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Comment by dloose | Hacker News Reader

> I'm always blown away out how little cell phone manufacturers seem to listen to customer feedback. I don't care about my phone being paper thin. I'd guess most people don't either.

We can only guess based on what we hear. Cell phone manufacturers have a lot more data than we do and they keep going for thinness, so I have to imagine there's a demand for it.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that most consumers prefer battery life to thinness in surveys and polls but actually wind up buying the thinner phone when presented with actual hardware. Thinness is easy to see. If you're comparing phones in a Best Buy, the thinner one might feel more modern and impressive. Battery life is a hard feature to demo in that environment.

In other words, maybe the average person only wants battery life in the abstract, but opts for thinness when making a purchase.

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You may be confusing "because of" with "in spite of". If your phone breaks and you need a new one, you buy one that has new features. If the only choice is thinner than you buy it and grumble on HN. I've never been asked to fill out a survey about the features I like/dislike about my phone.

> I've never been asked to fill out a survey about the features I like/dislike about my phone.

I've never been asked which political candidate I prefer, but I see polls on the news every night.

> We can only guess based on what we hear. Cell phone manufacturers have a lot more data than we do and they keep going for thinness, so I have to imagine there's a demand for it.

I worry about this being "data driven design", where X sells so lets try X+1. Problem is that phones do not sell on their own. Most customers buy them with some plan attached, meaning they often grab what gets the biggest carrier subsidy (or whatever gets the seller the biggest commission).

That or they get whatever their neighbor/relative/coworker/friend has.

There are a whole pile of perverse incentives between the OEM and the users that may or may not show up in the data hitting the meeting room table.

I remember this being one of the things that caught Blackberry by surprise. BB had better battery life and functionality etc, so BB co-CEOs never thought the iPhone would catch on.

Then again, the iPhone had years of iPod install base to bootstrap from. People in part bought it because it was an iPod with a mobile radio attached. The tech press had been hammering Apple for years to get into the phone market, as Nokia etc was eating their lunch with MP3 playing featurephones (at least in Europe).

And i seem to recall the stated surprise for BB was how much of the iPhone was battery.

I have worked in tech retail and the customer's needs are actually quite flexible with a bit of marketing. In any case the thinner and bigger trend seems to have ran its course: With the current UX design in iOS and Android, phones with screens larger than 5in are uncomfortable to a lot of average people and thus manufacturers can no longer cheat the thickness game by making the screen and chassis bigger.

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