What do we really want from our next cellphone?

What feels like every 5 minutes, a new smartphone drops with the promise of changing your life/your social media status. The war over popularity – read sales - in what has become an increasingly saturated market is instead taking its toll on the very products they are trying to sell.

The attempt to shove a farcical trick into each new premium offering to generate “talkablity” has left the whole market feeling like a bit of a joke. Talking poop emoji’s; facial recognition; AI chips; 3D scans of your head; or a live stream Bothie! All things no one ever really asked for. Such is the plight of trying to reinvent the wheel every single year.

And it seems it doesn’t always pay off. According to sources although the iPhone X has done well in SA, internationally the poor holiday sales in the US, Europe and China have led Apple to cut their production on the phone in half this quarter. And it’s understandable, justifying that kind of money doesn’t make sense — no matter how fun it is to be a talking cat emoji for the whole 5 minutes it is amusing. We need something more convincing.

If we were honest with ourselves we don’t need the flash anymore, here is the list of all the things we actually need:

LONGER BATTERY LIFE:

Sure, it’s nice that we are now all finally on the same wireless charging tip but, let’s be honest, it would be nicer to rather a phone that actually lived to fight another day, or even made it past 3pm. If cell companies spent as much time on trying to make my phone battery last (and not explode) as they did trying to make millenials instagram posts look prettier then our battery would be like the 3310 all over again. And it is possible the Nokia 8’s battery does last well over a day, so the rest have some explaining to do.

LARGER AND BETTER CLOUD ACCESS:

“It has been 465 days since you last backed up your phone to the cloud.” Yes, phone I know, because 5gig space I’ve been given won’t even cut it for grandma anymore. With all the ten’s of thousands that we shell out for these 200 gig phones the least they can do is allow us the space to back it up, for free. Not everyone has a miniSD card dock, and even if we do most of us would only every really bulk to buy the 32 gig card anyway. Less trickery, more access: we’re paying you for it anyway.

UNBREAKABLE:

In high school I knew this girl that hated her phone so she spent a week throwing it across the cricket pitch and down the stairs in an attempt to make it break so her parents would get her a new one. Yes, she was a terrible brat but long gone are the days that any phone could take that amount of damage in a day let alone a week and still be alive. All the “strongest glass ever made” nonsense is exactly that, nonsense. Chip, crack, crash, boom, bang later and we still find ourselves being ripped off at your nearest “fix” store. Stop making glass phones. Just stop it.

LOWER COST POINT:

With more phones becoming one-step – and attachable keyboard – away from laptops it’s easy to see how these little rectangles that live constantly in our hands are becoming more complex and incredible. But they shouldn’t cost the price of a (very) small second hand car. Or worse when the Porche brand is attached to it – we’re looking at you Huawei and your R26,999 P10 Design Plus. With brands like Xiaomi showing that you can have it all for less, it’s becoming increasingly hard to part with ones hard earned cash. Especially when another tempting phone will come out in a few months.

This Sunday Samsung will be launching their much-anticipated Galaxy 9 series. Let’s wait and see if they touch on any of the above or what else they may have up their tricky sleeves.

Read the full breakdown of the Samsung Galaxy 9 UNPACKED presentation here next week.