The 5c looks like an homage to Nokia’s Lumia line of phones, they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
The 5s is the main event, it’s a nice phone…. as they’ve all been since the iPhone-4.
This is where it gets tricky for ALL phone manufactures, smartphones are now ‘good enough’ and have been for a couple of years, there is no great tech leap forward that compels people to change their phone each year any more.
Everyone does cloud based storage and syncing, all operating systems offer some kind of sat-nav, all have excellent browser’s, all have the main and most popular apps available on their OS…. and if they don’t virtually everything can be accessed through the web using the desktop version anyway!….. all play music and stream video beautifully and they all have excellent cameras that could stand alone as a selling point.
Where to go from here?
For me it’s price and battery life.
If Google can sell the Nexus for around £200 why would I pay Samsung, Apple or HTC £400-500 for one of their phones?
The main players are creaming it, offer me the same tech as last year but drop the price and I’m sold but don’t offer the most incremental of camera updates and expect me to cough up £500 for the privilege.
Battery life. Where to start?
The manufactures know that modern batteries are only good for 300-500 charges before performance drops dramatically and yet they still ship them with batteries so bad that most people charge the phone every night… That’s 700+ charges in a typical 24 month contract, it’s not hard to see why most phone’s performance tails off during the last 6 months of a contract.
Sell me a phone with a battery that can go for 2-3 days of hard use and performs as well in 2 years time as it did at the start of the contact and I’ll consider that real progress!
New phone announcements are all a bit ‘meh’ at the moment, the only reason I’m looking forward to the next Nexus in a month or twos time is because it will be as good as anything out there currently but retail for half the price.