The degradation of the Smartphone.
I'm not sure what this post will be, really. It might be a rant of nostalgia of great technologies and norms that have been lost. It might be a lesson for the newcomers to the smartphone world. But I know of at least a couple of things I want to point out.
Build Quality
I keep hearing that the ultimate in today's build quality is the iPhone. I want to address a rampant misunderstanding of materials and premium senses: The iPhone is a block of Aluminum and Glass, two out of the three most mass produced materials for consumer electronics. There is nothing premium about its build. The same goes for a majority of other phones out there. You know what "premium" materials are? Leather. Gold. And there are phones that address that need for elitism, RIM even tried to bring it down to the casual consumer. You know what an iPhone does have? A good (albeit, dated, at this point in time) design. When it came out, it was easily the pinnacle of modern phone design (I am strictly speaking about the iPhone 4/4S here, prior iterations were ugly). But its time has come and gone. The Lumia 900 and the LG Prada both outclass it by miles in industrial design.
An iPhone is not premium, nor is it exclusive - and by extension, other phones on the market are just the same. The third party accessory market for the iPhone (and various iDevices) is easily an extension of this premium feel, e.g.:
But, logically, I shouldn't need a third party to allow the premium design and beauty of a device to truly shine through. An iPhone truly has a great support base, if in the form making applications with great interfaces (something we have truly advanced in, as a collective), or great accessories. However, it should be Apple's job to make sure that when I touch my new phone I feel euphoric without being ecstatic about all the accessories that are going to make it a better experience. As an example, look at the Lumia 900. Not one person is trying to come up with a case to make it "really pretty", it just is: off its own accord. Another great modern day example of proper premium design and aesthetic:
I know it's not premium material, and yet it nails premium feel. The back is supposed to invoke a leatherette feel, and it does so perfectly.
Speakers
A lot of people seem to overlook the shortcomings of modern phones. What happened to properly built and conceptualized phones? What's wrong with phone speakers? Less than 5 years ago we had the above.
Almost every phone on the market was up to the challenge of surround sound, and pushing the limits of high fidelity in a package that was smaller than most phones today. There's no reason this shouldn't be a priority for manufacturers. The phone on the absolute bottom in the above image is the Nokia N96. Along with the N81 it pioneered the design that Apple used for inspiration on the iPhone 4S. (It, in turn, took design cues from iPods for reasons I won't get into here for the sake of not diluting the argument, however the evolution from iPod to N81 to iPhone 4 is one of the best design stories in this market sector.)
SD Card Support and Hotswap
The iPhone 4S. The Galaxy Nexus. The Lumia 900. All phones people would consider the flagships of their respective ecosystems. And yet, none of those phones have SD card functionality. The only thing that even begins to act as save face for this clear downgrade, is that the Nexus has USB Host functionality. However, what if I want to carry two music libraries on me, one for road trips for connecting my phone to the Aux input, and one for my run? What if I like to carry lots of documents that due to NDA's I'm not allowed to upload to as much as a private server? Many modern day NDA's allow "reference copies" of materials to be the only retained copy after a business transaction. That means one printed copy, or one digital copy, but not both at the same time. Am I supposed to just leave these on a company server, even though I might be meeting a client? What if I'm a photographer and I want to upload to Tumblr or Flickr right from my studio without jumping through hoops logging in and out of computers? If this is truly the post PC era, our phones must replace every aspect of those machines, no?
Moreover, for the few phones that do include SD Card support (a la Galaxy SII) manage to make handling the data such a mess that it's not worthwhile functionality to boast about. The above image includes a Nokia N95 with SD Card Hot Swap. A technology that allowed you to "safely remove" your SD Card and insert a new one. It felt like USB thumb drive functionality, brought down to phone level. Moreover, there was the promise of innovation. WiFi antennas integrated to SD Cards, a theoretical capacity of 128GB+ on a card smaller than my fingernail.
Cameras
Macro mode, autofocus, Tessar optics. All features that were standard on the Nokia N93 (pictured above). Its photgraphy is only rivaled by its much younger cousin the N8, and it continues to, after release, blow cameras that come on the iPhone 4S and the Galaxy Nexus out of the water.
Never mind the actual camera. Where's the bloody camera button? Many pictures I've already linked to have had these, and the N93 had many of these to control a near full camera environment from on the phone itself. The controls even had access to video editing tools and post processing functionality. From within the camera environment itself. I could snap a picture, and with the same button move on to editing, or cropping.
What has become of the pocket camera replacement predictions? Here's a sample of what the N93 was capable of:
Radio Band Support
What use is a Smartphone that won't work 500 kilometers away from its location of purchase? In 2007, the N95 (pictured above) was one of the pioneering phones for a technology known as Pentaband support. It supported all 5 radio frequency bands in use across the globe. Today? You're either stuck with the iPhone 4S, which has been alive for 5 years and yet just got around to addressing the issue, or you're stuck with the Nexus series of phones. Why has this functionality been ignored? Why is our greatest pocket companion most likely non-functional when we need it the most (international travel). What kind of company thinks it can be taken seriously when it pushes for an ecosystem where the vast majority of executives and travelers are excluded from being comfortable to use the technology as they choose, and moreover, why did Apple take 5 years to integrate technology that existed for all 5 of those years into its flagship?
Handwriting and Stylus Support
Cursive. Print. The HTC Touch Diamond could read any handwriting input and convert it to digital format with near perfect accuracy. Today, people still seriously use sausages to take in-class notes rather than shell out for a stylus. The HTC Touch Diamond came with a stylus that integrated into the case and probably cost a few cents to replace. However, to achieve even similar capability on modern resistive screens, one needs a complicated piece of technology that costs north of $20, shipping excluded thus far, infringes on an Apple patent and is prone to breaking with the least amount of applied force.
The Adonit Jot Pro produces the finest controlled lines on any resistive screen. However, it also comes with all the aforementioned disadvantages. And all for what? To compete with Apple's capacitive intellectual property and multi-touch angle. Multiple multi-touch technologies exist, and yet everyone gravitated towards a similar solution to Apple's technology to compete evenly, neglecting in the process, all the shortcomings of the selected technology. Today phones like the Galaxy Note attempt to sort the problem, but it is nowhere near the polish possible if this side of the field wasn't ignored as much as it has. Two of the most requested items on any person is a pen and paper. Patent offices even jokingly accept napkin drawings. This is a field the smartphone addressed two decades ago, and yet, for the sake of competitive edge, as opposed to consumer benefit, the technology has been scrapped in favor of a screen with a few degrees more of viewing angle, and multi-touch that most people don't care for beyond page zoom.
If you don't think a stylus is necessary on a personal assistance device as much as voice guided control, then you have yet to use a properly controlled stylus environment and see its benefits. It's very difficult to turn back on a technology clearly superior, once you're used to it.
Games
Games, today? Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja. With all due respect, what is this utter shit, being passed off as original revolutionary IP? The N-Gage launched in 2003 with console ports of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and Tomb Raider. Almost ten years ago. And yet, today people are proud that they can emulate SNES on their phones? You've got to be joking. This is functionality that has been around for a decade, now. Moreover, the entire community seems to want the iPhone and Android to succeed as the best portable gaming experience, to rival the Vita, with time killing games the likes of which I'd expect to see at my local dentist's for the kid's playground?
The N-Gage went on to have many big name titles released for it, some of which are: Atari Masterpieces, Call of Duty, Catan, Civilization, Colin McRae, Crash Nitro Kart, The Elder Scrolls (an entire original storyline written, too!), FIFA, King of Fighters, Rayman, Red Faction (during its hey day), The Sims, Spiderman, SSX, Super Monkey Ball, Tom Clancy, Warhammer 40k, Worms World Party, X-Men.
This list discounts the N-Gage exclusive titles, which many review sites found better than the franchise releases on the platform. Look at Rifts: Promise of Power and Pathway to Glory: Ikusa Islands, for example.
And each game was optimized for the controls at the time. No port was half assed, and the platform was on a yearly release schedule to ensure the high quality. Show me one platform of games today that has as much quality. Even the iPhone's lauded Game Center fails to get past bad humor and lame grinding, and past the god forsaken model of torturing the player with in-app added bonus purchases.
Closing Words
There's a lot more to be said. The death of the FM Radio functionality, the death of hardware cues (such as sliders activating options, and the low adoption rate of bezel gestures), the recent lack of Flash support on the mobile front - something that was only alive for less than half a decade, the devolution into AGPS navigation darkness and the more recent push towards those uncharted lands (pun intended), the recent push towards Over-The-Air updates with many smartphone market leaders - functionality that has existed for a decade, the marketing tyranny over the 4G moniker and the loss of standardization benefits, the phasing out of keyboard usability (no more sending entire text conversations from within your pocket) and the lack of dedication to advanced haptic feedback (as seen on the N9). Alas, I leave all of it for another rant.
I will leave with this. The above, ladies in gentlemen is the Galaxy Nexus. The current flagship of the Android world. It is made of plastic and glass. It has negligible third party after market accessory support. Its camera is laughable. It lacks SD Card functionality, meaning you're stuck with the only provided storage on the market. Its speaker diaphragms sound like they're made out of tin foil. Its platform game is Angry Birds.
Welcome to 2012: Where the emphasis is on the web browsing experience, and not about the package you just signed 36 months of contract, or paid $600, for.
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