The Wishlist
It has become something of a tradition of sorts. Part work and part tech-fuelled passion, tech journos like me pencil in dates when the world’s latest phone vendors showcase their latest smartphones for the year with the sort of fervour that a fashion journo pencils in the dates for Paris Fashion Week. These global smartphone launches are grand affairs, packed to the rafters with a host of guests and journalists from near and far. Each one is a carefully choreographed pageant of pomp and grandeur, a testament as much as to the image of the brand that made it as it is the commitment they have to sell it.
Like how a fashion writer waits with bated breath as a model struts on the catwalk donning the latest haute couture, we sit and wait crowded around stages at a carefully choreographed spectacle as the likes of Apple, Samsung and Huawei tease, hint and then finally show their latest flagship phones.
The love child of a convergence of technologies, the smartphone of today can do a host of things that was hitherto the province of an array of separate devices.The audio recorder. The camera. The calendar. The word processor. The camcorder. The digital music player. A smartphone has subsumed the functionality of all these erstwhile popular devices and more. Recently in Malaysia, the smartphone has just tacked on the role of being a digital wallet, allowing you to use your phone to pay for purchases. All this makes the life of a tech journo somewhat easier. Where before we had to carry a dedicated camera, a notebook and a phone to tether with, we can now, in a pinch, just tote a smartphone around albeit with some caveats.
[perfectpullquote align=”left” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=”14″]These global smartphone launches are grand affairs, packed to the rafters with a host of guests and journalists from near and far. Each one is a carefully choreographed pageant of pomp and grandeur, a testament as much as to the image of the brand that made it as it is the commitment they have to sell it.[/perfectpullquote]
The uninitiated will likely wonder what the fuss is all about – for all intents and purposes it’s still a hunk of steel and plastic that makes phone calls – but for us in the trade, a smartphone launch is a glimpse to the future, a look at how tech companies push the envelope for the most accessible personal tech devices on the planet.
While advances have been made in tech with more powerful processors powering smartphones and crisper, sharper and ever larger displays and even better cameras, smartphones still have tangible limitations of size, physics and cost.
The excitement is how the various phone manufacturers tackle those challenges with a combination of technology and design is what makes it so exciting every year. Unfortunately, there’s only so much you can do in a given period of time to make production deadlines and each phone manufacturer often prioritises certain features over others. Some are pioneers in one field or a certain feature: waterproofing; better cameras; a better processor. There’s no right answer as to what should take priority first. Tech journos all have individual predilections as to what features ought to take precedence over others in a smartphone.
As I was musing over this with a friend over dinner who was on the cusp of changing phones after her current one was about to give up the ghost on account of a combination of wear and tear, misadventure and old age; her phone was over three years old – an eternity in tech – she asked, “What should I look for in a smartphone?” I gave her the standard list of what phones were in production in the last few months, rattling off ad verbatim an array of phones that would have suited her budget or her somewhat narcissistic needs with a better front camera.
[perfectpullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=”14″]”What phone would you pick as a tech journo?”[/perfectpullquote]
She shook her head though. “ I don’t want those.” As she forked over another helping of steaming hot noodles onto her plate in the small speakeasy in Petaling Street amidst a roaring downpour outside, she added,”What phone would you pick as a tech journo?” That was something of a challenge to answer as we constantly rotated between phones in a Sisyphean quest to review them. I answered as such and to be fair, not everyone wants to buy the smartphone equivalent of a sports car. Many are content with the proverbial equivalent of a workhorse to putter around in. She changed tack.”What kind of features would you want in a smartphone then?”
A tech journo’s smartphone feature wishlist? Sure.
I speared a helping of fried fish cake onto my plate as I mused over the thought. Often, the grand predictions and announcements made at a smartphone’s launch paint grandiose promises but all too often, reality sets in. Sometimes a phone sounds wonderfully peachy on paper and under controlled testing conditions like on a showroom floor. When it hits the market, production problems or absurdly high costs limit it to some half baked implementation. Sometimes, a phone looks fantastic and performs like a thoroughbred but has banal endurance that limits its utility. Jaded tech journos can list a litany of woes encountered that only gets bigger with every phone they review and a wishlist of ideal features that seemingly gets longer as time goes on.
My dining companion prompted me further.”What can this perfect smartphone of yours do?”. I snorted. Expecting a perfect phone was like expecting live unicorns to start crapping rainbows in the streets and Santa Claus to leave presents under the tree every year. She cajoled and pleaded, curious to know the features that a technophile would want in the perfect phone.
I relented as she bought me a round of drinks from a vendor opposite the restaurant. The rain slowed to a drizzle as the crowd built up again with tourists milling around, walking back and forth in the briskly cool evening air. I mused over the thought as she proffered a serving of sea coconut water served in a flimsy plastic cup. I held up my index finger. “First is survivability and build quality.” Phones were getting better looking as they were increasingly being crafted of steel and glass but they weren’t getting any lighter and they weren’t getting any tougher either. An ancient Nokia 3310 could survive almost anything short of small arms fire or immolation in a volcano. A current-gen smartphone will crack its display the moment it hits the floor at a wrong angle. And may the Heavens help you if a phone ever encounters water. “Ideally, in a perfect world, a smartphone would be light, slim and good looking yet able to survive a drop or accidents and maybe a dip or two in the pool.” Many phones in current production have several of these features but not all. Some are waterproof but fragile. Others are tough as nails but were as attractive as a brick. Yet others were fantastically good looking but were so fragile that they had to be coddled in an armoured casing which defeated the purpose of showing it off in the first place. She mused over this. “What else?”
[perfectpullquote align=”left” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=”14″]Expecting a perfect phone was like expecting live unicorns to start crapping rainbows in the streets [/perfectpullquote]
I raised my second finger. “Second is endurance.” I explained further. Smartphone performance has improved – displays are bigger and sharper, processors are better and cameras are even capable of capturing 4K video – all this however drains battery life faster than the sashimi platter at an all-you-can-eat buffet. While phone vendors have compensated with larger batteries and somewhat more efficient ones, this has conversely made phones heavier to compensate. Some efforts have been made to reduce the drain with more efficient app usage and smarter processors too. This has eked out a full day of conservatively modest usage. Needless to say, there’s no such thing as ‘modest usage’ when a tech journo uses a smartphone. Our daily routine of posts, video, photo snapping and paperwork ought to ideally be done on a notebook but in the midst of rushing for coverage, we often end up resorting to writing a story and posting up snaps straight off a smartphone. This kind of punishing routine often ends up draining a phone by late afternoon. Some have resorted to carrying multiple phones; others bandoliers of power banks. It remains an irksome quandary to have an incredibly powerful phone but having to nurse it through the day. It’s the equivalent of having a sports car but having to drive it like a subcompact. I summed up what would be on my wishlist for a smartphone in terms of endurance, “A phone that had a battery that was light enough and powerful enough to handle our heavy usage patterns and was able to charge fast enough that we can have true, all-day level endurance.”
She frowned as she mused over the thought. The rain outside stopped and more diners streamed in, looking for seats. The harried looking restaurant owner gave me a pointed look and a raised eyebrow. I got the hint and did the universal Malaysian gesture that indicated ‘bill please!’. As i doled out a couple of tenners on a proffered, grotty looking silver plate that had seen better days, she asked. “So, what’s the third thing on your wish list?”
The restaurant owner shuffled off, returning with a smattering of loose change rattling around in the plate. I pocketed them and hefted my backpack. If I had a phone that could take a beating and had true, all-day endurance, there was only one other thing that would make it indispensable to a wordsmith. “A decent keyboard.” My friend raised an eyebrow. “Doesn’t your phone already have a virtual keyboard on it?”. That much was true. Almost all phones had a virtual keyboard that was perfectly fine to type out a text on Whatsapp or Facebook. Less so if you wanted to type something like what you’re reading onscreen at this very moment. “Yes it does but have you tried typing a story with fingers like these?” I raised one hand, revealing callused digits. “Unless you have fingers like chopsticks, you’ll be using the backspace key more than anything else.” Even as we vacated the table, a hungry couple immediately flung their bags over to the stools surrounding it; a local affectation to book the seat before others did.
I elaborated further as we walked farther along the crowded streets past a roast chestnut seller, his wares raising roiling coils of wafting smoke in the night air as he plied his trade. There were third party solutions to be sure and virtual keyboards had text prediction algorithms and personalised lexicons but they were like training wheels on a bicycle – they just got in the way. They kept flagging sentences and words that they weren’t familiar with like an overenthusiastic beagle pointing at every random object it didn’t recognise. Auto-complete mode on virtual keyboards was unpredictable at worst and patronising at best with a choice of words that were ideal for completing a short text one-handed but were ill-suited for writing an article. That and just bringing a virtual keyboard up means that a good chunk of screen real estate is taken up by it simply being there. Sure, there were physical keyboards but they remain stopgap measures at best as pairing and docking them with a phone were a royal pain the posterior. Many are also designed for use on a flat surface – try doing that at a press launch without a table in sight and only your lap as a work surface with a horde of people jostling you around. Word: it’s not fun.
Trying to do that while you’re trying to cover a hectic global smartphone launch is tantamount to missing the whole event altogether. “An ideal phone ought have a smarter, efficient virtual keyboard,” I mused. “If it had the option of a physical keyboard accessory it ought to have large enough keys for actual work and be sturdy enough that you can use it in your lap with the phone too.” In lieu of that, there is still the time-tested solution – a notebook and the commensurate weight of it sloshing around in your backpack.
My friend nodded. “So is there anything that exists at the moment that fills your wish list?” I saw her off on her Uber that waited on the street corner where a bookstore once stood, its silent boarded up windows a memory of better days. After the recent launch of the Huawei P10 and the new LG G6 at Mobile World Congress several weeks ago, several other promising flagship phones were in the pipeline. Next up was Samsung’s Galaxy S8 that was slated to make an official appearance by the end of the month in New York. “Perhaps. Several promising phones have just been released though the S8 launch will happen in a few weeks and that is so far one of the most promising phones on the horizon,”as I ushered her into the car. “If it’s not urgent, try waiting for a bit for the S8 launch before you make up your mind.” She nodded, satisfied. At that, her Uber sped off into the night, her question answered in a fashion. KT
