- mobile mp3 player sales are low unless disk and battery life are greatly improved
- large display touch screen phone market is small unless someone solves the "app problem"
- smart watch market is tiny if exists at all unless someone makes one that is useful and has improved battery life
The breakthru that made touchscreen phones works wasn’t an app ecosystem. That came after people were already crazy about iPhones. It was capacitive touch screens. Basically everything before was resistive touch, which is why they usually had styluses. Getting touch, and really multi-touch, working well was the game changer that redefined cell phones.
In other words, if they made the battery last twice as long it'd still be equally as annoying (since your daily routine would be nearly the same, except now you also need to remember if it's a charge day or non-charge day).
To be fair maybe 3/4 days buys you some convenience. But anyways charging once a day is a reasonable place to get to, to get something better would require at minimum a 3x improvement which probably means a ground-up rework instead of continuous refinement.
A battery band might get you there but I suspect it'd be too clunky. At best Apple may redesign their watch to support a battery band and allow 3rd parties to make them for folks that need weeks of battery life.
Especially considering how useful sleep data is, then I was surprised to see they're only getting sleep scores now.
My dirt cheap Huawei watches have had this for years. It's accurate enough (my own perception based on use). And I get a weeks battery life too (although I don't have the distracting fancy notifications perhaps). It does check blood oxygen levels, heart rate, stress etc.
I truly thought this was a solved problem (looking at headphones battery life, although I might need to check my assumptions here also apply to Airpods).
From Google's official Pixel 9 Pro Fold handling instructions: (https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/15090466?hl=en#...)
> Flexible screens are softer than traditional phone screens, so avoid contact with sand, crumbs, *fingernails* and sharp objects.
I'm sure that if Apple invented the exact same thing in the exact same way, it would have been the "greatest thing since sliced bread".
For those that are not chronically online, a mobile phone from a decade ago has everything they need. If you only have to phone the family, WhatsApp your neighbours, get the map out, use a search engine and do your online banking, then a flagship phone is a bit over the top. If anything, the old phone is preferable since its loss would not be the end of the world.
I have seen a few elderly neighbours rocking Samsung Galaxy S7s with no need to upgrade. Although the S7 isn't quite a decade old, the apps that are actually used (WhatsApp, online banking) will be working with the S7 for many years to come since there is this demographic of active users.
Now, what if we could get these people to upgrade every three years with a feature that the 'elderly neighbour' would want? Eyesight isn't what it used to be in old age, so how about a nice big screen?
You can't deliberately hobble the phone with poor battery life or programme it to go slow in an update because we know that isn't going to win the customer over, but a screen that gets tatty after three years? Sounds good to me.
I have several apps that no longer work on my otherwise good phone bought in 2018 because I can no longer update the OS that they require.
Edit: This is a honest question.
It's small, has dual sim card sockets, and a headphone jack.
I'm not sure how I'd replace it to be honest.
Because there are very cheap, lightweight adaptors to headphone jack from USB-C.
The S7 you mention lasted 4 years, and received the last patch in 2020.
Not convinced that doing online banking on a phone that hasn't had software updates for 5 years is a good idea.
A lot of us the techies can be strong-armed via FOMO and other tropes but good luck convincing the elderly neighbors.
