I was listening to the Android Authority podcast when I heard Joe Hindy (I think) giving one of his usual rants about things. This one was about 'average' phones. Phones have sort of stagnated. I remember the Galaxy Nexus. Wow! A HD TV in your pocket. Granted it was only 720p but it was overkill. And people were debating whether you actually needed this retina-scortching high DPI display.
They don't make phones like that anymore. Now the most exciting smartphone feature is a micro-SD card slot or a removable battery. We've seen everything. Water proofing. AMOLED. QHD. It's just not exciting anymore. And, yes, technically there's a 2160p phone but it runs at 1080p most of the time.
Why do people call 2160p 4K? I mean it makes no sense. You could argue there is 4 times the resolution of 1080p and 1080p is almost 1K. And then 4 * 1K = 4K. Or you could say there's about 4K horizontal pixels. But both of those are really pushing it and I'd say are inconsistent. I originally thought 4K meant about 4000p vertical pixels. But by either logic point 1 4000p would actually be a 16K display. Let's go further. 8000p is 64K. And 64K ought to be enough for anyone.
This got me thinking about OnePlus. I have a OnePlus One. When I bought it I was using a Nexus 4. That was a great device. But it had a problem. It only had 16GB of storage. It was enough especially as I wasn't installing custom roms or using Titanium Backup at the time, but I constantly had to micromanage what apps I had installed.
Then came the OnePlus One. I didn't want to upgrade right away, but I'm glad I did. This phone had 64GB of storage. 4 times the amount on my Nexus 4. And it had a full HD display. This was a big upgrade.
After that OnePlus launched the 2. This phone could not have been more disappointing. It was basically a One with updated specs and no NFC. Oh, and the camera on the back looked like HAL 9000. And OnePlus had the audacity to not only call this a flagship killer, but also a 2016 flagship killer.
And then came the X. Now its specs were even closer to the One. It had SD card support which I guess is reassuring.
The OnePlus 3 announcement is just around the corner. Most of the leaks suggest it will be and updated OnePlus 2 with an AMOLED display. There's nothing wrong with this but I'm really hoping for more. I don't want it to have basically the same specs as my 2 year old OnePlus One. And there are better phones being announced for low prices biweekly. We've already seen the Axxon 7 and Zenfone 3. Both have 1080p displays and 64gb storage options. Even many flagships have 1080p/64gb or better.
This actually reminds me of something else. AMD, the company famous for supporting open standards like async compute, recently unveiled the RX 480. The predecessor, the R9 380, had 2gb and a 4gb vram variants. How much vram does the RX 480 have? 4gb and 8gb.
Although you can technically game in 1080p with 2gb of vram some games may exceed this cap and so people prefer to buy 4gb I'm guessing. Now you could say AMD is pushing VR gaming and that's why they need so much vram. And you wouldn't be wrong.
But AMD also listened to their customers. And their customers said they wanted 4gb of vram. AMD could have easily kept 2gb and 4gb for this year. But they didn't. This is a lot like 16gb and 64gb in phones. Not only did they discontinue the 2gb option that everyone loves to hate, they also gave us the 128gb equivelant: 8gb of vram.
Why isn't OnePlus listening to their customers? That is why I want a OnePlus 3+. I want Carl Pei to pull a one more thing and announce the OnePlus 3+.
More storage, a QHD display, and maybe even a bigger battery. They can sell it for $150 more and people will pay it. Well, that's what I'd do if I was CEO of OnePlus. I would buy this. Because it is truly above average.