I'm convinced that tech reviewers live on a different planet than us. They're always fretting over trivial things that would be nice to have but far from dealbreakers for the average person and then ignore or barely mention the stuff a regular user would need

It absolutely discusses phone size - in some detail both in the intro and as part of the reviews.

Yeah. Unfortunately there's not much to chose from. They're all huge glass slabs without ports nowadays.

Part of the issue is that the biggest smartphone manufacturers are all sister companies to each other. Oppo, OnePlus, xaiomi, they're all different companies under the same banner, so they're bound to share hardware specs and manufacturing.

Personally I think nothing phone is the only phone brand that's innovating on design with the candy bar style phone, but even that's hard to justify. Samsung has been repeating the folding phone designs and refining them year after year and Google has been pretty lazy with the pixel phones in regards to hardware.

It's a weird time for smartphones, can't push more power without destroying batteries, can't really innovate with batteries because we've hit a wall that only software can help mitigate. Not only that's we all apparently want bigger and bigger phones, and the only way to realistically get that is with folding display tech, which again chews up battery power.

If you're into it you can watch tech youtubers go to those big conferences where they show off prototypes of their newest tech, earlier this year they were demoing rolling and pull out screens on phones and laptops, among other stuff.

For the batteries your outta luck for now due to a SOB called physics.

Companies make what sells, and flat candy bars sell. All the companies you mentioned went out of business (at least in the smartphone sector) due to not selling iPhone clones. I'm not saying that's a good thing btw. I wish we had hoverboards & holograms too dude.

I'm pretty content with my folding phone for now though.

So right. The last Blackberry I used with BB OS had micro hdmi port, hardware keyboard and completely different OS that was able to run android apps. Fast forward 10 years and you can't get any of those any more except maybe from some weird Chinese brands.

The public voted with their purchases and this is what they wanted.

Eventually most products settle into a baseline normal and innovation slows dramatically. It's not just phones that do this.

There are plenty of phones out there that are weird and different but most people ignore them and they don't get the same attention. Think rog phones, flip and fold phones, fair phone, sony's camera focused phones no one wants to buy.

Not too mention this list is for what you should buy, which is really the word experimental phone.

It's a strange mentality that almost everyone time phone are brought up people so for absolute innovation. A full on game changer. Most of these already do exactly what we want incredibly well. There isn't much room for a game changer. Innovations will be less dramatic, more subtle.

No one is going to buy a round phone, or a squiggly phone, and curved screen edges or curved phones never did well. So rectangular it is.

Enthusiast features rarely stick around cus most people don't need those features or the features get rolled into something else. Headphones jacks and HDMI and so on can ask be integrated into USB C and for most that's good enough.

And you can always go Lineage/DivestOS/Graphene after that and it'll run faster than new.

Remember the days when we had the notification led? :(

Sony is very ROM-friendly. Main issue is price, which affects active development. My wishlist is similar to yours, I ended always going with Xiaomi. While their 7 days wait to unlock bootloader is annoying, the ROM scene is very active, with great GCam ports.

Google, maybe Motorola and Nothing. Those seem to be the only choices remaining in the US

In the states the only way to get an Honor, Oppo or Xiaomi phone is to import.

[…] water resistance is one of those things phones love advertising but nobody ever notices.

Water resistance is something I do not want to notice because if I notice it, it means it has failed. Do I trust it completely? Hell no. Do I prefer to have it? Hell yea!

Couldn't disagree more. Both are huge selling points for me, and have virtually no downsides, unlike other phone features.

Both have been must-haves for me over the past number of years. It's nice being able to drop the phone onto a charging stand at the desk or in the car. Also nice being able to rinse the phone off or use in a bath/shower without worry.

For the price manufacturers are asking it better have everything.

I used to think the same way until my wife's phone stopped charging via cable because the USB port failed. The fact that it can charge wirelessly has kept the device usable.

I've only had 1 phone in the last 10 years that didnt wirelessly charge, and there's zero chance I'd buy a phone without it again. And I'm really hoping qi2 starts appearing in phones next year.

I don't understand the need for super fast charging, like it's handy if you're on the run and forgot about it, but I need more charging than my phone does, so it's no issue to just plonk it on a stand when I'm resting....