The iPhone’s 10th anniversary this past week has put me in a contemplative mood. I’ve been thinking about smartphones in general, and about my perpetual quest to find the one that checks all of my boxes. And the thing I’ve come to realize is that I don’t actually want to ever find a perfect smartphone. So long as there’s still something else irritatingly out of my reach, some other feature that my phone doesn’t yet have, I’ll know that smartphone makers are still innovating and pushing us forward. The perfect smartphone would be the sign of a stagnant industry.
I’m sure I’m not alone in starting every year with a refreshed anticipation for the novelties to come from the likes of Samsung, OnePlus, HTC, Huawei, and Apple. As much as we all love and rely on our smartphones, there’s always something new coming down the pipe that draws our attention and our dollars. That innovation pipeline has slowed in recent years, as we can’t enjoy such massive breakthroughs as high-resolution AMOLED displays every year, but it’s still the case that every few months another layer of polish and improvement is added to the smartphone category. With such a moving target, it’s obvious that an ideal phone that has everything one could want is a practical impossibility.
The Galaxy S8 from Samsung, for example, would have been the perfect phone at this time last year. It has exceptional design, top specs, a delightfully modern TouchWiz UI, and that envy-inducing Infinity Display. I rank its camera ahead of the iPhone 7’s, and I’d tell you that the S8 is the best phone you can buy right now — except the Google Pixel exists, and it has an even better camera.
So I use a Pixel myself. But the Pixel has a million little foibles that make it kind of crappy: the USB-C port at the bottom is sharp and digs into my fingers when I hold it, Bluetooth connections are easily cut off if I cover up the glass window on the back, and the headphone audio coming out of the Pixel is just terrible. it’s also not waterproof and its battery doesn’t last for a particularly long time.