What I want my phone to do
A 20-year-old’s take on what a “smart”phone should actually do.
Hi, I’m an average 20-year-old. Or so I’d like to think. Anyway, I’m pretty sure I can safely say that most people of my generation would share the same views as I, when it comes to what we want our phones to do. It might vary, country to country, gender to gender (the lines are blurring, though, aren’t they?)… basically, person to person, but let’s just say that we’re generalising us, okay? Okay.
So, here it goes —
I have a Google Nexus 4, manufactured by LG. Like so :
It’s a pretty slab of a phone, with a classy (yet glittery) black back cover that shines subtly when seen from certain angles. It works pretty smoothly (as it runs stock Android), most of the time. (It used to work better before, and has obviously degraded over the last 27 months that I’ve owned it.) And I’m grateful for getting to use it — it takes a beating and usually surfaces with a smile. I’m mostly happy with it, except for when I really need to take a screenshot, or when I really need to make a phone call, or when I really need to use Snapchat, or when I really need it to last just one frikkin minute longer.
When I do want it to work during such times, though, it either doesn’t take a screenshot (the power + volume down combo just doesn’t work sometimes; it just shuts the screen off) and has to be rebooted to make it work again; it drops the network exactly when I need it the most (have I been cursed?); it fails to run Snapchat properly exactly when I have a snap that can’t be resnapped; and yes — it dies exactly when I need to tap that one last word in the OMG-I’M-LOST text I have to send. While in a city I don’t know. When I realise I don’t remember the name of the hotel we’re staying in because, well, I was relying too much on the god damn phone.
That’s when I realised how dependent we’re getting on these things. These… these boxes of plastic and metal and glass, which take eons to charge and milliseconds to discharge… these slabs of magic that give you whatever info you need, whenever you want it (mostly only when you’re connected to the internet, but you get what I mean.) They’re so damn useful, yet cause so much frustration, exactly when you don’t need it. URGH.
I keep wondering if this is the case with just me and my phone, but nope, studies (you know… “studies”) show that most 16–25 year-olds are fed up with smartphones of today. Unless they’ve got phones from this year… Which I haven’t, so fine, let’s call them smartphones from 2012–14.
Sure, they’re leaps and bounds ahead of what we used to have (I had to restart my Droid Razr every time I had to cut a call; circa 2012; yeesh — BTW, I’ve always wanted to petition to call them something other than smart“phones”. They’re barely used to make calls anyway, right?), but they’re still lightyears away from being perfect.
At this point, I’d like to take a moment to bring to attention the amount of genius, intelligence, science, and precision that goes into developing and making these devices. It makes me feel so grateful to be living in this generation. I can’t even begin to explain how fascinating I find it that they can fit in so much into so little, and make them do that much. (You’ll understand why if you see how I pack. 😂)
However, can we please have phones that don’t have to be charged every day? Okay fine, they already exist. What about phones that don’t have to be charged every other day, huh? Got you there! You might still say, “Hey, but we’re getting there — we’ll have phones that could last a week, coming next year!”, to which I’d say — fine, what about phones that you don’t have to upgrade every two years?
GOTCHA.
Remember when people only changed phones because their shells changed? (Think about a decade back — almost every Nokia/whatever-branded “feature” phone had the same innards, the same OS, just different shells and colours. And yeah, one “feature” to write home about.) Battery life was never an issue; they were über-reliable, and specs? Who even talked about specs?! Sure, they had limited storage, their cameras sucked (if they even had one), and of course you couldn’t play Asphalt whatever-number-it’s-at-now on them. But they worked properly, for years and years. People (read grandparents and the older generation of parents) still use them, because they’re simple to use, and to reiterate — über-reliable. Even phones from 2010 were pretty cool — I remember my Corby Txt lasting a couple of days on a single charge, and it had Orkut, and a moderately fast web browser as well.
But smart“phones” swooped in, and promised to give us the power of the internet at our fingertips. That’s all great, but of what use is the internet when I’m stranded in the middle of the night in an empty neighbourhood in a city I don’t know, while waiting for a cab whose driver was relying on me for directions, all because my smartphone lied to me about when exactly it would die?
That’s why I’m glad that we’re soon approaching the era where specs won’t matter anymore again. Not many people care about how many GB of RAM their phone’s got, as long as it works smoothly, and we’re finally at the stage where even mid-range phones have enough RAM to run a stock OS smoothly (hello, Moto G.)
So, can smartphone-makers just concentrate on making phones last longer? Can they please work on making them just as reliable as the “dumb”phones of 2005? Can they please last at least two years before the shiny, newer, better, hotter, improved models are dropped in front of us while all we can do is bicker and mope about how we can’t change our phones yet (because we haven’t got enough money to get the new phone/ we don’t want to spend that much on a minor improvement?) Can they please work at their full potential for at least two to three years before starting to give up?
I know, I know — “we’re getting there.”
But, can we get there sooner, please? I’d like to stop with the “are we there yet”s.
