Smartphones have become all the rage in the last decade, but smartphone designers are doing very little to improve their products. While a lot of consumers are still buying into the hype surrounding these mobile devices, other consumers are waking up to the reality that they are being offered low quality products for a great deal of money. For this reason, some consumer advocates are recommending that people hold out until smartphone manufacturers give consumers much more quality bang for their buck. This is not only in terms of better quality smartphones, but also in terms of new features. The following reasons explain some of the leading causes for why consumers should hold off on buying that new smartphone release.
The Battery Problem
When it comes to shelling out a lot of cash for a smartphone, you would expect phone manufacturers to at least improve the battery life and recharging rate. Unfortunately, despite all the generations of smartphones that have been brought to market, the batteries that most of these phones use truly lack improvement. Batteries drain relatively fast under heavy use, and their rate of recharge is excessively slow. This makes smartphone use more of an inconvenience than anything else, especially when the battery starts to go bad. Even replacing a battery will sometimes result in poor battery function if the new battery is not built well.
Where Are the New Features
While smartphones used to introduce new features with every succeeding generation, the rate of innovation with new smartphone features has dropped to a virtual crawl. Calling, alarms, apps, texting, on-board cameras, streaming video and audio have all been done before. Buying that new smartphone, when your old one already performs the same functions, only provides a consumer with more of the same. With the advent of stackable stamp sized memory chips, one would expect that modern smartphones would be pushing a terabyte of memory storage capacity by now.
Then There Is The Cost
Expensive is an understatement when it comes to the Samsung Galaxy S7 and the Apple iPhone 6s products. While the Samsung Galaxy runs around 700-dollars, its rival, the Apple iPhone, is weighing in right around a hefty 900-dollars on average. It is enough to make anyone ask the question if a smartphone is really worth the lofty prices that companies like Samsung and Apple are sticking to consumers. If an upgrade is needed every one to two years, this type of price tag becomes outrageous for anyone to keep paying out of pocket. Even with manufacturer discounts, the prices of the two most popular brands, by all accounts, are quite steep. This has caused consumers to seriously consider rival brands which sport most of the same features at a much lower price point.
The App Landscape
Purchasing a new smartphone really does not change much in terms of the availability of new apps. Most app developers do not seek to make their apps restricted to specific generations of a given smartphone type. Consequently, having a slightly older smartphone or a brand new one pretty much keeps the available apps the same to both types of users. The only time this really makes a difference is if the newer smartphone has a much higher memory storage capacity. In this situation, the number of apps the smartphone can store could change dramatically. But, ask yourself, does that new smartphone really have that much of a difference in on-board memory storage capacity?
Conclusion
Smartphones are a staple electronic mobile device in our modern society. With each generation of smartphones hitting the market, we find that batteries remain poor quality and lack performance, features and improvements are minor at best and popular brand smartphone prices seem to increase higher and higher. From an economic standpoint, purchasing a new smartphone, especially from companies like Samsung and Apple, is truly not worth the outrageous expense pushed off on the consumer. Holding on to your current smartphone or purchasing a lower budget phone, which contains most of the same features as the popular brands, becomes a far more economically viable option for savvy consumers who are over all the smartphone hype. Additionally, as more users choose to hold on to their old smartphone, this will in turn force manufacturers to do more to reignite consumer interest in their mobile products.