The questions that mobile phone reviewers never ask

[amosbatto]

I blogged about how the reviewers of mobile phones never ask the right questions.

When writing that article it struck me that the PinePhone would rank much higher in the reviews if reviewers cared about the right things when reviewing mobile phones.

[desca]

Maybe tell us here what those questions are.

[nas]

You could probably summarise them as repairability. longevity and hackability. Ordinary smartphone users honestly dont care about those. Preaching that gospel in reviews is only going to have niche appeal.

[amosbatto]

You could probably summarise them as repairability. longevity and hackability. Ordinary smartphone users honestly dont care about those. Preaching that gospel in reviews is only going to have niche appeal.

Actually, the data shows that ordinary smartphone users do care about the longevity of their phones and would like to keep them for longer. Look at the data in my article:
https://amosbbatto.wordpress.com/2020/08...-of-phosh/

As for ordinary consumers not caring about repairability of their phones, a survey by SquareTrade in August 2018 found that 66% of smartphone owners damaged their phones in the past year. Of those, 29% had cracked screens, 27% had scratched screens, 22% had nonworking batteries, 16% had touchscreen issues, and 16% had chipped corners/sides. 59% reported that they have chosen to upgrade to a new device rather than repair a broken phone. A 2015 survey by Motorola found that 42% of smartphone owners reported that the expense of fixing a cracked screen was the biggest barrier to fixing it.

For the 41% of smartphone owners who chose not to upgrade a damaged phone, presumably most of them would like to repair their current phone.

As for hackability, I think that you have an argument there since most people don't want to take the time, but if it were easy to change the operating system to one that receives 5 years of updates, more people might care about this issue.

[CampGareth]

You could probably summarise them as repairability. longevity and hackability. Ordinary smartphone users honestly dont care about those. Preaching that gospel in reviews is only going to have niche appeal.

Actually, the data shows that ordinary smartphone users do care about the longevity of their phones and would like to keep them for longer. Look at the data in my article:
https://amosbbatto.wordpress.com/2020/08...-of-phosh/

As for ordinary consumers not caring about repairability of their phones, a survey by SquareTrade in August 2018 found that 66% of smartphone owners damaged their phones in the past year. Of those, 29% had cracked screens, 27% had scratched screens, 22% had nonworking batteries, 16% had touchscreen issues, and 16% had chipped corners/sides. 59% reported that they have chosen to upgrade to a new device rather than repair a broken phone. A 2015 survey by Motorola found that 42% of smartphone owners reported that the expense of fixing a cracked screen was the biggest barrier to fixing it.

For the 41% of smartphone owners who chose not to upgrade a damaged phone, presumably most of them would like to repair their current phone.

As for hackability, I think that you have an argument there since most people don't want to take the time, but if it were easy to change the operating system to one that receives 5 years of updates, more people might care about this issue.

I think repairability becomes more important the more software stabilises and the generational upgrades become smaller. I had a Samsung Galaxy S1 for instance and being quite early in Android's lifecycle it was obsolete a year later when the S2 came out. Android 2.x to 4 was a huge jump, as was quadrupling the 3G modem speed, doubling the RAM, doubling the core count, storage etc. If I dropped and broke the S1 after the release of the S2 I would use that as an excuse to upgrade rather than want to repair my old phone unless it was my only option.

By comparison I mourned the death of my Dell XPS 13's battery pack as future revisions hadn't really changed much, maybe lost a few grams here and there or gotten a few percentage points faster but really that laptop was a fine workhorse that made more sense to repair than replace. I think we're getting there with phones. A snapdragon 835 is much the same as an 865 for web browsing, twitter, youtube etc and android 11 is much the same as android 9.

[User 18618]

Well put, @amosbatto.

The PinePhone and Librem 5 (and postmarketOS ) are daring to break the mould of shiny object syndrome. Smartphones are a commodity, treated with no regard for longevity as manufacturers bring out their "latest and greatest", ultimately cannibalising one another.

Alas, the target audience for a hacker-friendly, open smartphone is wildly different to the audience already purchasing iOS and Android devices. Pity.

[ryo]

Over the past couple of years, I noticed that there are 2 kinds of reviewers: reviewers who got a free review unit, and reviewers who got a unit from their own money.

Reviewers with free units will review way more models, but they are obligated to give mostly positive points and keep negative points at a minimum, otherwise the company will never give them another free unit again.
Because reviews they make are effectively lengthy advertisements.

Reviewers who aren't contracted by any of the phone companies and have to buy the phone themselves will maybe review one or two model a year, and might require a lot of searching on YouTube, but can freely say whatever they want about it.
So these reviewers are honest because they have no strings attached.

That's why the former group will probably avoid certain questions while the latter will put them in with no problems if you ask for it.
The problem is not necessarily that they don't want to talk about hackability or indepth technical parts, the problem is they are not allowed to.