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Comment by chucknelson | Hacker News Reader

Stagnating how? Less fancy whiz-bang shiny maybe-novelty features to entertain the tech blogs and mainstream media?

Since the iPhone arrived in 2007, phones in general have made incredible advances in mobile performance, networking/cell, form factor and screen technology. This continues today, with things like crazy-high ppi screens and 8-core processors in Android phones, to things like Touch ID and the Ax SOCs in Apple's phones.

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The opposite. All there is now is shiny shiny - there has been no change in substance for a long time, in mobile terms.

Yes, the chips etc. are ridiculous, but no one has a clue what to use them for, so they're just creating fluff.

That's a pretty narrow view of things IMHO. Smartphones are much more usable than they were 2-3 years ago and lightyears beyond what they were 7-8 years ago. Phone web browsers are just as fast as real computers, and fast LTE connections keep things moving quickly. I remember the early days of the first iPhone era smartphones and would never want to go back to them. The web browsers sucked and overall the phones were too slow to do anything beyond check a simple web page. Now a big smartphone or phablet could easily replace a laptop for most people's needs.

> Phone web browsers are just as fast as real computers, and fast LTE connections keep things moving quickly. I remember the early days of the first iPhone era smartphones and would never want to go back to them. The web browsers sucked and overall the phones were too slow to do anything beyond check a simple web page.

This is a result of chip improvement. If you don't do a single thing to improve mobile phones other than use the current generation of chips, you get that. I have seen no other improvements or innovation, and the chips were directly referred to in the comment to which you were replying.

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