give up what we don’t need

This week I had the chance to review the CMF Phone 1, a phone that made me think a lot about what I need in a mobile phone and what I can give up to lower the cost of future phones. Note that I am a power user, a photography enthusiast and a gamer on my mobile phone, so I am not target this type of cheap phones.

However, phones for 200 euros are mass phones. For users who want a mobile phone to make calls, surf the Internet and take decent quality photos in a timely manner. In recent years, the market has punished this type of buyer: below 200 euros, almost everything is a wasteland of processors that will agonize after a couple of years, cameras and components of very low quality.

This could encourage buyers to opt for a new mid-range car. One that already costs around 300/500 euros, and in which I usually see some features that could be done without.

Plastic mobile phones have no problems. If plastic is well processed, it has important advantages over glass. Resistance to impacts, breaks, scratches, the ability to avoid fingerprints… A large number of users end up putting a case on their phone, thereby negating the aesthetic advantages that choosing other types of materials may have.

The middle class sometimes tries to approach the more premium range of materials. This is a legal practice, but it significantly increases the final cost.

Ultra wide-angle camera. This is probably the most controversial point in my thoughts, as it depends entirely on personal taste and usage. Here I rely on both my experience and the experience of most users who write to me and with whom I communicate in everyday life.

The ultra-wide angle is almost forgotten, and I know users who have used it only a couple of times to test it. This sensor is always the smallest and therefore the weakest of the photographic set. The low quality, and the fact that the phone’s own camera is already wide-angle (24 mm in most modern mobile phones), does not make it all that attractive to use.

Ultra-fast charging systems with the appropriate charger. Since fast charging is one of the main features of the phone, I think it is necessary that the charger is included in the box. There is not much point in selling the phone with the best 240W system on the market, and the buyer has to make a living and buy the official charger, since no one else will charge it at that price.

In more modest mobile phones with charging power from 30 to 70 watts, the situation changes. The Power Delivery standard is usually more than enough to achieve these figures, and at the moment almost everyone has a C charger at home, which is enough to charge a modest mobile phone.

Fingerprint scanner under the screen. Mobile phones costing over €2,000, like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold6, have a side-mounted fingerprint scanner. There was a time when most of them did. Under-screen fingerprint readers are standard, but having rear-mounted readers (to be more accessible to both right- and left-handed people) is perhaps an idea we shouldn’t give up on.

We all want support, but there are factors to consider.. Support is also paid. Six years of waiting for the phone manufacturer cannot be free. We all want the mobile phone to be updated as long as possible. or not.

There are many users (non-nerds and non-software savvy) who consider updates to be of absolutely secondary importance. In fact, some prefer not to update their mobile phone so that “everything can continue as before.”

In addition, we must remember that updates are not always good, especially on underpowered phones. Android versions are always designed with the latest hardware in mind. Updating a phone with outdated hardware can be a good thing, or it can be a terrible idea.

Image | Hataka

In Hataka | Big manufacturers have big profits: nothing has broken the market for cheap mobile communications with CMF Phone 1.