End Of Smartphone Revolution? The Clone Wars

All of you must have noticed that smartphones nowadays all look and feel the same, provided they’re in a similar price range of course.

- Yetnesh Dubey

The shape, the material used, the camera placement, all these things in every new phone feels just the same. Ask a kid in your house to draw a smartphone without any logo and he will draw a shape that resembles 90% of devices today. And while the hardware in our smartphones has gone above and beyond. The software is still playing catchup. Let’s take a look at all of them.

The Same Smartphone

A smartphone can do wonderful things but only with the right combination of hardware and software. Most devices today already have that. We’re at a point in history where a Rs 30,000 phone will offer exactly the same functionalities as an Rs 80,000 device would. And more often than not, the cheaper one hardly lacks any feature present in the expensive one. The only difference between them is of performance and that too very minimal. The expensive one would be 10% faster in most cases but would cost you an arm and a leg. Let’s understand this by some examples.

Apple iPhone XR is one of the most popular smartphones made by the Cupertino giant. They launched it in September 2018 and since then it has been a best seller for Apple. Even today, the smartphone holds its value amazingly well and sells for more than Rs 40,000.

In terms of performance, it has a great battery and a superpowerful A12 Bionic SoC which is still faster than the top-spec Snapdragon 865+ chips in modern Android tablets and smartphones.

And the only worthy change in the iPhones in recent years has been in the form of software. iOS 14 changed how we use iPhones and added features that were long overdue. On top of that, the software became available not just in iPhone XR but in several iPhones launched prior to it.

Apple iPhone XR proves that since the last two or three years, phone innovation has stagnated. But let’s take another example to further illustrate this point.