I’ve been watching movies in the cinema quite often over the past few months and when you are early, you get to sit through tons of advertisements before the movie starts. I wish we got to see more trailers, but I guess those don’t make any money for the cinemas.
Anyway, what I’ve noticed recently is that we get tons of ads for phones. While the selling points of phones have changed over the years, one thing remains – the phone’s camera. However, since we’ve reached a point where our phone’s rear cameras are as good as they can be, the focus has now shifted to the other camera on phones – the front facing camera.
I’m not sure who started the trend, but almost all the phone adverts these days are about their selfie capabilities. It’s like the advertisers are only pandering to the generation of narcissists. What happened to all the other unique features that make a phone great? Battery life, storage, graphics/performance, customization features, UI, security and all would make great selling points. But I guess it wouldn’t pander to the Instagram generation of today.
When I purchase a phone, the last thing I care about is its camera. Because I know that cameras these days have all pretty much reached a quality that is acceptable on most phones. I don’t take many photographs and Instagram filters can salvage my shitty shots into something presentable. Also, if you have a cute subject (i.e. my dog), you don’t really have to try very hard.
Maybe I’m too old (LUL age as an excuse) and I care more about reliability than anything else. The last smartphone I purchased and am currently using is the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4. Why? It has amazing battery life – I can be out all day and using the phone actively and still have battery left to spare by the time I get home. I’m not a fan of lugging power banks around just to make sure my phone still runs.
It is fast – apps run smooth, even multiple apps at the same time with the not too recently added splitscreen feature, and I had no problems with dual-SIM operation (I used to travel a lot for work). The display is standard – nothing to shout about, but it’s large enough to make watching YouTube videos and Twitch streams a pleasant experience. 4G and GPS works well, and there’s a slot for an additional memory card if I choose to use it (64 GB onboard is sufficient at the moment). Oh, it also charges really quickly and looks pretty sleek. And the fingerprint sensor is in my preferred position (behind). With the customizations I made to the launcher so I don’t have to use the default MIUI, it’s the perfect device for me.
I guess I strayed away from the point of the blog post – basically, phones are much more than selfie machines and marketers should think of other ways to sell their phones. If everybody is doing the same thing, nobody is standing out from the crowd – who is going to remember your phone being advertised? The ads are going to continue and I’ll still sit through them, but I’ll finally be excited once they start showing new or different ones in the cinema, until then, I’ll try to arrive just in time for the film.