Re: Right
Yep, I'd agree with that.
One of the problems I think is that they're not actually improving core functionality significantly, such as battery life. Apple in particular seem hell bent on making thinner and thinner phones, whereas if they made them only a couple of mm thicker they'd be able to radically increase the battery life. And keep a headphone socket. And have slightly better antennas (maybe). And stop them bending if placed in pockets.
Apple taught the money guys that shiny, dysfunctional toys made more profit that boring, business orientated devices. Now that we're all growing up, they're failing to learn that we don't really give a damn about thin, shiny and fragile any more.
The Western mobile phone industry is where the Western auto industry was sometime about the 1970s. Western car companies were hell bent on "sporty" models (hard to believe these days, but so be it), and their engineers were making designs that pleased their engineers. Reliability? Who cares. Economy? Well, that became an issue right enough.
Then along came Toyota and their QFD analysis of what the motoring public actually wanted. And given the size of Toyota today, it seems that what the motoring public wanted was boring, comfortable, functional, high build quality, reliable and well priced. Sporty? Forget about it. Good looks? Largely irrelevant. Badge image? Who cares. Toyota made a large if unglamorous fortune.
Then the American's noticed, and decided to do some QFD analysis of their own. But they cheated. QFD is largely a semi-objective way of teaching eager engineers that the majority of the market doesn't share their dreams at all, and that they'd best just get down to the boring stuff like making it reliable, durable, etc. You have to be in the right mindset to believe the result and accept it. The American car makers weren't, and screwed up again. Toyota and the other Japanese auto makers got even bigger.
I think we're basically in the same place with mobiles. I think the first company to make a proper slab of a phone with a bigger battery, slightly smaller screen, a lack of fragility with a heavy emphasis on security updates and reliability and less emphasis on compute performance, continual software design revolution and service lock-ins could do very well. It's more or less the opposite of what everyone is making in the West, but that might just turn out to be what the customers actually want.