Hacker News Reader

Comment by tetraodonpuffer | Hacker News Reader

now that phones are quite fast and have good cameras, what is the main driver towards upgrading? so that you go from 300ppi to 500ppi? not going to make much of a difference and for most people not worth the upgrade costs.

The only issue is that phone manufacturers have even more of an incentive to bloat the OS more and more (and make it slower and slower on old models) and to deprecate it faster (on older models) so they can sell more hardware if people want to get the latest security fixes / software

View on HN

I'd say battery life. I moved to Android for this reason. I can get a phone with around ~4000mAh battery vs 1715mAh on the 6S or 2750mAh on iPhone6S+.

Furthermore, my phone supports Qualcomm's Quick Charge tech which means plugging in the phone for a few minutes gives it a lot more charge.

Between these two points; my phone very very rarely runs out of battery. When I was on iOS it'd be almost every day.

in general, hardware improvements will drive new swanky software, and make computing on smartphones closer to a first class citizen (remember motorola's laptop+phone dock, where the phone powers the laptop?).

another big pain point is battery (and battery consumption). still waiting on hardware (and software in conjunction) to get more efficient. you'll remember how power hungry PCs were in the beginning and how much better they are now (laptops notably).

feels to me like we still have many years to go, and many more "big" technology investments.

> another big pain point is battery (and battery consumption)

True, but you could easily make it less of a pain point by making the device 1mm thicker ;-)

Xiaomi's redmi series can last a day of heavy use and even 2 days with lighter use. So i wonder why isn't this solved for others already.

Screen DPI will affect VR headsets that utilize mobile devices, if demand for those ever take off.

Other than that the major change on the horizon that would drive mass upgrades is any advancement in battery tech.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com