Thread: Things That Kinda Suck About Modern Mobile Devices
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railroadmaster is offline railroadmaster
2014-12-07 , 06:08
Posts: 1,082 | Thanked: 1,235 times | Joined on Apr 2010
#31
I will add some more.
  • Devices Keep Getting Bigger - This isn't exclusive smartphones at all. My Samsung feature phone is thicker, wider, and taller than my previous Motorola Razr. The Tablet I currently own is a Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 which I bought for the form factor, Ir blaster and Active Digitizer pen as a replacement for my HTC Flyer. The HTC Flyer was getting old in terms of both hardware and software features being stuck on Honeycomb, but there were no real replacements as 7" tablets had been relegated to the low end and the 7" offerings were low end at best. If I wanted the stylus and the high end features simply put there were no real choices. The HTC Flyer I owned I bought as a replacement for my Archos 5. The Archos 5 became outdated from an OS perspective being stuck on Android 1.6 cupcake and the LCD got damaged so I looked for a replacement. I liked the Archos 5 for the resistive touchscreen enabling stylus use, having Android plus linux in the form of angstrom, high storage capacity, and not having to buy it on contract or buying something that was 400+ dollars unlocked. When I looked to replace my Archos 5 there were no replacements, 5" tablets/UMPCS/MIDS died as a product category and phones became 5" and tablets became 7". So my only real choice was as a replacement was a 7" tablet. Now 8" are being relegated to the low end and being replaced by 8 - 9". I won't use any tablet larger than 8" as 8" is the maximum of pocketable. The trend is similar with laptops. 7-10" Laptops used to be the very low end being netbooks, 11.6 -12.5" laptops being ultraportables, 13 - 14" being mainstream with some higher performance options, 15.6" - 17" being very high end performance. Now 10" or smaller netbooks have disappeared, 11.6" laptops have been relegated to the low end replacing netbooks, 12.5 -14" is now the ultraportable form factor with fewer higher performance options, 15.6" has become the mainstream form factor with some higher performance options and 17" has become a niche. The smallest ultraportable is now 12.5" or a 12.1" or smaller tablet with a core i5. In short each generation of devices I have has gotten an inch or two bigger with each generation. I might just keep my Core i5 Acer v5-171 running Ubuntu and My Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 for as long they can last, I have no reason to replace either technology wise (until the next processor architecture change any ways), both devices are in reasonable shape and nothing has come out that can truly replace either in terms of both form factor or functionality. The problem is that even though laptops, tablet, and phones are thinner they are footprint wise bigger and are thus less portable. Device manufactures seems to forget the importance of portability.
  • User Interfaces - I guess this is subjective but I am not a fan of these newer minimalist interfaces. They lack depth in terms of color and shape. The use of minimalist interfaces is one of the reasons I switched to Ubuntu, I found the color schemes and shapes of Unity of KDE more visually pleasing.
 

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