Boy, its dawn of the flag-ship smartphones! Or should I say noon?(Coz it’s been a while and we already have a dozen flagship smartphones out there)
Anyway , we have more reasons to boast about that "premium hardware under the bulk of that oleophobic coated, gorilla 3 protected silica slab"… I mean smartphone… "Flagship" that is.
Smartphones are so very part of our daily needs, we use them for every darn thing. No wonder if someone is using their smartphone to tell which direction the sun in rising from!
We always want more for less (in our phones) and to a large extent Android is delivering just that(and thanks to our own manufacturers who have made smartphones affordable if not flauntable)
That “extent” is so large Android is even considered a poor man's operating system! and yes Apple is for the rich!. Wait don’t be excited yet, it doesn’t mean you are rich because you have an iphone. Thank god we have those EMI schemes.
"what wait, did you say a poor man’s operating system? This is .@#!$!" Calm down brother, it’s only a survey that showed the rich preferred iphone over an android, more to do with the "status” thing.
wonder whats with this "flagship" thing?! perhaps the manufacturers & media found a new upgrade to the word "smartphone". well why not?
Every phone with an operating system and capable of connecting to the internet is a smartphone right? So it makes all sense(business) to create a class of device which is all premium and a tad bit faster and cash in on it.
"Drum Roll" Presenting… "flagship smartphones" – now, that sounds premium!
So what does it take to make the smartphone a flagship?
here are the ingredients
Cost 50,000 INR onwards(price is fixed first and then the specs are matched, not the other way round)
Processorv not less than 8 cores
RAM 2 GB or more
Camera upto a 100M pixel! rear and upto a 50M pixel front
Screen size upto 6.999999 inches (technically speaking, anything above this will make it a tablet!)
Display ppi not less than 500(you may call it retina-iris-cornea display) Display protection crouching dinosaur? stronger than a gorilla!
Build all metal, Titanium-vanadium alloy or may be something else that sound fancy and adds to the cost. What ever that is, you drop it, you break it!
smart features… lets shove in everything one can think of;
shake head to flip pages right and left
nod head to scroll up and down
shut eyes to lock screen.
yawn to activate sleep mode? Who wants to look stupid making gestures at the phone? When you can simply do the touch
sensors light sensor, temperature, compass, g-sensor, proximity – these are useful.
But why do we need these?
barometer(pressure)?May be useful if you happen to fall into a pressure cooker or something?
Humidity sensor, is everybody working in a lab or what?
There you go, unnecessarily premium hardware and gimmicky softwaresfor the finest flagship phones!
There is a saying “to know the price of everything and the value of nothing” in my opinion, may be this was a forecast for the flagship smartphone!
Andif you already own a flagship device, I betat some point, had for once thought “all that money for this?!” Congratulations, you are enlightened! now you are seeking value.
Technology is changing so rapidly, every generation(i.e., 6 months or less) we see better processors, better softwares with new features, better manufacturing technology, and costs going down. And not all softwares work on older hardware and there is absolutely no question of hardware upgrade. You might get one or two FOTA upgrades if promised by your manufacturer. In my opinion such upgrades are only minor that you won’t even notice any difference after the upgrade! More likely something gets broken.
And its not like all the flagship phones perform flawlessly or free of problems
some simply heat up on heavy use, battery drains out sooner than you expect and take more time to charge. Some have hissing audio issues, Bluetooth wont auto-connect , some have so many bloatware that uses up all the RAM, wi-fi connect issue with particular routers, a plastic back cover is the last thing you want after coughing up so much money. And then there is issues with Bluetooth and wifi working together; you will see wifi stutter, downloads and streaming interrupted. This is kind of prevalent in any device I guess.
With such a scenario how does it make sense to invest so much of your hard earned money on something that’s going to be outdated sooner and clearly no chance for an upgrade?
Statistics show that smartphone users upgrade their device every 9 months on an average!
so in less than a year your premium phone is no more than a premium paper weight!
The nexus devices have a good value proposition currently(its still a bit high if you add the import charges, local tax and stuff which adds to 1/3rd the overall price vs buying in the US). It will be interesting to see how “Moto G” is all set to change the game around. Indian manufacturers will face the heat and will be in pressure to deliver a worthy mid-range smartphone to stay in the game.
Hopefully 2014 will be a year of “low cost high value” smartphones that will satisfy our desire and deliver great user experiences without compromising on quality.
I am all excited about 2014 , about the Moto G and Haswell based mobile devices.
Happy upgrade!
vnboss.
