What new hardware features are left for smartphones?

[Brian Stirling]

updated OP





i agree manufacturs will keep pushing size limits until sales fall off, but i think that limit will be reached at ~4.3inch for simple limitation of being pocketable.

how will you carry around a 5" phone?

In a case clipped to my belt.


Brian

 

[Raduque]

. When folks say you don't need 1920x1080 on a phone I'm reminded of the too numerous to count examples of that statement being made and then proven wrong almost before being made.
Brian

I'm not saying you don't need it; I'm saying it's going to be unusable. 1920x1080 on a 5" display is going to be such a high amount of pixels mashed into such a tiny space that it's going to be unpleasant to use for reading.

 

[Brian Stirling]

I'm not saying you don't need it; I'm saying it's going to be unusable. 1920x1080 on a 5" display is going to be such a high amount of pixels mashed into such a tiny space that it's going to be unpleasant to use for reading.

Utter nonsense! A correctly chosen font scaled to the size YOU want will handle that nicely. I'm not saying a lesser resolution would be bad just that as technology progresses there will less and less that argues against it. Again, we maybe 5 years out for this which would be at least two doubling's of uP, memory and storage capacity so at that point it would be no more difficult to handle 2MP as it would be to handle 500K pixels. The next iPhone, due in about a month, is over 500K pixels!

A phone with that size and resolution screen would make the use of laptops superfluous. For people like me that use smart phones for business, in addition to personal uses, the ability to view AutoCAD drawings and other technical documents in the field without having to carry or fire up a laptop would be great. Would a 5 inch screen be all you need to create an AutoCAD drawing -- probably not, but being able to view and pull a dimension at a worksite could save me and my company time and that means money.

Larger phones with higher resolution screens are coming -- get over it! Ten years from now there will be smart phones with 2TB of storage or more and you can take that to the bank...


Brian

 

[soydios]

A good physical keyboard.
See HTC Touch Pro 2.

 

[akugami]

Utter nonsense! A correctly chosen font scaled to the size YOU want will handle that nicely. I'm not saying a lesser resolution would be bad just that as technology progresses there will less and less that argues against it. Again, we maybe 5 years out for this which would be at least two doubling's of uP, memory and storage capacity so at that point it would be no more difficult to handle 2MP as it would be to handle 500K pixels. The next iPhone, due in about a month, is over 500K pixels!

A phone with that size and resolution screen would make the use of laptops superfluous. For people like me that use smart phones for business, in addition to personal uses, the ability to view AutoCAD drawings and other technical documents in the field without having to carry or fire up a laptop would be great. Would a 5 inch screen be all you need to create an AutoCAD drawing -- probably not, but being able to view and pull a dimension at a worksite could save me and my company time and that means money.

Larger phones with higher resolution screens are coming -- get over it! Ten years from now there will be smart phones with 2TB of storage or more and you can take that to the bank...


Brian

I have to agree. Higher res screens are always preferable. On a UI designed with the screen size and resolution in mind you should have zero problem with readability. I think where people soured on higher res screens is that Windows is not designed to properly scale the fonts properly by itself. Considering all of the varying resolutions (some non-standard) that Windows has to support, it's not really MS's fault. The user can adjust the system font size though.

I'm still not sure 1080P resolutions on a 5" screen is needed for the majority of users and likely won't be seen any time soon.

Also, for a phone, a 5" screen is likely being too big. You want to use it for a specialized purpose but for the average person buying a phone, even most business users, a phone with a 5" screen is a luxury and likely too bulky for a phone.

When people think business, it's more along the lines of email, accessing the company database and office apps. Not CAD which, while business related, really is a specialized niche application. A roughly 4" screen is a better fit in pockets and offers greater portability while still being fine for typical business applications.

What you're probably looking at is something along the lines of the E-King S515 which does have a 5" screen. For the average consumer who is looking to buy a phone, that is too large.

I don't think there is anything to "get over" on the 5" screen issue. Most people just feel that it is unnecessary for them and adds increased bulk with little added benefit. There is always room for other form factors in phones and other computing devices from larger to smaller. The sizes you're pushing is IMHO out of the norm for what someone would consider a decent size for a phone. What you want to use it for is also a niche application.

 

[SoulAssassin]

RFID chips for mobile payments.

 

[Munky]

Physical keyboards with actual keys for characters like %$&{}[].

Better camera sensor. I don't care about a zoom lens or 12MP crammed into a microscopic sensor, but give me 6-8MP on a decent 1/2" sensor, a fixed wide-angle lens, and some sort of flash.

IR port that can be used to control a TV.

A cpu that doesn't hang when 1 app becomes slow/unresponsive. The Cortex A9 looks promising, being a multi-issue, out of order execution core. Everything before that is nowhere near a desktop cpu from a decade ago.