Many companies have tried making slightly thicker phones with bigger batteries (which many people claim is what they want), no-one buys them. Companies make thinner phones, lots of them get sold.

These companies (mostly) aren't idiots, they do huge amounts of measurements on what people say they want to buy, and what they actually buy.

I always claimed I wanted qwerty keyboard. now blackberry finally has a phone with it that is not selling. the priv.

well, while id kill for a keyboard on android, I'd also need a non-phalet size and open firmware. so I continue to use my keboardless motoX developer edition first gen.

nobody buys phones for one feature. you cant add a thick battery but sel a device with 300x200 screen, which was the case I think you're talking.

I found the Bold keyboard to be fantastic. I could type 60 wpm without looking at the phone.

I found the Droid keyboard to be terrible and unusable.

Not all keyboards are the same, but I do know the best-possible keyboard experience can be far better than the Droid (or any iPhone I've used).

Barebones BB Curve 9310 user here for ~4 years and counting, which replaced a Treo 755p when seemingly everyone had iPhones back in uni. Been meaning to purchase a spare for when this one inevitably hits the pooper. Battery obsolescence is my biggest sustainment worry. QUERTY keyboard requirement has made me a perpetual mobile luddite.

Definitely feels like the last man standing now that our senior-most engineer's wife forced him off his flip phone this past Christmas. Personally don't know anyone who doesn't own a smartphone these days...lonely world.

But few want to pay more for leg room. It's just not much of a benefit compared to the five things I mentioned (and several others like comfortable lounges at hubs -- but not apparently decent food). The airlines want to sell leg room because it's very easy to adjust.

Not that it's on the way to many other countries...

Basically, the problem seems to be that the USA does not have "sterile transit"; if your plane stops there in the way to somewhere else, you have to disembark and go through customs, and you need an expensive visa.

There are no other flights directly between Asia and Latin America (unless you count the EK GRU-DXB flight), though NH may be flying to MEX soon.

On my most recent trip to the US I selected cities that I could get between via train to avoid the entire mess apart from arrival into the US (and made an effort to depart out of Canada).

Among a wide variety of industries, a large portion of revenues come from "upsales", pushing some impulse buys extra like insurance. Which is to say that the impulse buy extras are shitty ripoffs and consumers over time have grown to expect promises to be worthless and to only pay for things they can clearly verify.

And that relates to selling cellphone with longer battery life - all the companies make unrealistic claims, how could someone feel safe giving up something that can see (like a feature or a smaller size) for something they can't see?

I think the airline market hardly ever offers real choices and many things that look like choices end up actually being the same flight sold by different carriers from the same alliance. Alliances are a huge pet peeve of mine anyways. There are certain (US based) airlines I strongly dislike and would like to avoid. However, it's almost impossible. Even if I book another carrier the flight often times end up being operated by them again. Sometimes it gets changed after I book. This is a dysfunctional market. I want Delta and United out of business and I've had the same from others. Yet we are all stuck flying them because we can't avoid it.

Want +3in legroom? For each flight, go to a flight forum and punch in the route to figure out what plane they're flying. Google the airline and that plane to figure out how much legroom is available.

Give up and just fly jetblue and/or southwest, and if they don't go, decline to travel.

1. Flightaware

2. Seatguru

3...

4. Comfortable flying

(Step 3 is becoming a millionaire that flies business class.)

I'm glad Apple didn't go in the same direction and released the iPhone SE, but even they were surprised by the demand for it:

http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/04/26/apple-faces-constr...

That said, i wonder how much the "big phone" issue comes from the paradox of wanting slim phones (needs to fit those jeans after all) longer battery life (Wh pr volume is largely a fixed value based on battery chemistry). Stretching the phones on the X and Y then allows a bigger (Wh) battery to be installed.

Never mind that they can also then market it with a higher screen inch number...

On top of that you have things like store commissions, carrier subsidies, and who knows what else, going on between the OEM and the end user that affects the choice of model.

One relative of mind went from a small featurephone to a large smartphone, because another relative had gotten the same one. This with the idea that said other relative would be "tech support".

Big box stores are usually brightly lit (which is usually compounded by having all the light-emitting TVs next to each other, whatever their brightness setting is); human perception of color is strongly influenced by background, and in that environment not having a set configured at the brightest makes it looked dull and washed out rather than seeming like accurate reproduction of color.

This is, of course, very different from what looks good in typical use conditions.

Or, if you could remove battery because of lowered power consumption of components (and then make the phone smaller) just Keep the battery the same size.

I would not bet anything on phone companies marketeers ability to run multi-dimensional hypothesis tests on the market. And I do actively doubt they have any intention to, given the opportunity cost they'll pay at the beginning of such test, and how long the test results will probably stay valid.

The idea that the Market is an all knowing beast always operating at maximum efficiency is hilarious.

I'm yet to see a person who'd say "You know what? It would be cool if the new phones had heart-rate sensors.". It's always "oh, they put a heart-rate sensor in that phone, cool.". Driven by what manufacturers do, not what the consumers want.

Also the fact that people end up buying something different than they were initially requesting doesn't help to put more weight on their suggestions. But if you don't hear people asking for features, you're not listening all too closely.

Before that I owned every Droid qwerty slider including the elusive Droid 3. I love the form factor mainly because once extended the phone becomes a very natural reading/typing device not unlike some of the early PDAs. The keyboard was getting better with each iteration and Droid 4 was probably the best phone I have ever used for remote management with the row of dedicated numbers keys. We have all lost something when qwerty sliders faded out of the mainstream.

The closest thing I've seen is the S7 Active. It looks good, but I'm on T-Mobile, so it wouldn't be a great idea to get one.

I haven't seen a market that's more driven by what is being put for sale than mobile phones. People don't choose shit, they pick from the few somewhat cost-effective options that are available any given year.

I doubt the technology to have higher density and more energy efficient battery is far off, but I fail to see any report of mass manufacturing of these, only article about new technology advancement in labs. And if there is no incentive from buyers (the device manufacturer) for better parts (in this case the battery), then the alternative is just have something that is good enough and that won't be dwarfed by the competition.

Also, when buying a smartphone, they rarely think "I should go for the uglier one, with a bigger battery", but after they notice how often they run out of battery, they'll buy an external one.

We can only guess based on what we hear. Cell phone manufacturers have a lot more data than we do and they keep going for thinness, so I have to imagine there's a demand for it.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that most consumers prefer battery life to thinness in surveys and polls but actually wind up buying the thinner phone when presented with actual hardware. Thinness is easy to see. If you're comparing phones in a Best Buy, the thinner one might feel more modern and impressive. Battery life is a hard feature to demo in that environment.

In other words, maybe the average person only wants battery life in the abstract, but opts for thinness when making a purchase.

I've never been asked which political candidate I prefer, but I see polls on the news every night.

I worry about this being "data driven design", where X sells so lets try X+1. Problem is that phones do not sell on their own. Most customers buy them with some plan attached, meaning they often grab what gets the biggest carrier subsidy (or whatever gets the seller the biggest commission).

That or they get whatever their neighbor/relative/coworker/friend has.

There are a whole pile of perverse incentives between the OEM and the users that may or may not show up in the data hitting the meeting room table.

And i seem to recall the stated surprise for BB was how much of the iPhone was battery.

Sales seem to prove otherwise

> Can you imagine what an annoying hassle it would be to have to pair and unpair the same bluetooth headphones between two devices like that?

Bose seems to have come with a solution to avoid un-pairing and re-pairing: https://www.bose.com/en_us/products/headphones/over_ear_head...

> I don't want to have to get new ones, and I don't want to have to carry around a stupid lightning adaptor for them

Well, you can always not upgrade, or purchase a phone that has a 3.5mm jack. If enough people feel the same, manufacturers will continue to produce compatible products.

I suspect that (outside of HN), you're in the minority, however.

> Sales seem to prove otherwise

I'm not sure that sales have proven that people prefer a thinner phone. I know that when I buy a phone, I never look at the thickness specs, just at the height/width. My phone could be another few mm thicker and I wouldn't notice or care -- it would still fit in my pocket either way.

I may end up buying the thinner phone since it has more of the features I'm looking for, but not because it's thinner.

"Manage your headphones with an app" still sounds like an annoying hassle to me. Even if it works seamlessly, it's still a far cry from hot-plugging at will.

What do you use? I also buy $20 totally off-brand Bluetooth headphones (I wear them while exercising, and sweat ruins them every few months), and mine don't have this feature, which I would love.

Once data has to be transmitted wirelessly, there is a much better chance that you will do it in ways that can't be pirated, but can be controlled, monitored, and profited from.

Once all the necessary pieces are in place to decisively force it on the consumer, why wouldn't they try again?

If there's a USB port, most people will just plug in and back up to their computer. But if they do it over wireless, they'd just rather use Google / Apple's services, which means they get your data.

And with movies, there's the ridiculous HDCP crap... and I highly believe that the MAFIAA would give manufacturers with a fully protected AV path cheaper licensing.

> it must not transmit high definition protected video to non-HDCP receivers; and DVD-Audio material can be played only at CD-audio quality[7] by non-HDCP digital audio outputs (analog audio outputs have no quality limits)

Analog hole is still analog hole, and the MAFIAA wants to close it.

1) Multi-channel streams are easy to grab in digital, but expensive to grab in analog - simple reason: six channels that have to be captured in exactly the same time, without offset. Most consumer-grade sound cards only carry one line-in, not three of them.

2) Power supplies in computing tend to be NOISY. I mean, REALLY noisy. So basically the PSU adds noise to the output DAC, and then the PSU adds noise at the ADC stage. It most definitely is a quality loss.

3) Naturally, headphone-outs and in a lot of cases line-outs tend to be engineered in a way that their output impedance can drive headphones, too. This can massively distort the signal.

4) Clipping. Hard enough to avoid when using a professional mixing table, next to impossible to avoid when ripping audio via the analog hole.

It's also somewhat poorly-defined, because "CD quality" can mean lousy mid-range performance when rounding 24-bit to 16-bit, or high frequency hiss when noise-shaping 24-bit to 16-bit.

So "CD quality audio" is quite a degradation when you listen in a 100% quiet room with expensive speakers and your full attention.

I, for example, can hear these ultrasonic weasel defenders, which operate between 20 and 30 kHz, again - when I used to work on outside construction works using massive jackhammers, excavators etc. I couldn't because daily stress would fuck up my ears.

It's more likely that the sound produced by those devices, even if ultrasonic, may produce intermodulations in the audible range.

> The commonly stated range of human hearing is 20 Hz to 20 kHz. Under ideal laboratory conditions, humans can hear sound as low as 12 Hz and as high as 28 kHz, though the threshold increases sharply at 15 kHz in adults, corresponding to the last auditory channel of the cochlea.

(ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_range)

Not having an analogue hole would be a right royal pain in the arse.

[edited to fix my english]

I guess a lot of newer cars have bluetooth pairing, but mine doesn't.

Further, a lot of the anti-piracy impulse is not simply a desire to charge get more money from everyone but a desire for control. Essentially, the music industry is reconciled to most people paying little for their music (or better yet, most people forced to hear advertising mixed with their music) but the industry want to have the ability to sell to people at a variety of levels. Perhaps charge more for just released music or certain artists or music connected to movie sound-tracks or for "audiophile level" audio or whatever.

For a commodity that's infinitely reproducible, the ideal position is being able to separately charge each consumer exactly what they're willing to pay. Maximum utility for the owner, which would imply minimum utility for the buyer.

  what an annoying hassle it would be to have to pair and
  unpair the same bluetooth headphones between two devices

That said, such headsets are pretty rare and command a surprising premium for what looks like a purely software feature.

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jabra-Easygo-Bluetooth-Headset-colo...

For example, I absolutely love thinner phones. I cannot revert to thicker ones after each time I switched to thinner ones. I guess my experience aligns with the majority of the consumers, but I do not know.

I totally respect Apple's (or any smart phone manufacture) decision, they certainly know much more than me on how to cater millions and billions consumers.

Why don't you just watch the video on your laptop? Even with a simple 3.5mm plug, moving the headphones over sounds like a lot of work for something that you can just do on the laptop.

Even if your friends send you an SMS with the video, there are plenty of ways to get an SMS on your laptop.

Perhaps the videos aren't reachable via his work network, or the OP doesn't want his "work" to know what's being viewed at the office? I'm sure there are other reasons to use a cell network (which is the assumption).

For this I just connect my phone to my computer so that all audio comes out of my laptop.

This regularly happens to people who sit near me and use bluetooth headphones. It is pretty awkward when they are listening to pick-up artist tutorials on Youtube.

And should I exhaust their (measured, actual) 22-hour battery life, they can be used in wired mode, as well.

Apple earbuds aren't 'nice' headphones.

On the UI side just need the OS to present local bluetooth devices as output options, just like they switch to usb/hdmi/internal/headphones

It's too bad, especially since the SRS-X3 was not a cheap purchase. And NFC speaker pairing is all sorts of cool. But music that stutters constantly? The crappiest $2.50 earbuds you can find make for better listening than that.

Less problems with CyanogenMod 12 and 13's stack, though.