14. PALM PHONE
So first up is the palm phone which looks suspiciously like an iphone 10 for babies. They're selling this as a companion phone for minimalists. The idea being that you leave your main phone at home and take this tiny little thing with you when you're out and about.
I kind of like this concept of something that can keep you connected without being distracting but this ain't it chief. Aside from the fact that it's almost invalidated by the existence of a smartwatch. It just feels like there's an inherent contradiction here. Because surely as a minimalist the last thing I want is to have to split all my stuff between two different phones plus it's being targeted as a way to get away from your distractions.
But it's still a full android phone. You can do everything. It's just bad poor camera, tiny screen, slow processing and terrible battery life. The consequences aren't major but it's a flawed concept and as a result has kind of disappeared off the radar.
FAIL RATING : 2/10
13.ESCOBAR GOLD 11 PRO
In 13th place we have the myth, the legend the Escobar Gold 11 Pro. A few months ago the Escobar company announced that they were going to sell a gold-plated iphone 11 pro for $499 and without delving into the details of it, they weren't. It's a scam, a scam that we debunked within four days of it being launched after which it very quickly disappeared from their website.
12. LG OPTIMUS 3D
Jumping back a few years, the LG OPTIMUS 3D is one of those devices where you have to say you know fair play you tried on very first glance, apart from the fact that it was a thick boy phone. You might not have even noticed something was a miss. But this was a 3D phone and they really committed to the idea.
It had a 3D display, 3D applications and even dual 3D cameras on the back and this was a fun phone. Like going around taking 3D photos and even 3D videos was an incredible novelty all these years ago. But there were just too many limitations. The second you entered 3D mode, the resolution of the screen would half to get the 3D to work. You'd have to look at it from a really specific angle and I guess more important than any of that there wasn't really much 3D content available.
This phone was almost banking on 3D becoming the next big thing on being able to tap into a flourishing ecosystem of 3D content and to be fair had 3D taken off this phone might well have been a huge hit. But as we quickly discovered from how well the 3D TV revolution went down people didn't really care.
Because
I don't think it was a particularly dumb decision. LG took a gamble. It
just so happened that they took a gamble on the wrong thing.
FAIL RATING : 3/10
11.XIAOMI
All right next up is not a smartphone but it's something that Xiaomi has been doing with their smartphones that I think is a bit shady. So in a lot of markets like India, the competition is furious. Companies just keep releasing device after device, fighting to ever so slightly outspect each other and ever so slightly undercut each other. So with that in mind Xiaomi decided to start baking ads into their MIUI software skin.
The idea being that it gives them another source of revenue so that they can price their devices cheaper and to be honest I don't have a problem with ads. It's how a lot of services are run. It's even how YouTube is run. It's just the fact that Xiaomi didn't tell people about it that's bad. It's crazy, literally full screen ads came out of nowhere. There were ads baked into a lot of the core pre-installed apps even the calendar and the phone cleaner. Every time you installed a new app, sure enough it serves an ad and probably the worst part of the whole thing is that there was absolutely zero quality control.
Also Read : The Real Problem With Android
It's as if Xiaomi just didn't care at all. Some of these ads would try to sign you up for fake scam lottery signs and others were just straight up vulgar. So Xiaomi faced a lot of backlash after this with a lot of people just boycotting the brand entirely and while they have now somewhat dialed back on this the damage has been done.
Actually also I'd be curious to know what your stance is on having ads baked into your software if it meant to cheaper phone. Let me know in the comment section below.
FAIL RATING : 4/10
10. MI MIX ALPHA
On the subject of Xiaomi though late last year they revealed something which we can confidently say the world had never seen. The MI Mix Alpha, a smartphone with a 360 degree wrap-around display and I really do commend projects like this. Stuff like this keeps things exciting. I'm all for it. It's just a shame that for this launch the one thing that Xiaomi couldn't wrap their heads around was how to execute it.
The logistics were all over the place. One of the big Youtuber said, "I got an email actually back in December 2019 asking if I wanted to go hands-on with the phone. I was so grateful for the opportunity but that early hands-on was delayed so many times that it didn't actually happen until the end of February 2020". The film was also meant to enter small-scale production in December but it just kept getting pushed back and pushed back indefinitely. It's not going to come out now. It would get crushed by the Samsung Galaxy Z fold 2.
The other side to this fail comes more from the fact that this is a completely new type of phone. When you're introducing a new product category like this, your one job is to make it clear to people why they would want it. The phone does have really cool potential uses. But Xiaomi failed to communicate them. They talked about how in theory you could run a whole load of apps on the back of your phone. But that's completely pointless when you can just swipe left on your home screen for the same result.
They showcased crazy looking 360 degree battery charging animation. But let's be real having this entire display lit up while you're charging is just gonna slow your charging down. It's super counter intuitive.
Because
naturally a fail like this whilst it's not disastrous. It does somewhat
damaged Xiaomi's reputation as a company that delivers. It means that next
time they announce to the world that we've got something crazy people
are less likely to get excited about.
FAIL RATING : 4/10
9. ONEPLUS COLOR FILTER
In an effort to build a new exciting feature for their flagship OnePlus 8 pro they integrated something called a color filter camera. It was pretty weird. The photos from it were low resolution with strange inverted colors. But it could do one thing. That was kind of amazing. It could see through stuff you could pick up. A TV remote and see the batteries and the entire circuit board inside of it.
Also Read : OnePlus 8T vs Google Pixel 5 - The Brutal Truth.
But the reaction to this feature turns sour pretty quickly when people realize that you can actually see through some items of clothing slight privacy concern. So OnePlus very quickly nuked the feature in some regions and updated it in others so that you couldn't see through stuff. But as well as disabling the best part of it, this fix massively toned down the effects of the already fairly useless color filter camera.Again I think OnePlus handled it well. But at the same time nearly giving millions of people x-ray-like vision, it's quite the pre-nightmare.
FAIL RATING : 4/10
8. 2MP MACRO CAMERAS
As MKBBHD said often, the photos from the macro camera are actually worse than if you just use the main camera and get as close as you can and then crop in. But the worst part of the whole thing is that the companies putting these lenses onto their phones must know that. So this is almost as bad as grabbing your phone getting a permanent marker and just drawing a bunch of fake lenses on the back.
Because they know these macro cameras are completely useless. You can get great macro cameras but if you see one with a 2MP resolution that won't be one of them.
FAIL RATING : 5/10
7. SAMSUNG GALAXY BEAM
All right the general rule with smartphones is if you have a gimmick on top of an already really well-rounded phone then cool that can be a really good way to differentiate yourself. But if that gimmick comes at the cost of other crucial functions, it's probably a no-go and this is pretty much what happened with the Samsung Galaxy Beam.
Samsung made a phone with a built-in projector. You can see why this is cool. It's kind of like how modern phones can cast their screens onto a nearby TV but with that phone you could do it anywhere on any surface. The problem is that having a projector built into your phone is very much a pro feature. It's something that enthusiasts would be willing to pay more for. But no pro is gonna want a phone that's had to have every other component inside of it sacrificed because of this projector.
The Beam was specced like a phone that was already 2-3 years old on release. So understandably no one bought one.
FAIL RATING : 5/10
6. DELL STREAK 5
The Dell Streak 5 was a 5 inch tablet phone which obviously sounds ridiculous. Five inches on a phone today seems micro but this was 2010 when most phones were closer to 3.5 inches and this was genuinely like the galaxy S20 Ultra of 2010. The spec sheet was monstrous. The dell street five was genuinely as exciting as it was surprising and that's what makes its failure all the more of a shame .
Also Read : Samsung MOCKS Apple and iPhone 12
I'd say there's two reasons. One that being this big back in 2010 naturally made it a niche product and two that frankly Dell tried to be a software company. But they're not one. They built a software skin just for their streak devices to try and take advantage of these massive displays. Honestly it just made everything fiddly and pretty ugly. A lot of the icons were tiny little things that were hard to click and they didn't even leave spare room to show the time when holding the phone in portrait.
Also it was running on android 1.6 when it came out which was 3 major android versions behind its time. It's a bit like a brand new android phone coming out today running android 8.0. Except it was worse back then because each new android version brought massive changes. Being on version 1.6, you didn't have access to the Facebook app, you didn't have any flash support and just crucial things like multi-touch support weren't available. The streak was the beginning of the end for Dell smartphones which is a massive shame. It would have been so cool to see what Dell could have done in today's market.
FAIL RATING : 4/10
5. YOTAPHONE
If you've ever used one of those and one that barely uses any power the irony though was that in order to fit these two displays. They had to massively shrink the battery capacity to just 1800 mAh hours which counters the main purpose of that second screen. But the company persisted. They came out with a Yotaphone 2 and a Yotaphone 3 which fixed a lot of these problems. But were just too expensive for something that ultimately was a niche perk.
But it gets so much worse for this company because the Yota company made an agreement with their supplier that they were going to order a large amount of units. It makes sense if you assure your supplier that you're going to order a lot of phones. They'd be willing to give you a better cost per unit but see the Yota company quickly realized that they weren't going to sell as many units as they'd agreed to order. So they very quickly tried to go back on it but ended up getting sued for 126 million us dollars. So they're now bankrupt.
FAIL RATING : 4/10
4.HTC' "REVIVAL"
Now one of the biggest smartphone fails of all time has been HTC. They went from being the maker of the first ever android phone to now having 0.05% market share. It's been this really sad slow decline with each successive flagship becoming less and less relevant.
Now is HTC's attempt at a revival because it got to the stage where HTC was done. The curtains were closed and we finally made our piece with the fact that HTC was out of the smartphone game. But then they posted a cryptic, "Save the date" and the fans, they still had went nuts. This is it. They've done it. HTC is back with a mid-range phone. They released something called the U20 5G which is basically the spec of the OnePlus Nord but for closer to $600 instead of $400.
Also Read : NOKIA is Doing What Samsung and Apple Couldn't
They've teased returns in other regions too. Only to then release a bunch of hyper underwhelming wildfire phones that look like something straight out of 2015. And that is pretty much it. Like don't get me wrong. I would love to see HTC make a comeback. But just because of how far they've fallen behind in terms of software and scale, the ability to place mass orders for components I don't think they've got any chance of catching up. I think they should just steer their focus to other markets.
FAIL RATING : 6/10
3. VINE'S DEATH
Okay let's talk about Vine for a minute. The smartphone focused social media platform where people would share six second looping videos. The reason why I started thinking about this is because TikTok which is literally flown over the last few years is very similar in a lot of ways and yet TikTok was downloaded over a billion times in 2018.
So why did Vine fail even though technically it beats TikTok to this game of super short form video. Well to put it simply, it was out competed. Social media platforms are brutal. As soon as one platform does something that works for its users you can guarantee that the others are either thinking about copying it or actually copying it.
So in this case it was the fact that Instagram which used to be a photos only app at this point started offering video. Video that gave people flexibility to make longer content than just six seconds and video that could take advantage of Instagram's filters. Plus Instagram just had a bigger user base. So if I'm a creator and I can choose to post something on Vine or Instagram, I'm gonna pick Instagram.
And on top of that Snapchat came in with their stories which kind of took over the functionality that vine initially intended to have. This idea of broadcasting snippets of your life to your friends. The final nail in the coffin though was that there was no real way for Viners to make money. See if Vine really wanted creators to come onto their platform to pour their heart and soul into making the most exciting six seconds of people's lifetimes, they need to be compensated for that. Brands would pay Instagrammers for sponsored posts. YouTubers earned ad revenue. But because of how new and wacky the concept of a six second video was at the time, no company felt like paying to sponsor people who made them.
So naturally those creators just moved to other platforms where they could monetize. So the way I see it, the success of TikTok is at least in part because they learnt from the failures of Vine. Vine was like a half-baked idea that TikTok has now executed properly. But in the process of Vine lots of people lost their careers. Lots of people lost a lot of money.
FAIL RATING : 6/10
2.MOTOROLA
Okay let's talk about Motorola. This one almost needs no introduction. Motorola was iconic. Motorola made the first transmission from the moon. Motorola was so ahead of the game that they pretty much became synonymous with the word communication. It really was looking like nobody could stop them. In 2004 they dropped one of the best selling mobile phones of all time, The Razer V3. And just to try and quantify how successful this was this was a feature phone not a smartphone. It sold for $450, the current equivalent of just over $600 and it sold 130 million units. That's as much as the iPhone 11, the iPhone 11 Pro, the iPhone 11 Pro Max, the iPhone 10s, and the iPhone 10s Max all put together.
Also Read : Apple Takes The CROWN From Samsung
It was arguably the first device that made phones not just useful but fashionable. See in 2004 every phone looked like something designed by a geek, practical, plasticky, clunky kind of high-tech looking. But the Razer was different. It was this beautiful aluminium and glass designer piece in an era where there were very few caveats to making your phone slim. You look at this and you look at other phones around at the time, you can see why this was cool.
So how was this giant toppled iPhone. Simple as that the iPhone changed what people thought was cool and so literally within two years of its release Motorola's market share had halved. Within two more years it was just an eighth of what it once was. They've done a lot since then. They've been bought by Google. They were then sold to Lenovo. They came out with a foldable phone but they've not since even come close to the titanic success that they once had.
Motorola really has been an example of hero to zero. But they have started making phones again now and they seem pretty good. So who knows maybe they will rise up the ranks again.
FAIL RATING : 8/10
1. HUAWEI US BAN
In first place then is the Huawei US Ban. This is one of those things that started off as a mess but it slowly got worse and worse and worse. Over the last decade Huawei has very quickly become this powerhouse company. They churned products out at an unbelievable pace and genuinely created smartphones that every year were at the very bleeding edge. Huawei was growing so fast that it looked like samsung was in trouble. Even though Huawei has always had a rocky relationship with the US, their success was so meteoric that it looked like they were going to break into that market too.
Because in 2017 with the Huawei Mate 10 phones, US carriers finally agreed to start distributing them. But then something happened. At the last minute they pulled out ATNT Verizon even best buy all of a sudden announced that they wouldn't sell Huawei devices. Because apparently the US government told them not to. This is bad enough being excluded from quite possibly the most lucrative smartphone market in the world. But then the US government put Huawei onto their entity list which meant that now they could not only not sell in the US.
But that they couldn't do business with any US company. This is not a good bit of news to wake up to. It means no Google. So as you know Huawei phones now don't come with core Google services like Google Maps and Gmail. But it also means that the company that builds Huawei's chipsets, TSMC can't do business with them. That's actually a Taiwanese company but just because some of their equipment is from the US, it still counts.
Let's be very real for a second. If huawei can't source chips, it's got nothing. And from that point it was just this rolling snowball that kept gathering momentum. The Wi-Fi alliance, the SD card organization, they pulled out and apparently 130 companies who'd applied for licenses to work with Huawei, they were all denied. And add to that countries left, right and center started blocking Huawei from having anything to do with their 5G infrastructure because you might know this is actually one of Huawei's main businesses, building networking equipment.
But since the US ban, countries have literally been reaching into their networks and ripping out Huawei components. If nobody comes to their rescue Huawei might only have a year or two more making smartphones. The only potential silver lining is that they may start buying in chips from Mediatek or even potentially Qualcomm.
Now qualcomm is a US company but they recently made a pledge to the US government saying please let us work with huawei. Because if they do that they'll bring more money into the US economy. Plus their justification is also that if qualcomm can be the central component in Huawei phones then in the US's eyes they'll be more trustworthy. But we'll see if this goes anywhere but yeah the Huawei ban has been an absolute tragedy in a lot of people's eyes.
FAIL RATING : 9/10
So let me know your thoughts about this in the comment section below and as always I'll catch you in the next one.....
Peace Out !!!
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