Your smartphone feature wishlist – Which features do you wish smatphones had?

[Ertio]

Let me start with mine:

• User-replaceable battery. Let's get the obvious one out of the way. This would eliminate dependence on external repair services and eliminate the need for slow and careful charging. Just blast the power in, charge to 100% guilt-free, and then replace it carelessly and cheaply when it stops working. Batteries are meant to be replaced like car oil. It is basic maintenance, as Louis Rossmann said (video).
• Dedicated Micro-HDMI port. This allows for presentations while charging is possible at the same time, without bulky adapters that also slow down charging.
• Full-sized SD card slot. Can add up to 2 TB. Worries about running out of space will be a thing of the past. Memory cards also protect against data loss since they can be retrieved if the phone breaks or is remotely disabled because the phone vendor feels like it (Louis Rossmann video).
• Separate high frame rate and slow motion options. Some smartphones (currently Xiaomi and Apple, formerly Samsung) store videos recorded at a high frame rate in real-time, some slow (currently Samsung) down the file they create. I prefer the real-time one for editing purposes and versatility (can be treated as ordinary real-time video), but I also acknowledge that the slowed-down file has the possible benefit of being played as slow-motion by default on every device, which is desirable to some users (example). So both options need to be available.
• Start the camera in horizontal orientation by default. On some smartphones, taking a picture or starting a video recording too soon after the camera software launched will result in misrotation. This could also be fixed by saving the video file horizontally if the phone was held horizontally for the majority of the time, not just at the beginning.
• Dedicated camera shutter button. With customizable shortcuts like "double-press to start recording video as soon as possible (horizontally of course!)".
• Notification LEDs and real proximity sensors. These have been removed in recent years in favour of a bezel-less design. I don't mind a small bezel for these benefits. I don't really need a bezel-less design; I was satisfied prior to it. The bezel size of, for example, the Note 3, was fine to me. It seems people started started being unhappy with their current phone designs as soon as Justin Denison told them so on Unpacked 2017 for the S8 (video, at 17 minutes, 32 seconds). However, the small S8 bezels could still fit a proximity sensor and a notification LED. Now, we have completely bezel-less phones so there is no space for that anymore. The front-facing sensors and LEDs had to go.
• 8K 4320p at 60fps. But that is going to come soon anyway, and (hopefully) eventually cascade from the flagship phones down to the affordable phones. Strangely, the transition between 2160p 30fps and 2160p 60fps on smartphones took four years, between 2013 (Galaxy Note 3) and 2017 (iPhone 8), much longer than the two years between 1080p 30fps (S2, 2011) and 1080p 60fps (Note 3, 2013). We saw the first 8K video cameras in phones in 2020. 2024 is over and the 8K 60fps smartphone cameras aren't a thing yet.

Now, let's hear yours.

 

But please be realistic. No "transform into an airplane" type of stuff like in that iPhone 4 vs. HTC Evo video (at 1 minute, 7 seconds).

 

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