Samsung’s Galaxy Note 8 flagship phone may be representative of the “peak smartphone” phenomenon, writes Peter Vogel. (Samsung Electronics)
Remember the term “peak oil”? That was some years ago, before fracking led to ever more oil and gas finds, although not without controversy mind you. Get ready for another “peak” term: “peak smartphone.”
It seems that the makers of top-flight, so-called flagship, phones are running into the “peak smartphone” phenomenon. Whether it’s price or just an overwhelming number of features that is driving resistance in this space isn’t yet clear.
Perhaps it’s a combination of the two. The flagship phones all have multiple cameras, they take stunning photos, they have various security features, and they even make decent phone calls. But that thousand-dollar price point is driving resistance.
I was a relative latecomer to the mobile phone scene, going through a couple of iterations of Blackberry devices when the company behind them was still known as Research In Motion.
Then came an introduction to the nascent Android operating system, thanks to winning a contest in the early days of social media. I had spotted a post about a mobile phone giveaway, requiring an entry through Twitter. The nature of the entries and their associated hashtag made it possible to see all the entries, and even though the contest was national there were fewer than 10 entries!
Right away I was hooked on the relative freedom of the Android-based Samsung Galaxy SII I had won. I kept using that phone until it stopped working. Its one last gasp allowed me to retrieve a token $15 worth of Bitcoin that had been put on the phone as part of a teaching exercise in 2015.
My Galaxy SII died just after Samsung released what is arguably the best smartphone on the market today, and, coincidentally, just as the value of Bitcoin peaked. That $15 had grown to become almost enough to purchase the Samsung Galaxy Note 8, the popular phablet successor to fire-prone Note 7. Thanks to the CRTC there was also deregulation in the mobility space, and, again coincidentally, there was a price war in progress for big-data packages.
I bought the phone from Freedom Mobile (they were including a package of no-charge add-ons), and then walked the 25 metres to the Telus dealer to activate the phone on the $60/10gigs package being offered as part of the price war. I could have activated the phone with Freedom but that company still has a way to go with its LTE coverage across the Lower Mainland.
A little over six months later I can’t see myself using any other phone. The device simply handles anything I can throw at it. The speed is blazing, its management of open tabs or windows is outstanding, the battery life is superb, the screen is glorious in all conditions, and, yes, that curved edge is indeed useful!
Then there is the wireless charging. Slow, to be sure, but always complete overnight. My unit has never had a single wire or cord plugged into it!
Tops for me, though, is the S-pen, the Samsung pen that is stored within the body of the phone. I use this pen about 75 per cent of the time that I am using the phone. It is used for screen captures, quick edits of photos, capturing text from within images, and adding markups to images.
I make a lot of social media posts, to Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook and the like. The S-pen makes it easy to grab a screenshot to accompany such posts. Any other way is just more time-consuming. I also use the S-pen for texting and even for writing portions of this column.
As with all flagship smartphones, the camera (two cameras actually) in the Note 8 is outstanding. It has led to me using my bigger DSLR dramatically less. This Note 8 camera performs very well under all sorts of lighting conditions; recently I used it to photograph an ice crystal halo around the sun and later that day some Canada Day fireworks. And all in auto mode.
For me the Note 8 typically lasts all day on a charge. On a few occasions where I had made use of extended video recording, the battery was beginning to run down by the evening. The Samsung software took over and began optimizing anything that was running, eventually even switching operating resolution and available colours, all to avoid the phone shutting down.
It is difficult to envisage what Samsung will do to improve on the Note 8. The “9” should arrive this fall. There is talk of a Bluetooth S-pen, maybe incremental improvements to the camera, and perhaps a marginally bigger battery.
Let's face it, the market for $1k+ smartphones is a small percentage of the overall mobile phone market. And replacing such a device every year, on an outright purchase, is just not fiscally sensible.
Are we at “peak smartphone”? I suspect we are, at least until 5G technology makes an appearance in North America.
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It seems that another round of Internet service price wars has erupted in the Vancouver area, with the two major players – Shaw Communications and Telus – announcing 300 megabit per second service at heavily discounted introductory prices. More on this in a future column.
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