8 useless smartphone innovations that you overpay for

Smartphones are becoming more complicated and more expensive every year. Some technologies are designed to make our lives easier, while others help us sell more devices through smart marketing. The life hacker figured out what innovations do not make the user experience better, so that you do not overpay for them when choosing a smartphone.

1. Record performance of synthetic tests

When announcing new smartphones, manufacturers boast outstanding performance and record results in synthetic benchmarks like AnTuTu, GeekBench and 3DMark. These programs evaluate the potential of the iron, loading it with complex calculations. In theory, the better the results of such tests, the more powerful and faster the smartphone is.

However, in practice, everything is not so simple. Manufacturers often use tricks to achieve impressive performance. For example, smartphones OnePlus, Xiaomi, OPPO and Huawei removed the limitation of the frequencies of the processor and graphics cores in synthetic tests. And although the AnTuTu developers have closed the loophole since March 2019, the usefulness of such benchmarks remains in question.

These programs test hardware under extreme scenarios that are rarely encountered in day-to-day use. Even the latest mobile games do not load the smartphone as much as benchmarks do. It turns out that the potential of the new device can be assessed only a few years later, when more resource-intensive games appear. In addition, the power hanging by a dead weight consumes more electricity than the optimal solution for everyday tasks.

2. Wireless charging

Wireless charging has become one of the trending technologies in smartphones in recent years. The essence of its work is as follows: an induction coil is built into the back of the device, capable of conducting current when placed in a magnetic field. You put your smartphone on a special platform and it charges.

In the future, the technology will eliminate the need for connectors and wires, but now it makes little sense.

Paradoxically, the wireless charging station still requires a cable to connect to the network.

Also frustrating is the lack of infrastructure in public places: in a cafe, you are unlikely to find a table with built-in wireless charging. So you have to carry a wire with you the old fashioned way.

The induction coil takes up precious space inside the smartphone, which could have gone into increasing the battery. Moreover, by passing current, it increases heating, which in theory can reduce the battery life.

3. Curved display

The screen has become the main element in the design of modern smartphones, so manufacturers are trying to attract maximum attention to it. One way to do this is with the curved edges of the display. Samsung was the first to try such a solution, presenting the Galaxy S6 Edge in 2015. Now a similar screen is found in smartphones of almost every brand.

While the curved display looks impressive, it has significant drawbacks: it's much easier to break and harder to replace. The curved edges of the screen also impair ergonomics: sharper edges rest against the palm of your hand, and false positives around the edges prevent you from using your smartphone.

The image also suffers from this. All flexible matrices are made using OLED technology, that is, they are based on organic diodes. These screens tend to distort colors at corners, so don't be surprised by the odd shades on the curved edges.

4. In-screen fingerprint scanner

The biometric sign-in feature has become popular since the announcement of the iPhone 5s in 2013. Manufacturers have been experimenting with the location of the fingerprint scanner for a long time: some placed it at the bottom indent from the screen, someone put it on the back side, others built it into the side edge. Nowadays, most people build the sensor under the surface of the screen - this solution saves space, but it has its drawbacks.

In order to embed the fingerprint sensor into the screen, companies had to abandon fast and accurate capacitive scanning technology (measuring the voltage between different parts of the finger's surface and the sensor). They were replaced by optical and ultrasonic recognition methods, each of which is less perfect.

The optical sensor is like a miniature camera that works through an invisible hole in the screen. To recognize the fingerprint, it needs a backlight, which is why the part of the display above it emits a bright light, which can be annoying in the dark. Optical technology works with a two-dimensional image of the skin pattern, which is why it is the least reliable.

An ultrasound scanner sends sound waves through the screen and registers reflections. This method makes a three-dimensional scan of the fingerprint, which puts it on the same level as capacitive scanning. However, this is the slowest technology of the three. In addition, until now, manufacturers have not achieved its seamless implementation in smartphones - forum discussions of such models as,, and, are full of user complaints about the scanner's operation.

The final argument against on-screen fingerprint sensors is the lack of tactile communication. In the past, the area of the scanner was easy to find blindly, now you have to peer into the screen surface to get into the tiny scanning area. Of course, this is a matter of habit, but nevertheless, the fingerprint sensors in the display are inferior in convenience to traditional solutions.

5. Foldable design

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip with foldable screen

Folding beds are back in fashion. The long-forgotten form factor has become the next round of smartphone evolution, and the design of the new Motorola RAZR and Samsung Galaxy Z Flip is a real delight. Unfortunately, there is a dark side to all of this.

Foldable smartphones have proven to be extremely unreliable.

So, the release of Samsung Galaxy Fold was postponed for six months due to the dying flexible screen. Motorola RAZR and Galaxy Z Flip users also experienced display breakages in the early days of operation. The situation is complicated by the low maintainability and high cost of spare parts.

The devices themselves are also not cheap and start at $ 1,500. At the same time, their characteristics are noticeably worse than those of less expensive models with a classic form factor. Finally, foldable smartphones offer nothing new beyond design. Whether the latter is worth a double overpayment is up to buyers to decide.

6. Tricks with cameras

With the transition to full-screen design, manufacturers are faced with a problem that is not so easy to solve: where to put the front camera. Modern technologies do not yet allow it to be implemented under the screen, so one of the ways out was a moving or swivel front camera hidden in the case.

It turns out to be a funny situation: companies are massively abandoning the 3.5 mm audio jack, justifying this by the lack of space in smartphones, but they are introducing bulky mechanisms and hinges into the design. In addition, mechanical parts become clogged with dirt and are sensitive to falls, which increases the likelihood of breakage.

Another dubious trend is the mindless increase in the number of cameras in smartphones. At first, manufacturers experimented with different focal lengths, complementing the standard lens with telephoto and wide-angle modules. However, in new devices you can find up to five cameras, some of which you most likely do not use.

For example, relatively new smartphones Honor 20, Xiaomi Mi Note 10 Pro and Mi 10 have a dedicated camera for macro photography, the resolution of which does not exceed 2 megapixels, and the quality of the images is as if from 2005. A wide-angle autofocus lens can serve this function, but marketers are more concerned with the number of cameras than their quality.

Also, in smartphones, a depth measurement camera is often found. It defines the boundaries of objects to effectively blur the background. And although neural networks do a good job with this, manufacturers do not hesitate to take up space in a smartphone with an additional module and offer the user a record number of cameras.

7. 8K video

New smartphones have begun to feature 8K video recording. Each frame of such a video is equivalent to 33 megapixels, which is certainly impressive. But if we abstract from the numbers, then we do not get much advantage over recording in 4K. But new problems appear.

Shooting video in 8K is a huge waste of memory, energy and computing resources. One minute of this video takes about 600 MB. The camera image sensor heats up and can fail, so manufacturers limit the maximum length of such clips to a few minutes. The processor is forced to process a huge amount of information in real time, which also increases heating and power consumption.

Maybe the incredible quality of these videos will justify all these sacrifices? No matter how it is.

Resolution is just one of the factors affecting picture quality, and not the most important. Bit rate plays a much more important role, which is determined by the degree of compression. For example, the Samsung Galaxy S20 writes 8K ‑ video at 80 Mbps, which is not much higher than the standard 4K rate of 55 Mbps (and this is with a fourfold increase in resolution). What's more, third-party camera apps like Filmic Pro can record 4K at 100Mbps.

Also, the bottleneck in mobile cameras is the optics, which are not able to provide such a high resolution with the required sharpness. Lenses used in smartphones suffer from high diffraction values, refracting and scattering light passing through them. So a huge number of pixels simply have nowhere to show themselves.

Finally, there are practically no devices with 8K-screens on the market now, as well as platforms supporting such a resolution. Therefore, you will be able to evaluate the resulting video only after a few years.

8.5G ‑ modems

With the advent of fifth-generation networks, it is tempting to buy a 5G smartphone in order to quickly experience the new technology. However, there is no need to rush: although commercial 5G networks have already been deployed in several countries, Russia is in no hurry to launch them.

Adds ambiguity and frequency range situation. There is a possibility that Russian 5G networks will be deployed in a non-standard spectrum of 4, 4–4, 99 GHz or in the range of 24, 5–29, 5 GHz. To work in the latter, you need mmWave support, which is not available in all 5G ‑ smartphones.

Having bought a 5G ‑ smartphone now, you may never try the next generation networks. However, for all current use cases, there are enough fourth-generation networks, especially LTE Advanced.