Comment by trjordan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trjordan | Hacker News Reader

Let's apply the same rubric to smartphones and see if any of the complaints make sense:

- Price: Yep, but everything expensive can be solved by pricing. $600 over 2 years seems to be a sweet spot.

- Portability: Maybe this is why there are more smartphones than laptops in the world?

- Software: The first iPhone was a big step up. App stores were another huge inflection point. Gotta have that software!

- Displays: Remember how fast displays improved once Retina broke the ice? Definitely a differentiator for each new generation of phone (until a year or two ago, where things seemed to have cooled off.)

- Niche usage: They're right, there were a bunch of niches that took off and encouraged markets to open up that otherwise wouldn't want it. Square comes to mind; I don't think artists are particularly keen on tech for tech sake.

I find it fascinating that the problems were identified so clearly in 1985. Much of the progress needed to let laptops and smartphones take off were incremental, but at some point, quantitative changes became qualitative.

Forgot one point: battery life

The next phone manufacturer that will be able to make a smartphone / laptop that can last more than 1 working day on a single charge will rule the world of smart phones. Old cell phones could last 2, 3 even more days on a single charge. Battery life is currently the main thing lacking.

There are already plenty of phones that last more than one day. Despite your belief, people don't care about them.

Agreed, who doesn't bring there laptop/phone chargers anywhere where the intend to have even medium usage (airport, car trip, study session , etc).

One day is kind of a sweet spot. Pick it up, go do your daily business, come home and plug it in to recharge, you're good. The chargers live at home unless you'll be gone for more than a day.

More would certainly be nice but smaller/cuter/more powerful generally makes for a better reason to upgrade. Especially when you can just grab a battery you can throw in the bottom of your purse and use to recharge the phone a few times if you really need more juice.

> The next phone manufacturer that will be able to make a smartphone / laptop that can last more than 1 working day on a single charge will rule the world of smart phones.

My OnePlus One lasts 2-3 at least. I've never let it run down, but there were a few days when I had its USB cable plugged in backwards (doh!) and was wondering why it didn't charge.

Phone manufacturers typically optimize around a 1 day use case. The battery takes up a significant amount of space and adding more than a day of charge at the expense of a thicker or larger phone typically doesn't play out well in the market.

A perfect example is the correlation between screen sizes and the launch of LTE. At the time if you asked anyone they wouldn't have wanted a larger phone however carriers wanted LTE phones and the market wanted phones that lasted all day. At the time thickness was a fairly standard comparison so what happened? They sold you a bigger screen so that they could fit a larger battery without producing a thicker phone.

I had a feeling 5"+ phones sizes had to do with carriers wanting to sell you more data.

(Though I'd guessed it had to do with promoting movie streaming.)

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