vivo has been ahead of the curve with many innovations in recent years, but has it taken it too far with the NEX 3? A 90° curved waterfall display may look eye-catching, but it comes with compromises. While the tech world clamours over the next innovation, is a screen so curved that there is no space for physical buttons one for which any asked?
https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-vivo-NEX-3-shows-where-Android-OEMs-are-headed-and-it-is-one-that-few-will-want.434886.0.html
Quote from: Redaktion on September 17, 2019, 18:03:41
While the tech world clamours over the next innovation, is...one for which any asked?
On the broader point of technological innovation not following consumer demands, I think it's important to realise a couple of things:
- On a practical level, it's notoriously difficult to figure out exactly what consumers actually want, without significant expenditure - not just in the researching of this information, but the financial risk associated with the downstream costs of effecting the conclusions of such research, which have the potential to become losses if the analysis, or the conclusions drawn from them, end up being incorrect.
- Additionally - and this is probably the more important point - a lot of decisions in terms of technological innovation are subject to many other factors beside consumer demand, which are arguably much more important, such as the state of cutting edge scientific, engineering, manufacturing, financial and even legal considerations.
A good example of these two points is the decrying of smart phones having poor battery life, back in the late 2000's, and early 2010's.
Many people lamented the fact that newer phones weren't able to achieve the weeks long standby time of older ones and this was frequently cited as far and away the most pressing issue in terms of consumer choice, especially when it was considered to be due to the trend for increasingly thinner devices.
The difficulty with achieving this, however, is two-fold, namely that:
- Battery technology has hardly moved in decades, compared to other technologies, mostly as a result of most novel battery technologies having unrealistic manufacturing costs.
- It's far cheaper to invest in shrinking chips and thus power consumption, which has a mature and well understood manufacturing pipeline for future process shrinks, in addition to lowering the base mobile computing cost, which opens up the market to more consumers.
With the advent of fast charging, the majority of complaints about battery life have now mostly subsided and consumers, quite contrary to their earlier stated opinions, now tend to choose their respective devices on the basis of other things, such as high performance cameras (Pixel, iPhone), headphone jacks (Galaxy S, LG G series), UI/OS (iPhone/OnePlus), computing power (iPhone/Galaxy S/Galaxy Note) and, of course, price (OnePlus, Xiaomi).
The other thing to point out is also that thinner devices with higher screen:body ratios have resulted in many new notable technologies, such as underscreen fingerprint sensors and cameras and the focus on developing better display technology has led to increased pixel density and faster refresh rates.
Summing up, while I am all for consumer choice having a bigger impact on producer's decision making, innovative technology products will inevitably pose a challenge for that principle, as they are subject to many constraints and, by their very nature, are quite unpredictable in terms of their actual utilisation by consumers, especially when integrated with evolving platforms, such as Android/iOS.
I don't think this would catch on from the launch of a couple devices...folding, but otherwise largely flat screens will probably be popularized instead.
And the headphone jack, I gotta say this is a strange combination.
This article is wrong on so many counts. Consumers are stupid. They want to be stupid. They want to and will believe any marketing that claims to be about "premium". And they will spend to be seen as premium.
AND FINALLY - they will buy anything that is stunningly beautiful from an aesthetically pleasing point of view. Actually, to be precise, they will buy something f-ugly, so long as you tell them it is beautiful - cue the ugly over-priced electric toothbrush heads with lousy sound quality, called Air Pods, that Apple iSheep stick in their ears. Or ugly iPhones with huge bezels and notches that they keep buying. When Android users have been enjoying non-existent bezels and zero notches (pop up selfie cams GEDDIT?) for a couple of years.
The truth is that this NEX 3 will sell like crazy because its design is beautiful. Why make waterfall screens like these? Because Vivo knows that they can. Because they know that they are the first, as usual. Because unlike the idiots at Apple, real people and not sheep know that leaders never follow and leaders are always first.
With stupid consumers willing to buy phones constructed with glass backs, they break whichever way they fall anyway!
N.B. It is not true that this is just a physical buttons issue. There can be physical buttons on the back of the phone, something LG innovated with years back with the LG G2 and G3, which to me has always been better than any buttons on the sides. When grabbing a phone, the side buttons always get pressed accidentally. But this never happens with back buttons. But why hasn't Vivo done so? Oh yeah, because stupid consumers allow manufacturers to persistently make glass backs - because they are shiny and look nice, despite breaking easily. See my points above.