What makes the perfect Smart Phone?

This isn’t exactly DIY related, but I love technology and this blog has been on my mind for some time now. Why? because I think the smart phone race has run out of steam a bit recently, and my most recent phone has left me feeling a little bit disappointed. I’ll explain why.

If you’re like me, you don’t have a lot of cash to splash around on the latest gadget, so upgrading your phone every couple of years is a rare chance to get your hands on a shiny new state of the art bit of kit – albeit for about £30-£40 per month if you’re on a pay monthly tariff.

I’m afraid I’m an Android man. Please don’t click away all you Apple-ites. It’s just that we’ve got Google Apps in the office so it made sense to go Android, when I made my original leap from Nokia into smart phones, via a Blackberry. A few other things endeared me to Android – like being able to put a button anywhere you wanted to switch Wifi and Bluetooth on and off, and the obvious one – Swipetext, the App which in one foul swoop rendered Blackberry’s querty keypad completely unnecessary, and which Apple finally, grudgingly brought into iOS, about 3 years after it came out.

A year or so ago I was soldiering on with an HTC One X. A year and a half into the contract, with a broken screen that I had already repaired once, smashed a week later and thought, sod it, I’m not shelling out another £150 for a new screen.

Holidaying in Spain my phone disappeared. I don’t have replacement insurance so I started Googling cheap Sim-free phones, and quickly came upon Motorola’s Moto G. The reviews were excellent, it was about £150 (the price of the aforementioned cracked screen), and smashed every other budget phone out of the park, so I bought one on Amazon (Moto G, 4G, 1st Generation) for when I got back, and in the meantime ordered a replacement Sim.

The old and the new: my first generation Motorola Moto G 4G and my new HTC One M9

And my first impressions when I got home and fired it up? Love at first sight. I loved the size – it was a bit smaller than my One X (great for us guys who like to put our phones in our pockets). I loved the soft touch interchangeable back cover, and above all else, the stock Android operating system was just so simple and uncluttered, when compared to the bloat-ware that most manufacturers insist on installing to differentiate their phones from the competition.  And other little things really endeared me to the phone – like Motorola Assist, which can be adjusted not to disturb you when it knows you’re at home, same with the lock screen which switches off when you’re in a safe location (eg your home). Assist also kindly reads out text messages when you’re in the car, and will even allow you to dictate a reply (though my Vito Van is sadly too noisy for this to work except when stationary).

BUT, and there’s always a but – the love affair ended for innocuous and completely avoidable reasons.  MEMORY! The phone comes with 8GB of memory, which sounds like a lot, but Android takes up about 3 or 4 of that, which leaves precious little space for Apps or photos. This shouldn’t be a problem, as the phone comes with a micro SD slot which allows you to expand the memory considerably. And this is where I got really annoyed. I bought a micro SD card, installed it. Initially it was recognised, and then I got continuous messages saying the SD card had been ejected. I tried everything including buying a micro SD card adapter so that I could format it on my PC. None of my efforts worked and from trawling the forums I realised I wasn’t alone. This was a pretty inherent problem with this otherwise lovely little device.

It’s crazy isn’t it. You can have a seemingly flawless device for the price – then totally ruined by a basic but fundamental hardware error.

So I struggled on with my Moto G for another few months, and started researching what phone to buy next. The SD card problems on my Moto G were enough to put me off buying another Moto G for the time being at least. And this is really where I get back to my disappointment at today’s smart phone market. I’ve loved the HTC phones I’ve had, but have always felt that there was something slightly better I could upgrade to. The trouble is, my choice is actually pretty limited. I’m not prepared to defect to iPhone for the reasons given above, and because I don’t want to have to do all my syncing through iTunes. I’m a Spotify user these days.

Ideally for stock Android purity I’d have a Nexus 6 or Moto X but they’re both too big. Yes, they really are, and for someone who mostly keeps their phone in their pocket, this is a pretty major issue. The LG G4 is undoubtedly going to be a contender for phone of the year with its phenomenal camera, and removable battery but again it’s too big, and my carrier EE doesn’t sell it. Neither does it sell the Moto X. Shame on you EE!! What about the Samsung Galaxy S6? D’you know – after the previous plasticy handsets I just can’t bring myself to look at it even with it’s new more premium feel. I don’t like the bloat ware that Samsung fills its devices with, and rumours are the battery life is going to be pretty poor with that screen and processor.

So what have I ended up with? You’ve guessed it. HTC’s new flagship phone the One M9. I promise you, I’m not such a die hard HTC fan that I will stick with them in the face of all competition. I’m actually pretty gutted I had to stay with the brand. I don’t think the new phone has made any quantum leaps from the excellent M8. It has lost some of those slim beautiful lines of the M8 (it’s narrower and noticeably thicker) and the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor on my phone is heating up just as much as the doom mongerers in the reviews have predicted.

But at least this phone  is just small enough to fit in my pocket. It happily accepted the micro SD card that my Moto G had refused to get on with, and it does have some nice features – the camera’s pretty good, the auto selfie function works well and I like the way you simply pan across to take a panoramic photo. The two front facing stereo speakers are amazing when you’re listening to music with the phone in landscape, and the processor is quick enough to handle day to day applications without any delays. But I’ve never cared much for their signature app Blinkfeed – which I never bother to scroll across to. As for HTC’s Sense interface, I just don’t want my phone changing what’s on my screen depending on where I am. My life isn’t eclectic enough from one location to the next for me to want completely different apps showing on the home screen as I move around.

So what makes the perfect smart phone? Well, I suppose I’m posing the question as to what we all really WANT OR NEED from our smartphones. Each year we’re dazzled with an every more baffling array of specifications – from snapdragon quadcore this to megapixel that. But I think the following basic shopping list would tick most people’s boxes:

– Keep the size down: a smart phone that isn’t too large –  no larger than the HTC One M9 – at just under 15cms long by 7.5cms wide. If you need something larger, get a tablet.

– Speed: it just needs to be quick enough to handle internet browsing, emails, sat nav when you’re in the car and perhaps the odd game.

– Camera: a decent camera is a given these days, but mega pixels are a quite simply a marketing gimmick – the phone manufacturers just don’t need to keep raising the number of mega pixels, because put simply, unless you intend to blow up your photos to poster size 5 mega pixels are more than enough.

– Battery life: I can guarantee that we ALL WANT BETTER BATTERY LIFE! I’m convinced that if the manufacturers didn’t keep upping the specs of the phone screen, camera and processor power our batteries would stand a fighting chance of getting through a busy day without having to recharge.

But the sad reality is that Apple, Samsung, LG, Sony, HTC, Motorola etc etc have to keep raising the bar by packing in more and more specs, because otherwise they fall behind their competitors in what is becoming an ever more aggressively competitive market. And that’s the sad thing for us consumers. Our two year contracts get ever more expensive as our specification packed phones become more and more high tech, and arguably these phones are promising a lot more than we actually need or want.

And back to my question – what makes the perfect smart phone? Maybe the answer lies with phones at the budget end of the market, with their one-off cost and cheap Sim free tariffs! So bring on the next Moto G. As if to prove the point, I’ve just fired up my Moto G to take the above picture after a few months switched off, and it’s just updated itself to Android Lollipop – an update many more premium handsets are still waiting for.