Xu Jialu

Jun 23, 2024

Peak 🏔️ Smartphone

I remember there used to be a time when I would literally camp the Android and Apple sites for developer betas to the new OS updates. Excited as ever to try the new features, I would back my devices up days in advance and risk bricking my phones just to have a taste of OS-wide dark mode, the (then-new) weather widgets for android and new notifications for iOS. There used to be so much hype around WWDC in particular that it became a bit of a tradition for me to fanboy all over these events on Instagram.

And yes, regardless of how I want to frame it, it was very cringey.

WHAT do you mean 2019 was 5 years ago?

I don't write as much about the android world as much as I do for Apple, but it's really because no one cares outside of nerds 💀

Android Oreo and Pie were some of my biggest "OS fevers" of all time. I would play around with my Samsung Galaxy S8 (which I genuinely think is one of the most beautiful phones ever made, even till today) to match Google's vanilla android homepage pixel to pixel. ( 😉 )

Samsmixel 2XL.

And it wasn't just the homepages that got me so into smartphones. I remember the war against bezels as well. The first time I saw the Xiaomi MIX in action, I was completely and utterly mesmerised.

To this day, I think the MIX was a marked change in Xiaomi's standing as a phone manufacturer, a sign that they were ready for the next step to compete with the big boys. It was an exploratory device that declared the bezel of a phone (of which until then was of insignificant importance) an enemy of design. What follows was a scramble to maximise the screen-to-body ratio of smartphones.

Mi MIX kicked off the war against bezels. Love them or hate them, this goofy rice brand got pretty innovative.

Then came the Essential Phone. Couple of wonky androidy ideas later, Apple pulled out iPhone X with the notch. Then came the war to remove the notch.

Galaxy S10. So asymmetrical, so ugly, so beautiful.

Phone nerds all over the world were fixated on this war. I remember being so amused and impressed by the first generation Oppo Find X and the Mi MIX 3 (where you slide the back half to reveal the selfie camera). I remember the Vivo APEX concept phone taking the android space by storm in 2018 for its 98% screen-to-body ratio. These products may have been toned down in terms of raw novelty by now, but they were impressive feats driven by intense competition back then.

Now, a few years later, WWDC remains one of the more important developer conferences for iOS developers. But smartphone innovation has considerably slowed. Updates become more and more incremental, and iOS18, touted as "the biggest ever update" seems nowhere near as drastic as previous iterations. Most phones are now marketed for value, not for novelty.

A staggering 98% screen-to-body ratio. Concept or not, the Vivo Apex was a sheer engineering feat.

What can smartphones even still be?

It seems like, over the years, it's not just these OS features or hardware design that's been toned down, but the functionality of apps as well. Long-form videos have been reduced to shorts, articles reduced to pictures, games reduced to ads. (Sorry, I'll admit that last bit was a little bitter :D)

Calls, messages, navigation, expression. Our phones now touch every single aspect of our lives, through a marriage of its hardware, software, and applications created by the ever growing community of developers all vying to be the next TikTok. With GPT 4o, we'll likely won't be seeing any dedicated "AI Devices" anytime soon. So say bye to the AI pin and the Rabbit R1. (With some glee, by the way, so future "entrepreneurs" will actually make stuff work before pushing anything onto the market)

That's not a bad thing, nor is it unexpected.

We've always expected peak smartphone to arrive someday. There's only so much you can do with a handheld device, and only so much to make possible on a touchscreen. In many ways, the countless of camera updates and ChatGPT integrations would go unnoticed to the average user. What Apple and Google have achieved in the last 20 years trying to outdo each other is utterly impressive. We see a very mature iOS and Android ecosystem that only ever requires small, iterative updates from now on.

That's not a bad thing. Consumers won, and platform developers won as well. Never before have we ever had such a mature development platform that makes distributing software products so easy and so seamless.

We have mobile processing chips that have more than enough performance for modern applications. We have cameras that outperform the capabilities of its users. What other problems of phones do we even have left to solve? Or are we destined to swing back and forth between chonkyness and slimness and frame their justifications favourably in keynotes?

With the Meta Quest and Vision Pro products, companies and investors obviously think so as well. We've solved phones. The hunt is now on for what's next.

The culmination of those years of competition -- My Redmi 12R

I don't think there's a better representation of what we managed to achieve in 20 years of brutal competition than my current phone I use for connectivity in China.

Absurd value.

I got this bad boy for free on a 1 yuan per day unlimited data contract. You can buy the same model for about 100 SGD.

For that, you get a FHD 90hz LED panel that's smooth and clear enough. You get a 50MP Rear camera complete with an ultra-wide sensor and algorithms that are good enough. You get a cutout selfie camera that I used to dream about. Side-mounted fingerprint sensor that's blazing fast, IR face recognition, an elegant-enough plastic back and aluminium frame. Snapdragon 4 Gen 2 and 6GBs of RAM, 128GBs of storage. Speakers that are good enough, and a 3.5mm headphone jack, complete with an old-school IR blaster to turn your favourite prof's projector off from across the hall.

科技平权。Tech for all.

A hundred bucks. That's what all that fighting was for.

I don't yet know if tech makes our lives better necessarily but it definitely makes life accessible and more affordable. There's nothing more heartwarming than seeing my grandma talk to MI Ai to operate her phone, ask for weather information, or to play music. These things used to be locked away behind paywalls and learning curves.

Reaching peak smartphone means we've solved smartphones. At least, for now. If you've been wondering why I don't seem as interested in the newest updates or the newest devices anymore, well, look around. The fight's over.

We all won.