Samsung S5

The Samsung S5 is not a particularly great phone in 2019 considering its age. The specs aren’t terribly great nowadays. Many apps run a bit slow on it, some crash often (e.g. the modern incarnation of Google Maps is like letting my S5 drive Bumper Cars). The camera is just ok by modern standards and lacks any sort of expert mode.

At the time though, the S5 was setting the bar for smart phones. It sported the newfangled NFC, 5GHz WiFi, IP67 water resistance, as well as some thing that we didn’t yet realize were important features. For instance, an easily removable and replaceable battery. That may not seem like a big deal, but it is. Devices can occasionally freeze up to the point where the firmware isn’t responding to the signal from the power button, being able to remove the battery instead of waiting for hours for the device to reboot is a big deal. Having a battery go bad earlier than expected and getting greatly diminished battery life is a big deal. Even having the option to use a larger battery pack is a nice option, or to simply swap to a 2nd battery pack. One thing that the S5 appears to lack in at least some (all?) versions, that some predeceding phones (e.g. S3) had, was an FM radio receiver accessible to apps on the phone.

Modern Phones

Most modern phones lack features of the S5. It’s rare to find a phone with a removable back cover to access the battery these days. Heck, it’s even getting hard to find something we took for granted if we’re talking about higher end models these days, the 3.5mm headphone jack is apparently a dying breed. This is a tragedy for two reasons, one is that Bluetooth audio quality just plain isn’t as good, and the second is that for what phones there are with FM radio receiving capable chipsets, they still typically rely on the headphone cable to act as the antenna. Unfortunately it is not easy to replace this functionality with a cable connected to a USB-C port as USB-C is a digital connection whereas FM radio depends on receiving an analog signal. Some of these things are still available some of the time, but they are haphazard and typically appear only on lower end phones that are quite far behind in their other basic hardware specs. Oh, even IR blaster are fairly hard to find.

Expectations

I would expect a high end modern phone to easily be able to check all the following features. FM Radio, headphone jack, IR blaster, at least IP67 water resistance, and full stylus compatibility even if it doesn’t come with one. These aren’t even expensive components. Their exclusion is almost puzzling. It almost seems like they’re exluded on some kind of monetary or class basis. E.g. like why would someone that can buy a 1000 USD phone want free radio, they should fork over money to a streaming service and pay big data bucks to a service provider if they want music. Or that wireless is the cool thing (as dictated by Apple apparently), so who would want a headphone jack? These are the basics that I see excluded time and time again. Of course I wouldn’t expect them to go backwards by leaving out the things that they currently get right either, but I wouldn’t be surprised anymore.

Conclusions

I was recently looking to upgrade, to replace my now venerable S5, and yet I can’t find anything on the market that isn’t more of just a lateral move than an upgrade. I could gain in the best case a great new camera and/or 5G data and better basic specs (processor, RAM, storage), but there are a host of things I would be giving up as well, and that just seems so silly. I was a bit tempted by the Oppo Reno 10x Zoom, or the Galaxy Note 9. The Galaxy Note 9 is probably the closest to what I’m looking for, but I would still be giving up the IR blaster and removable battery. I guess it checks the most of these basic boxes, but the camera is indeed a far cry from that on the Oppo. I’m not sure if I should bite the bullet and accept a stupidly flawed new product to get some benefits or if I should reject the decisions of their respective marketing departments and keep rocking the S5 until it breaks or a product that actually checks all these very basic requirements enters the market. Oh, it must also check some additional boxes set my new products, with the 5x optical zooms available now in the Oppo Reno 10x Zoom and the Huawei P30 Pro… that is also something that I would want my new phone to have. If the Oppo had FM radio and a headphone jack, or the Note 9 had that camera unit it probably would be close enough to what I want to get me to give in and buy one. I guess this wasn’t much of a conclusion, but for now I’m still undecided on whether or not to get a new phone. It took them until this year to finally address battery life a bit, maybe they’ll finally get around to hitting up the full feature set to set themselves apart from the crowd of dumb smartphones over the next few years.

Honorable Mentions

CAT S61

It’s almost there, the slightly dated basic specs are forgivable. It’s a unique phone with thermal imaging capabilities, tough build including water and shock resistance, has FM radio and the headphone jack. It’s failings are in the lack of a replacable battery and that the regular camera on the phone is totally unremarkable, and no IR blaster.

Huawei Mate 20

This one is very close as well, perhaps even closer. The main shortcomings here are the unremovable battery, no 5G, and the camera has only 2x optical zoom. Overall not a bad entry though. Again with somewhat outdated basic specs.

Special Note

Saw the announcement for the Samsung Galaxy Note 10, the situation continues to degenerate as it drops the headphone jack, and consequently the FM radio available on some versions of the Note 9 (the ones with the Qualcomm chipset).