Xiaomi unveils concept phone with near bezel-less display

Killed the brand in my eyes

Except that that variety seems to be disappearing. The smallest Androids on the market are larger than the iPhone 5 / SE. The only Android currently on the market with a keyboard is the BlackBerry Priv, which is pretty high-end (and awkwardly sized). There are very few phones with removable batteries. And so forth.

They seem to like waterproofing and wireless charging as well, and at least the charging isn't usually available on the old candy-bar phones.

Personally, I'd love something like a flagship-style phone, but with a 4.5" 720P screen. For the most part, such a beast doesn't exist, and the next question is "what can I compromise on to find a phone that actually exists?" The comment you responded to seems like they're trying to answer the same question and coming up with "null set". It's a frustrating situation to be in, when the market moves away from building the tool you'd like.

It started life as a perfectly servicable Android phone. A little on the slow side, but not drastically so. The main problem was its 384MB of backing store. By 2015, very few Android apps supported installing to the SD card, and Google Play Services managed to eat almost all of the available storage.

Ideally, I'd like a modern phone with the same size and build quality of the Xperia Ray, the phone that fits unnoticably into my pocket and survived countless falls onto hard floors. I don't think it even needs to be super fast. Just with enough backing store to function as a modern Android device.

And knowing that such devices are possible is the reason I don't agree with the "you'd probably be fine with a feature phone" answer.

At the moment, I'm using a Z5 Compact. It's a great phone with solid build quality, but it's still too big IMO.

- No built-in mobile hotspot functionality, and no 4G/LTE

- No ability to use messaging systems other than SMS (Google Hangouts, Slack, etc.) except for maybe a few whitelisted ones

- No mobile maps

None of these would have been a dealbreaker 10 years ago, since no phones supported mobile hotspots or 4G or LTE, people either used SMS or some IM system that your phone did support (e.g., AIM - although AIM also had a pretty good SMS bridge, back in the day), and nobody expected you to have maps on your phone. Today all of those expectations are different.

Personally, I fit your description to a tee. My phone is a Samsung Convoy 2 (the 3 and 4 are inferior) from ~5 years ago. My camera is a small Canon EOS 1200D/Rebel T5. Even the cheapo 18-55mm kit lens that comes with the camera takes better pictures than an iPhone 7.

The cheap camera paired with a cheap prime lens (I paid $90 for a CEF 50mm f/1.8 STM lens) results in jaw-dropping clarity and dreamy depth of field blurs that no phone will ever match--until we overcome the physical limitations of current camera technology requiring light to shine onto a sensor.

The Convoy 2 packs a camera equivalent to an iPhone 3G. It gets the job done fine in daylight, and is passable in dark settings. The LED flash is almost excessively bright.

Personally, I have no problem carrying both with me. The only time I'm surprised by something I'd like to take a high-quality picture of is of another car I see while driving. So even if I had a 2016-level smart phone, the picture's still going to mostly be of a dirty windshield and my car's A-pillar. (Plus, you know, the whole dangerous and illegal caveats.)

They make much smaller cameras than mine that still take great pictures. I suppose someone out there really does drag around both devices with them. I'd expect that number to increase somewhat as mirror-less interchangeable lens tech continues to rapidly improve.

Sometimes it's not about going bad, it's about quick recharge. You can have a backup battery charged and ready for a quick swap. There are portable batteries that charge your main one now though, so the need for this is somewhat mitigated.

All batteries go bad. Science

I always go over the 2 years and for $20 I can buy a Duracell Battery that gets me back to the original life. Lithium Batteries Apple or not ALL Lithium batteries last about 300 to 500 charges.

"Rechargeable Lithium-Ion batteries have a limited life and will gradually lose their capacity to hold a charge. This loss of capacity (aging) is irreversible. As the battery loses capacity, the length of time it will power the product (run time) decreases." http://www.newark.com/pdfs/techarticles/tektronix/LIBMG.pdf

If the phone is a widely used model, it's often not difficult to find new-old stock for a while.

I gave this list of "not cares" a several year window of context. It's pretty obvious OP doesn't want a bag-phone, but might be perfectly happy with the form factor of an iphone 4/5. Not a novel complaint.

It's rather because of the return on investment. From a company's point of view they want to invest as little effort as possible to generate as much effect as possible. Going from 8 hour battery life to 10 hour wouldn't turn the needle for most people, but having a sexy design or a cool new feature would.

So even if they make a breakthrough making a thinner battery, they would rather use that space to pack something else in, instead of making the battery last longer.

People do want longer lasting batteries. In an ideal world the companies may make that happen, but in a real world where there's competition, that's not easy.

This is clearly a different issue from "what the market wants". In reality, you don't always get what you want.

Mobile phone market isn't that - modern platform lockin makes switching platforms extremely hard, forcing customers to give up major benefits if they want to "vote with the wallet". For example, if you're an Apple platform user, you have a choice of a few form factors which are very similar. Swithing to another platform will cost you a lot of money (rebuying apps, rebuying connected hardware like Apple TVs and similar to retain functionality) and cause you significant hassle. For that people aren't going to just switch to another device/platform just because some properties are annoying them. Platform lock-in does its job well.

Talking about market in these conditions is not really realistic, since "the market" can't respond to product features like capitalism demands for best customer satisfation.

An economist sees a $100 bill on the ground, but refuses to pick it up because if it were real, someone else would have already taken it.

Perhaps the fact that the market consolidated to the point where it doesn't offer any choice to the consumers so they could vote with their wallets.

Also he never claimed any of the things you're asking him O.o

It's funny how Apple did the "no buttons thing" because they were responding to a tech ecosystem that had a button for everything at the cost of the user getting overwhelmed. However, now there's no sanity in the other direction - with people avoiding buttons and making things so streamlined that they're harder to use.

In every age there's an innovate response to a cliche, but ultimately this becomes a cliche in of itself :)

A phone with even less space around the screen would just drive me entirely mad.

And to think, just a few years ago with the E6-00 i had a phone that i could operate mostly blind. Nowadays i can't even take my phone out of the pocket without being careful and conscious about it.

'Thinnest phone ever' is similarly meaningless to me for the same reasons. I don't want a phone that feels like I'm going to snap it in half simply by using it.

Not sure if it is fundamentally a bad thing; it'll push prices down and manufacturers who want to distinguish will try other forms. Like I said before, and some here seem to agree, please experiment with more battery, focusing less on the size or speed. At the electronics fair in Hong Kong last week a friend gave me a tablet which is so cheap that if you drop it you wouldn't even pick it up but just get a new one (his words, not mine) and it is fast enough for me to browse, play some games, chat and have fine battery life. More battery life for this that kind of thing matters to me personally more than screen size/resolution or speed as the latter is more than enough for most people anyway but at the same time people complain mostly about battery life.

Or am I just in a bubble as a Google employee, where I hear disproportionately good responses to our stuff?

Android defaults to on-screen bottom-row buttons (to reduce bezel size), but the OS supports off-screen buttons just fine, and phones with dedicated buttons exist.

The phone looked good (if you like the design) but everything else was really poor.

Maybe unrelated, I've had the phone for probably two years (it supposedly came out two years ago as well - didn't think I bought a brand new phone but I guess I did). Recently (past month or so), it's started rebooting at random throughout the day. I'd do a factory reset if I didn't dread the thought of dealing with all of my 2FA stuff.