Mobile manufacturers are churning out new models of mobile everyday. New technological barriers are broken. Faster processors, gleaming display, niche looks and often larger display. I wonder if they cared to actually ask the consumer what they want? At least no one ever contacted me despite the fact that I am tired of receiving tele-marketing calls. Not a single call professing to survey for mobile phone features, has been received.
My presumption is there is no survey and phones are being churned out to resemble last successful product(s) but with some hardware changes. Software mostly untouched. A natural corollary would be that success of Samsung and Iphone is more a matter of chance of novelty of ‘touch screen’ than anything substantially material.
Therefore we have decided to document our requirements for a smartphone. Here is the list of expected features:
1. Auto turn-off and on feature. All phones have it but Android lacks it. It is an important feature to sleep well at night.
2. Qwerty keyboard with ergomatic or raised keys making typing effortless. Blackberry presently has the best keyboards. An alternative could be a small bluetooth keyboard.
3. Candy-bar design is best suited for single hand operation. Nokia Communicator type flipper is out of question.
4. No remote control of phone like Blackberry does over the phone features (e.g. Wifi hotspot.) I must know before hand what I am getting for the price paid and what benefits I will get on additional payment/conditions.
5. Proper push mail/ email capable of syncing with all major email providers. If pushmail has less than 5 mailboxes, than an imap client as well. The mail arrangement should be properly integrated in OS and not some tweak third party app as Nokia is doing for decades; and suffered for it.
6. A capable browser able to re-map or re-render the web pages quickly. It would be better if browser splits the lines and start displaying from top above rather than taking time to redraw whole page and show all at once and taking longer time. Re-sizing must not affect the readability. Option of disabling images from automatic loading would be helpful, so would be the switching between mobile/desktop views.
7. Touch screen or a sensitive tack pad (no track ball) to navigate properly.
8. Dual Sim with both working together (no stand-by). It would be preferable if at least one slot is CDMA and one GSM.
9. Two slots for Memory card since one of the card has to act as a hard disk therefore it may be inside the phone and other should be hot swappable.
10. A proper contact sync with Google/yahoo etc. Not with some proprietary owner or desktop alone. Sync should be more intelligent than what Blackberry OS 7.01 has to offer which keeps on repeating all contacts infinite time creating duplicates/triplicates upto any number of times at both ends and is unable to sync without the option of ‘repeat ok’.
11. An FM radio with full APDP i.e. The phone must be capable of rendering the FM signal over bluetooth headset.
12. An efficient task manager. With increase in functions/apps it is necessary to kill background applications to maintain the performance. Nokia’s Symbian and Blackberry slow down to appear frozen and Android simply reboots without any warning. This is irritating.
13. Stereo Music player (with two speakers), apart from playing music must be able to sort music with meta data like album or genre etc. A tag editor to edit meta data would be welcome. Speakers must not be under the phone but remain unhindered even when phone is kept down.
14. Camera must be able to shoot pictures in less lighting. Present trend of 8MP is OK. It would be expected if the camera has an ability to crop and sharpen the pictures and to saturate vividly. If zoom is only digital cropping, it better be not there at all. No second camera for video call needed. But a flash would be welcome.
15. Documents to Go is a good editor but any editor with good capability to open documents is welcome. Though ability to show preview for the purpose of printout out be expected.
16. Any processor with speed of less than 1 Ghz. seems slow. Therefore it must be more than that.
17. Apps must be available for trial. Demo is not enough. The app must be available for trial for few days. This is the biggest drawback of BlackBerry today and is not going away too soon.
18. The size of phone should neither be very small nor very big. Phone that fits into breast pocket of Coat is the ideal size.
What more to ask for? It is unfortunate that there is not a single phone matching all the above specifications. Let me know if there is one. Thanks.
Sandeep Bhalla's Blog 
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If a bald person appreciates the comb, then it has to be special. Thanks. I was expecting you to update any other feature, I may have missed.
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I like this post very much. Thank you.
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