Originally Posted by
PTravel
Hardly subjective. Display size, resolution, pixel density, color gamut and gamma are all readily quantifiable, just as with any electronic display medium.
Display size is objective; what display size is
better is very much subjective. Scroll up to all the complaints about typical flagship-size phones being too large for some folks' pockets, if nothing else, or longer ago the "this is too large for one-handed use."
Resolution is objective (as is pixel density, which is of course just resolution / size); whether there's any advantage for a given user to any given increase in resolution is subjective (and higher resolution has costs in both performance and battery life, all other things being equal.)
Well, that sounds, at least to me, like the Apple philosophy, isn't it? "Everyone works the same way?" The issue isn't whether a phone "works" but whether it works the way you want it to.
(underlining mine)
Yes, absolutely; OTOH, this was a direct response to
wco81 who assumed that everyone within some assumed demographic of Flyertalk worked in such a way that a flagship phone was both advantageous and advantageous enough to actually justify the higher cost.
I'm not sure what you mean by "modem." Digital phones don't have modems.
"Modem" is a term, in this case, for the subsystem that talks to whatever subset of LTE/UMTS/CDMA/GSM the phone talks to. I would normally say "radio," but was using
wco81's choice of terms since it was a direct reply to them.
My Note 8 has a Gorilla Glass display, which most certainly is not super-fragile. In fact, my Note 8 is the first smart phone I've owned for which I have NOT purchased a case. I don't know where you're getting this.
I don't have an opinion of the durability of any of these phones; I just have an observation that a huge number of phones I see out there immediately go into cases. I haven't counted to be sure it's a majority, but it's a very large minority if not.
Well, there you go again with the "most people" standard. I suspect most people don't need more than 4 gig for their desktop or laptop. I edit video and audio and do lots of graphics, frequently at the same time. I need the 32 gig that's in my primary home machine. Flagship phones (or desktops or laptops) are not intended for "most people," but for people who need the power and features, which is why they have better specs.
That's not how they're marketed (here in the US, at least): Apple and Samsung and to a lesser extent other manufacturers try very hard to create the assumption that their main flagship models of iPhone and Galaxy S respectively ARE the mainstream options for most people. The Note series, and now the iPhone X are somewhat exceptions to that.
...and again, you're interjecting into a direct response to
wco81 regarding an assumption of what most people
on this thread/Flyertalk are likely to need. My use of a smartphone is likely more modest than many here, and heavier than others -- but for the former part is in part because I've got a tendency to move tofull-size computers (although 4GB is a miserable experience on Windows these days; 8GB really should be the bare minimum even for light users.)
As I said above :
There's a continuum, from the $40 subsidized budget phones, to absurdities like the iPhone X. There's no one value proposition that will be best for everyone. For me, as I've said up-thread, midrange Android phones have offered the best value for some time, but that isn't intended to say that they're going to be the best value for everyone or even necessarily anyone else.
Far be it for me to tell anyone else (or at least anyone other than folks in my family where I'm the one paying for their phone) not to get a higher-end phone. Or a lower-end one.
The general trend on all phones is away from interchangeable batteries, for which only time will tell whether that's a good thing or not. My Note 8 doesn't have dual SIM, but I can't think of any reason I'd need it. When I travel internationally, it's easy enough to put in a local SIM, which is what I do. It does have support for a microSD card. You may be thinking of Apple, which has dropped support for wired headphones, a huge mistake in my view in that Bluetooth, being an inherently compressed and lossy digital transfer medium when used for audio, can never provide HD audio or anything close.
Not everyone is going to care about every feature; that's a major advantage of Android -- because there are a lot more options.
As for Bluetooth, plenty of Android phones offer aptX which is a lossless compressed format and supposedly much better than the native BT codecs. For that matter, bluetooth EDR (at short ranges and with a strong signal, which should be the case between one's pocket and a headset) has plenty of bandwidth for CD-quality uncompressed audio (~1.5Mbps out of a ~2Mbps practical limit on Bluetooth EDR) or FLAC. I have no idea if Apple has licensed aptX, or if they've got their own better codec, but it's certainly not implausible.