In 2015 I saw a ton of great smartphones hit the market; so many, in fact, that it’s getting harder to pick something you will regret. And yet whenever I receive a new smartphone to review, I feel like I'm always able to find a fault or major tradeoff that's been made. I see phones with really nice bodies and powerful hardware that fall behind on battery life. I see great cameras in phones with terrible camera apps. I see stock Android in phones with no expandable storage. I see big batteries in phones with mediocre processors.
There have been some smartphones that have come close to exactly what I want in a daily driver – the Google Nexus 6P, Apple iPhone 6s and Samsung Galaxy S6 are all great examples – but I’m yet to see the elusive ‘perfect’ device; the phone with no compromises in hardware or software. And after everything I’ve seen over the past year, and considering what tech we can expect in 2016, I truly believe it’s possible for a company to produce an ideal, perfect smartphone this year.
In this article I'll go through every aspect of the modern smartphone and list exactly what I want to see, with every aspect of the hardware and software firmly grounded in reality. This means no next-generation lithium-air batteries or desktop-class graphics processors: sorry everyone, but these features are still many years away. This is a smartphone that should be possible to create, and something I would absolutely love to see hit the market.
