I exchange text, sound, and pictures with people. Sometimes I play stupid games. The sound/pictures/text sharing long ago hit a limit where theres a big question as to why a person needs a faster processor. Increased watts per compute helps, sure. But what else? What besides bloat requires a Moore's law increase in a phone processor?
What do I want to do with my phone that I don't yet know I want?
Here are some relatively boring answers:
AI stuff - including, among other things, voice recognition, other parts of virtual assistants, photo capture (which involves a lot of processing in modern smartphones to improve the image), and photo auto-tagging - is always happy to guzzle extra cycles to improve accuracy a few percent. Some of this can be (and is) done on the cloud instead, but at the cost of latency, availability (when reception is poor), and, of course, privacy. Much better to do it on-device where possible.
Games, even short of VR/AR (which is definitely a "I don't yet know I want" candidate), similarly often push the limits of the GPU to achieve graphical fidelity. True, the kinds of simple, repetitive, low production value games that tend to grace the top charts of mobile app stores today have little need for increased fidelity. But I think that phenomenon is more about market dynamics than inherent to the form factor. Dedicated portable consoles like the 3DS have many excellent games that would so benefit, and while some depend on more precise controls than available on mobile (i.e. buttons), many do not, e.g. RPGs, and of course smartphones have their own unique input methods. (Given that the 3DS has atrocious graphics, games clearly don't need good graphics to be fun, but they can still benefit from them, as shown by home consoles/PC gaming - anyway, larger and higher resolution screens increase the baseline level of detail required for acceptability.)
It's perhaps unsurprising that both of these examples tend to rely on the GPU and other specialized processors more than the CPU.
Also, for motion design, fluidity is very important : if you miss frames, the illusion is shattered. And that's also important for a lambda user, having things move into place helps in understanding what is going on. When you delete a mail (or have a new one), having the list of emails move into place instead of blinking from one state to the other helps the user understand the event. Same thing for screen transitions. Android is not quite there yet (and to be fair neither is iOS, it is even surprisingly worse in many regards). Again, it is not entirely clear how much of this is due to software (not java, but the OS debuts as a camera OS, then a blackberry competitor and only after that as a modern mobile OS) but surely better single core performances would help accomplish this and Apple wrecks Android in that specific area.
Untethered VR and AR. Rendering views in stereo for an extremely pixel-dense screen (>4K) at the highest frequency possible (>90Hz) while processing camera feeds and depth sensors for positional tracking (>90Hz).
A mobile processor from five years ago is going to have a rough time trying to run 4k GUIs at 60fps.
And likewise not much else has improved since iOS/Android were released. What I mean by "improved" is real differences in the kinds of things you can do.
What did people do with phones in the 1890s? Even your closed set is much, much more than that.
What did people do with computers in the 50s, or PCs in the 80s? We do a lot more than that now.
With greater capability comes more, even if we don't yet know what "more" will be.
If I don't buy a new computer every few years, what I have will be nearly worthless because software has a funny habit of finding ways to spend all available resources, even if it does most of the same things. I just don't think I would be that disappointed if I was still using Win 95.
> With greater capability comes more, even if we don't yet know what "more" will be.
If you discount network speed and pixel density, "more" hasn't been much in 25 years as far as I can see. Miniturization means I can carry a laptop around with me, ok.
Likewise with phones. Android and iOS are about 8 years old now. What can we do that we couldn't then? _not much_ as far as I can see.
We're definitely past the point of diminishing returns when it comes to resolution, and near or already at the point where physically your eye can't couldn't tell if the pixel density was higher. So what's left?
If most instances of greater capability can be implemented as a thin client, then it's not CPU performance that is the bottleneck, but mobile ISPs and aged infrastructure.
I'd like the battery to last longer. 14 days - like my dumb phone. That would be a meaningful improvement.
Marketing departments.