And yet, we are approaching the day very soon where there's no point in getting the next year's flagship phone. It's not faster. It's not better. It doesn't have a better battery. The camera's not going to get any better. It's going to be the same form factor.
At some point phones will stop charging ridiculous amounts of money for 128 GB of RAM, when a terabyte of storage is approaching $50 in retail cost.
More ports SD card. I can see all of it coming back on the table. Cuz you're going to want features if you get a nice phone.
It will certainly be interesting to see how the manufacturers continue to find ways to differentiate themselves. Right now, unsurprisingly, all the hype seems to be focused around AI. So possibly future phones will be ruthlessly optimised for running LLM models. But if, instead, the phone manufacturers just decide to use cloud-hosted AI (or if the hype around AI dies down), then they'll need something else. The foldable form factor is the only other one that occurs to me right now.
What I do wish is if somebody at least made is a USB C phone dock similar to what Apple made for 30 pin and lightning iPhones with audio out jacks. There are dongles that let you charge and do audio out but not in nice dock form.