, but less powerful batteries. And that makes the idea of portable powerful machine stupid. Just give us good software experience and proper resource management with power efficiency.
5. The “Higher refresh rate display” trend
This one is outright stupid. I have personally experienced 90hz and 120hz displays. And I’m yet to find any big difference while 120hz display kills the battery much faster than a 90hz display. You can’t even go full day with a 120hz display phone powered by a 5000mAh battery.
Also, many of the games and contents are not ready for giving the full 120hz experience. So buying an expensive device for just smooth scrolling a meme page is stupid.
So these are the lists of trends that I’m pissed off about. And I hope, for Pete’s sake, make start to realize these trends as trivial. And replace those with better trends like big battery trend or good audio experience trend.
