Here's The Biggest Failures In The Phone Industry In 2018

There are always winners and losers in pretty much every competition. And it is the same in this industry, which has been massively growing with a ton of innovations and new features introduced every month, from the ubiquitous notch to in-display fingerprint sensor and now the in-display front camera and 5G on the way. However, many promising products even from popular brands in 2018 have failed miserably.

But do you know which are they? Check out our picks of the worst flops in the tech industry in 2018.

RED Hydrogen One Phone

One of the most awaited phones in 2018, the RED Hydrogen One Phone turned out to be nothing but disappointment. Made by RED, one of the most popular camera producers, the phone just didn’t meet up to the expectations which were pretty damn high.

When we first saw the phone, sorely disappointed was what we felt. The much touted 4-View holographic display on the Hydrogen One is by no means a unique feature. However, similar to the 3D recording and 3D displays that were introduced a couple of years back, it is just something that can’t make that big of an impression to widespread. Moreover, this unique effect isn’t applied for every app as you may have to go to a dedicated 4V APP Store to find particular apps that have support for this effect and there are not a lot of them out there.

And as made by the well-established camera maker RED, the Hydrogen One’s camera was also got a lot of hype but also failed miserably as it is nothing more than just an average camera. All of those features were packed in a rather bulky device and a $1,295 price tag which is much higher than the most expensive iPhone XS Max.

Palm Phone

Palm is a phone brand that has been known for its innovative Palm Pre series which got decent popularity at the time.

Palm phone is a very tiny phone that runs Android OS

That is why a lot of people was very hyped about Palm revealing the tiny Palm Phone earlier in the year.

Again, it was turned out be just another disappointment. After trying it out, we couldn’t understand its $350 price tag at all. It is not really a real phone but is more like a companion to the primary phone you are using, and it’s also severely handicapped. The idea of using the Palm phone to cut down the time you spend on your phone is quite absurd. Not only the phone has an amazingly short battery life but also disappointing performance such as poor call quality.

Samsung's smartphones in mid-range segment

The South Korean giant has been releasing quite a few affordable smartphones with a huge sale figure around the world. Even though those devices don’t exactly stand out in the competition but still offer a decent value for the money.

Samsung Galaxy A9 (2018) with a quad camera setup

But in 2018, Samsung somehow messed things up quite a bit. Its new Galaxy A phones lost several cool features that they had last year, water resistance for example. They also didn’t have the excellent build quality like before but they now come with bigger bezels and also bulkier form factors. And besides all of that, these Galaxy A phones were also terribly overpriced.

Not only that, the recent Samsung mid-range smartphones like the Galaxy A9 with a quad rear camera setup was quite a disaster, of course, if you value the camera quality over the others. It is even worse when you take into consideration the value that you can get from smartphones of other popular phone makers like Xiaomi, Honor and OnePlus.

Lack of fast chargers with the crazy expensive new iPhones

The extremely high price tag of the iPhone can be justified by its excellent performance and battery life as well. The iPhone devices also often get new updates for 4-5 years after launched and still run at a decent performance throughout that time span.

And Apple still keeps that going with the latest iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max.

However, paying over $1,000 (or even more in Indian) for a smartphone, we expect it to deliver an excellent in every aspect. And, the iPhone XS and XS Max are indeed excellent phones in most the aspects. However, Apple packs them with a 5W wall charger that takes a good 3 hours or even more to fully charge their batteries. Meanwhile, other phone makers have been offering fast charging tech for a few years already.

Oppo's Super Vooc tech is claimed to fully charge the Oppo Find X's 3,400mAh battery in just 35 minutes

It is just embarrassing that in 2018, there is still a phone with a $1,000 price tag that requires more than 3 hours to fully charge.

The new Android 9 Pie gestures

The new iPhone X’s gesture navigation proved that there is no need to waste the fluidity and space of the experience with buttons, and it also showed that it was possible to implement excellent gestures with smooth transitions. We expected other phone makers and Google to do the same and it did deliver new gestures on the latest Android 9 Pie. However, we were disappointed with the fact that Google delivered very poorly developed gestures.

The new Google’s gesture navigation in Android Pie is not even a gesture interface as it still keeps two buttons, so users still have to swipe and tap which is against the main idea, and it doesn’t save space in the display. Google has to put some more time thinking of what is the best way to develop a gesture instead of rolling out a half-baked one just to follow someone else.

This is the end of our list. 2018 has undoubtedly a hectic and crazy year for the mobile device industry, and there have been a lot of innovative and interesting features unveiled. Next year will also be another busy year with foldable phones, 5G devices launching in early 2019 and the in-display selfie camera which has already been featured in some recent phones like Huawei Nova 4, Samsung Galaxy A8s and Honor View 20.