| I actually based my recommendations off of the most common areas of complaint I come across and specifically the areas the younger set complain about most often. Battery Life: You can find someone tethered to a wall outlet in almost any public space these days. The apps which the younger set use most frequently (photo, video, and data heavy social media apps) are also enormous battery hogs. Facebook and Snapchat in particular are the source of more "my phone is on 2%, can I borrow your charger?" requests than anything else. Durability/Ease of Repair: Go to any high school or college campus and count the number of phones you see with cracked screens. I can't even count the number of people I know who have been stuck using a phone with a busted screen until they're eligible for an upgrade or able to afford a new one. Back in the days of the iPhone 4, a broken screen was a $50 fix. Now it is a mark of shame that lasts until you buy a new phone because replacing a screen is either not feasible at all or far too expensive to justify (this applies more to phones in the $250-300 range) Bring back the landscape QWERTY keyboard: I'll admit this is heavily biased by my curmudgeonliness because I loved my OG Droid and Droid 2, but there's something to be said about a feature that helped those 2 phones rack up huge sales figures but hasn't been seriously tried ever since. In relation to its appeal among the younger set, the amount of horrific typos and "oops, autocorrect screwed that up" I see across all forms of content generated on software keyboards is enormous. People may be "faster" with software keyboards but the speed means nothing when they either butcher their point or have to edit/send a second message to correct their mistakes. Also, the proportion of smartphone users who actually use swipe style predictive input and those who hunt and peck is skewed heavily toward the peckers. You make good points in relation to camera quality and cost but I see those as inherently "solved" problems in today's smartphone market. There are dozens of phones with great cameras, copying what they're doing is both easy and not a real differentiator. Any feature I neglected to mention can be covered under the heading of "just don't screw it up", there's no excuse for fucking something up when you have dozens of examples of how to do things right. As far as cost is concerned, it's obviously factor #1 these days as the "mid range" is continually eaten away by pressure from unceasingly good budget phones and the "flagship" price point becomes unattainable to startups that can't create an entire supply chain to support the latest whizbang innovations. I still think there's room for a phone like I've described at the $400-500 price point, whether that's achievable with the landscape QWERTY is the real question. |