[Off-topic] AlkaliV2:
There will be no tl;dr here so if you're not into long rants this may not be the topic for you.

Smart phone manufacturers think we're raccoons. Or idiots. Possibly both. Idiotic raccoons for the purpose of this rant. I liked it when Apple was the only company that made premium but dumb phones. I liked that they only gave users 1GB to 2GB of RAM, because what were they going to use it up on? But now, EVERYONE is doing it. They take whatever level of affordable hardware they can get away with and then wrap it in aluminum/glass and send it out touting refinement of the brand. The only thing they "refined" was their ability to market things that shouldn't even be sold. These phones are supposed to be built by ENGINEERING teams and engineers are supposed to

innovate and solve problems

. And there are plenty of problems with the cell phone that need to be addressed. A few examples:

Texting and driving:

How is safety with these devices not at the top of the list for these companies? People cannot help themselves when it comes to looking at their phones. I did a quick survey of 10 cars coming onto my campus and 4 out of 10 were texting near a crosswalk. 40% as a sample of the population on my campus who would rather look at their phone than look out for people walking or riding their bikes. I guess barreling down the road at 60 mph doesn't give people the thrill it used to so now we're adding the thrill of driving with one hand busy and not looking. What an exciting time to be a pedestrian. For the love of all that is holy in this world use the GPS technology in the phone to detect speeds over 20mph and lock the screen until it stops. And if you need your GPS for directions you open the app before you move and it replaces your lockscreen blocking usage of the rest of the phone. And before someone jumps in here yelling, "government overreach!" cool your jets, there is a reason seatbelts are not an optional feature in your car. The CDC reports that 9 people, per day in the U.S., die because of distracted driving SOURCE: http://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/distracted_driving/. I would bet that a few a of those deaths are people who aren't in the car at all, but walking somewhere and hit by someone who doesn't have the common courtesy to drive like their life, or other people's lives, depended on it.

Texting and walking:

If you do this you're probably going to be hit by the cars I mentioned above.

Thermal Throttling:

A genuine issue with modern smartphone processors. We are to the point where transistor traces are 14nm apart and yet our only method of heat dissipation is the wind. That's preposterous. Engineering majors are required to take thermodynamics and it's because heat is a real issue. But you're telling me that allowing heat to just be carried away passively is the best we can do in a several billion dollar industry? My laptop is 13mm thick and has an active fan when plugged in and a passive fan on battery power with 10 hour battery life pushing 1080P. Smartphone manufacturers just aren't doing it because it isn't sleek and sexy. And why do I think they should be cooled? This thing is supposed to replace every device in my living room and be near me 24 hours a day. Why is is that I get frame rate drops when I'm enjoying one of my favorite games? Oh yeah, it is because my processor decides that it gets too hot and stops running as fast as it was before. Oh, and that "advertised speed" you paid all that money for? Really only reaches its peak when you'e browsing the web or doing less intense activities. If any of our other serious electronics did that, we would throw them out. Your game consoles and desktop PC's run at full speed until they reach their thermal threshold and then shut off. They don't vary their speed in intensive tasks, they go hard until they can't go any further and they shut down. Hell if your microwave changed power settings while heating your dinner and you had to wait an extra 2 minutes to get your food you would have it replaced. In a world demanding more battery life, I demand better cooling and maintained top speeds for CPUs and GPUs while gaming.

Aesthetics:

While I never wanted an Apple phone I always respected that they decided to make an uncomplicated operating system, wrapped in a very professional package and served to the masses as "premium". What I don't understand is why innovation is being stymied in the name of "premium" feel? When people in this forum heard that the new Nexus 6P was going to have the Snapdragon 810 in it, they almost in unison said there was no way they would buy a phone with that processor. In fact, response was so bad that LG refused to put an 810 in any of their devices (bravo!). However, now that the 6P is out and it looks "premium" people are rescinding on their stance about how they won't buy one. It's like a phone being pretty is enough to forgive it for being partly broken on the inside. Now that I've written that, it seems like a deeper human issue, but back on topic we lamented as a community about how 2015 was the worst year for cell phones and that seems to be changing with those same people considering the 6P. And that isn't my only example. let's take the Galaxy Note 5/S6/6Edge+ (now with plus sign!) and pay attention to what they did in the marketing department. 3 phones, identical hardware, different cases. Identical hardware at astronomically more expensive prices because the screen is larger. But the processor in the S6, which came out early this year, is in a device that came out two months ago. How are consumers who have access to this information convinced that these devices are worth more of their money. Samsung just increased their profits because they didn't have to innovate, at all, and just pushed the same old board out with a high-end screen. Example 3!: LG G4 to the LG V10 is going to have the same processor as its predecessor. It is recycling hardware used within the same year by wrapping it in a different shell and calling it "premium." What makes me sad is that people are going to buy it. Probably thousands of people and probably some people who actually already have the G4. It boggles my mind that people see this happening and just jump on the train.

Software:

This is my last piece of rant and then I'm done. Being here I love Android; anyone that knows me knows that. I will defend it and what it stands for until it betrays me in the night and locks my sweet bootloader into oblivion while hiding its source code in the dark shadows of Google's labs. But let's get down to brass tacks: there is only one Android OS and that is pure Android on Nexus devices. If your manufacturer put their name somewhere inside your software you just landed at the mercy of not one, but two teams who decide if you can have access to an open source operating system update. How is it that people are just OK with buying phones that insist the consumer like what the manufacturer thinks is aesthetically pleasing? I thought the whole point of Android was to choose how your phone was supposed to behave yourself? Why is is that we bash Apple users for accepting whatever they are given whenever they can get it and we are stuck complaining about how Samsung/LG/HTC might never release their revisions of Android to our devices? Manufacturers paid for the hardware, they didn't pay a dime for the software other than what they pay their team to change it to their liking and then we are deprived of updates because it is too much work for the teams that they put in place themselves! How hard it is to just develop device trees and pass them to Google so that pure Android runs on everyone's devices? CM does it every new release and people who purchased software from for-profit manufacturers may never see Marshmallow. This is a real problem and I know that circumstances are different but Apple supports devices for an incredibly long time before dropping it from updates. The iPad 2 was released in 2011 and it is getting updates for iOS 9 the same time as everyone else. That is 4 years of support. And the Note 3/4 are one to two years old and almost two releases behind? Software updates should not be sold as a feature (especially not open source software), it is updated to protect consumers and their personal information from being compromised and misused through security patches and release fixes. And no, not everyone can ride the train forever, I get that. But a company dropping support because they didn't think their devices would last 5 years so they didn't hire the manpower to continue making releases sounds like a corporate issue, not a consumer issue. The only thing we can do is vote with our wallets. Oh, and case in point for updates for old devices: Google is dropping support for the Nexus 4 (2012) in Android 6.0 but maintaining security patch releases so people using that device are not left open to security vulnerabilities. If you needed a reason to support a manufacturer, it would be because they support you.

Rant over. I'm just tired of reading the same articles and comments on here, being disappointed by each subsequent phone release, let down by a huge lack of innovation by smartphone manufacturers, and let down by people who continue to be part of the trend and not fight it in some way.

I'm also mad at people who text and drive--cut it out

. If I had an answer to fix all of these things I would post them here, but I don't. There should be a way to change the status quo of the current hardware industry and push them to innovate as opposed to buying into their hardware subscriptions plans. Hopefully you know how much you pay a year to do all that Jump!ing and upgrading of those devices. We're tethered to a yearly fee and we just let it ride.

You don't have to leave your thoughts but I'm open to them. I'm open to your own personal rants about the topic. I'm open to ideas and solutions that haven't been presented and ways to fix things that we know are broken. This community is amazing for that because we have talented people here who aren't satisfied with the idea that what you get is what you are stuck with. They work hard and use their time to make something better. There has to be answers here and a way to fix the calamity that is the smart phone market. /rant