Related
Hello all,
I'm a former iPhone 2.5G, 3G, 3GS, I4 owner, and have now spent two full weeks with the Captivate. I thought I'd give a few observations to those that are either still on the fence, or are just looking for something Captivate related to read.
I'll break this down into sections for an easier read.
First Impressions: The first thing that struck me was the screen (obviously). The screen seemed HUGE, even though it's technically only .3" larger than my I4. The rest of the form factor was very clean, which I like.
Hand feel: I have larger hands... That made my life with the iPhone rather difficult. I found myself fumbling with the handset, as well as the keyboard. I learned to handle it over the years, but it was not my favorite one handed device. The Captivate fit right in the palm of my hand. I appreciate the weight and overall thin feel of the device, while still giving me a large touch surface. The battery cover looked incredible, but it's brushed metal made it slick enough that I could easily see it falling from my hand. I had iPhone 2.5G flashbacks. I bought a Body Glove case to remedy the problem, and with that, I found the perfect cell phone case. It's wonderful.
Screen: What's there to say, really? It's beautiful. The color saturation and black levels are unrivaled by anything I've ever seen on this level. The only negative I have here is that I had an iPhone 4 previous to the Captivate and that really made the lower resolution on the larger screen noticeable. It was an adjustment, but I've made it.
Touch response: The IOS will always seem to be perfection personified when it comes to the touch response on a phone, but the Captivate gives the I4 a run for it's money. I do notice some recognition lag on the Captivate. Usually upon scrolling through the app list or in the browser. Just not quite as smooth as the IOS. This may very well be linked to the lag in the unmodified Captivate. I have not done the lag fix, as my best friend did the fix. It worked well for the first several hours, then started to slow down. Top it off with the fix going wrong and corrupting his file system.
EDGE and 3G: I know... I know... The thing is supposed to be a phone, and thus make calls... Boring, but definitely a nice experience with the Captivate. I notice the signal bars being a bit on the low end with the phone. I truly believe that they are designed this way, for better or worse. I say this because I get much better reception and call quality in poorly covered areas than my iPhone 3GS, which would typically show more bars. The data response on the phone is fantastic. I'm very happy with the speed of downloads, video streaming, and web page loading. Again the bars look low, but operate like they should show much higher. The negative here is definitely the lack of HSUPA. AT&T decided to disable this feature, I'm assuming, to help with the overly congested data network in iPhone saturated areas. Luckily for those of us with an android device, the community will soon remedy this (hurry up Rogers).
GPS: The biggest pain in my ass... I rarely use the GPS for turn by turn directions, as I'm a man and require no direction... But seriously, the GPS is integrated into every aspect of the OS, and the work flow and experience with the phone would be greatly improved if this functionality worked as intended. We seem to really be at Samsung's mercy here. I truly hope they come through. If not, I feel like there could be some possible modification from the Vibrant, where I've heard there isn't an issue.
WIFI: Very very happy here. The first Captivate I bought had a broken antenna. Wifi didn't work very well. After I traded it in it worked like a champ. I can pull incredible speeds, up and down stream from several stories above my wireless router.
Media Playback: Not super happy here. iTunes(on Windows) is a raging pile of crap, but at least it provided us with a one stop shop for music, cross platform organization, upgrading, and one click syncing. There isn't a real good solution here. I've tried a number of music players, but ended up right back with the Samsung player. It's completely functional, but not elegant, and not feature full by any stretch of the imagination. Now, movies are something different. Getting them to the device is easy, and playback looks incredible. The audio quality of music and movies is much better than my iPhone, but the media management and players themselves aren't up to snuff. That's really where Apple shows it's pedigree.
App Market: Another place where Apple man handles the Android devices. The market is improving at a blazing rate, but it has many issues that the App Store doesn't. With Apple having a strangle hold over the apps and reviews that make it to market, there is very little chance of malware making it to the store at all, much less to the Top Apps (review spoofing bastards). Thank god for Appbrain... That's all I have to say.
Community: Yes... Yes... Yes.... There are so many helpful and brilliant people in the Android community. That really gives me a feeling of longevity for the device. Even if the developer throws in the towel, there will be an entire group of people who seem to be more than willing to step in and tune the device to it's utmost potential. I'm so excited to see what happens when the Froyo roms start hitting. I expect this little phone to really turn some heads. Mine included.
In conclusion, I'm really happy with the phone so far. The GPS is testing me a bit, but I just have to take a few deep breaths and power through with my patience. I think that anybody coming from a Blackberry, iPhone, or any other device will be happy here. But there are some things you have to be willing to do. You must be patient. These phones can do anything, but sometimes the community has to have time to accomplish it. Also, you have to be willing to play... Seriously, tinker with your phone. Download every launcher you can find, download widgets, fonts, apps, play with your settings. Truly explore your phone. There's a lot here that you may not even know exists. Just because you don't see a feature, doesn't mean it isn't there. This isn't Apple, things aren't locked down.
Beautiful review!
The one thing I was most worried about with switching to a Captivate from an iPhone 3GS was the GPS issue as my Apple touting friends were poking fun at me and wishing good luck with getting a GPS fix to check in to venues etc but I haven't had a single issue at least as far as check ins go. I rarely if ever use turn by turn directions, which I could see being an issue if I did.
Overall I'm extremely happy with my Captivate, Android and it's flexibility with customization is a breath of fresh air over iOS! Even with jailbreaking iOS just seemed to be really lacking with quality customizations, sure there were widgets you could add to the lock screen etc but none of it seemed very polished even though there were commercial apps for it.
The only thing I would change about the Captivate would be to add a LED flash for the camera for those random indoor/evening snapshots and it baffles me as to why Samsung left that out, otherwise it would be close to perfect. A front facing cam would have been nice to have as well but I really think those more belong on tablets at the moment than phones, I don't really see myself making video calls when on the go but rather places where I would have a tablet handy.
Correction, two things I would change... The other would be the addition of a physical home button, I'm still getting used to hunting for the touch buttons at the bottom and often hit the wrong one still. It did help once I installed WidgetLocker though so I can press the volume buttons to wake as well as the power button as hunting for the power button was also a bit hit & miss.
The jury is still out on battery life especially as I have been constantly playing with it during to it being a shiny new toy so I will wait to see what real world usage is like.
I hear you on the customization. I am flipping between Launcher Pro and ADW Launcher right now, and it's nice to be able to change things up on a whim. Also, the different keyboards (SWYPE is amazing) also give a nice change of pace.
I don't really care about the flash, really. My I4's flash pissed me off more often than not. When the flash would go off it would cause everything that I was photographing to look like a mug shot. I never really needed a flash with my long history of iPhones, and I guess not having one on any of my phones just made it easy to not notice it missing.
Okay... After spending most of the day before yesterday getting myself all revved up to return my Captivate and show Samsung that their time table was unacceptable by going back to my iPhone 4, I would like to say that I am now once again back on the Captivate, and am shockingly more relaxed than I have been for the last 48 hours. That was the shortest lived, most misguided tantrum that I've thrown in recent memory... I just couldn't do it. The Captivate is, with all it's little flaws, an amazing phone that is really hard to step away from. To add insult to my little snap decision, my iPhone has a massive proximity sensor issue. I was face dialing through most of my conference calls today.
Sad... But anyway. Have a laugh at my expense. My wife asked if I was having some trouble with commitment. I had to remind her that I asked her to marry me... It's just with phones that I have a problem.
The successor to Samsung’s Galaxy S II has got to be the second most speculated and talked about smartphone over the past couple of months, with Apple devices always taking the top spot, of course. Samsung has some big shoes to fill and after the kind of success they achieved with the S II, there’s a lot of pressure to up the ante once again. Given the kind of trend that we’ve seen post MWC 2012, we can now come to expect the S III to have these features as standard, if it has to qualify as a ‘high-end’ Android in today’s day and age. We know it will have a quad-core Exynos CPU, the screen size will probably be around 4.6 inches and have an HD resolution, the camera will most likely be a 12MP with BSI and so on and so forth. Samsung will never launch their flagship device that’s inferior in specifications to the competition and now that we’ve seen what HTC and LG have in store, we can draw a rough picture of what to expect.
However, impressive hardware alone is not enough to guarantee a successful product. If you’ve been following the rumour mills, then you’ve probably heard of some of the features that could make it to the S III and we really hope that it’s true as it would truly make it an unique phone and possibly the best Android so far.
A non-ugly, waterproof phone
So far, all water resistant phones haven’t exactly been much of a looker, except for perhaps the Sony Ericsson Xperia Active. But even that wasn’t slim, primarily because of the protective coating for the screen and all the ports. Any manufacturer so far had to fall into the same trap, if they wanted to create an ‘all-weather’ cell phone. The S III, however, needn’t go down that same route. Early last month, we heard rumours about the Galaxy S III getting a water-proof treatment and thanks to the folks at Liquipel, Samsung need not compromise on the design. Available currently in the U.S only, Liquipel will water-proof any smartphone you have for a small fee. It works by injecting the phone with a compound that resists any liquid or moisture. They even had a very impressive demo at CES.
Think of all the money or silly contraptions you’ve used to protect your phone in the rainy season. This technology makes rubberised housings and bulky chassis a thing of the past. If Samsung does implement this and we sincerely hope they do, then they will be the first to do so and it will give them a major advantage over the competition.
Feel what you see
We know that the S III will have an HD resolution screen as the bare minimum, but high resolution mobile screens aren’t exactly cutting edge right now. What if you could feel what you see? Senseg have developed a special touchscreen technology that lets you feel the texture of the image on screen. This is achieved by creating a little electrostatic field around the area that simulates a particular type of texture. They call this a ‘Tixel’ charge driver that creates a small force and by modulating the charge, Senseg can simulate different textures.
While this exact technology might or might not make it to the S III, we hope that Samsung do something special with the screen. If not the ‘Feel Screen’, then at least a higher resolution display would be a nice addition. There were passing rumours that the S III may have a 1080p screen, which seems like overkill, but then again, most high-end Android phones are, so i guess it's ok.
Wireless charging
With everything going wireless, why do we still have to put up with charging cables? According to the Wireless Power Consortium, a number of big companies, including Acer, HTC, LG, etc have certified handsets and chargers that use wireless charging.
‘Qi Certified’ products will be able to charge either from a wall charger or from another compatible device, wirelessly, just as long as they are placed in close proximity. Now Samsung’s name may not be on the list of companies that have applied for patents, but the website clearly states that it’s up to the company, if they want their name up there. Now, given how secretive Samsung have been with the S III, it’s no surprise they don’t show up on the list. This is another big advancement in mobile phones and Samsung can add another feather in their cap should they choose to include it.
Lose the plastic body
While the S II was a sturdy and durable phone, it wasn’t any match for HTC’s unibody aluminium Sensation in terms of build quality. One of the reasons they went with plastic was to keep the weight down, which was fine in 2011, but not anymore. With polycarbonate being used in the Lumia 800 and HTC going with space-age material (literally!) for the One S, Samsung have to step up their game. If you haven't already, check out this really cool video of how HTC creates the chassis for the One S.
Alternately, they could use a ceramic casing or even something fashioned out of carbon fibre or kevlar. The trouble with building chassis with materials like these is that the battery would probably be non-removeable. This is not a very big deal and we can certainly live with it just as long as they have a way to hard reset the phone in case it locks up, because I don’t want to wait around for the battery to drain out.
Gesture control?
This one’s not from any of the rumours, but just hit us while coming up with this list. Rather than using the front camera to recognize gestures, which quite frankly is quite ridiculous because, for one, you can’t use it in the dark and two, it has never, ever worked properly; i were thinking of something along the lines of a PS Vita like touchpad at the back of the phone. The entire phone needn't have this, just a small patch on the top and bottom. For instance, if you hold the phone in one hand, you can easily use your index finger to swipe the rear to unlock the phone, or have a two finger gesture to open the camera. Once in landscape mode, your fingers automatically align around the edges, which comes in handy in racing and action games. Now you never need to block the screen with your fingers, which happens a lot in first person shooters.
This way, even if the screen doesn’t have an oleophobic coating (which never really work anyways), it’s not a major issue, since you’ll be using the gesture pad. This would be a very interesting feature, if Samsung implements something of this nature, as you now have a ‘gaming phone’ as well.
While it’s great fun to speculate what upcoming tech products may shape up to be, a side effect is the pang of disappointment when you realize that none of the features that were so greatly hyped are actually true (iPhone 4S anyone?). Recently, live shots of a Samsung GT-I9300 have been doing the rounds, which is expected to launch in mid-May. To us, it’s highly unlikely that it’s the S III, as it appears to be more of an upper-end mid-range smartphone. Also, we don’t know if Samsung will actually call it the S III. While that does seem like the most logical name in the series, they could decide to start a completely new series, altogether. Samsung have managed to keep the phone a secret incredibly well, but now, the wait is getting a bit frustrating. They better have one hell of a phone in hand whenever they launch it or risk losing their huge fan following.
I wish they make touchwiz as functional and good as sense. After a year of owning the sgs2 I found out it's not just the specs that count. I still prefer my desire (w/sense 3.5 of course)
btw, one of the things I do like about the sgs2 is the build quality, it's not cheap that phone is almost indestructable....
edit2: the sgs2 is not plastic, it's made out of magnesium chasis with a plastic shell, magnesium is used by some of the most expesive cars and racing cycles because it is so light and sturdy (and expensive)
Although the subject is rather troll like I hope I can do it in a non troll way.
There's a number of things that are really hacking me off about phones these days. I thought I'd have a major slam out to let off steam with the off-chance that someone might say "Ah but if you try X you can avoid that".
...some of the challenges in the mobile phone area these days...
1) Battery capacities aren't good enough as we all know. Getting through a single day is really the basics for me. Why not have hot swappable batteries? For me I expect to be able to go for 3-4 days. I don't know why... I just kind of expect that kind of efficiency.
2) Samsung Galaxy series... seems amazing but the batteries overheat, no?
3) So many people are ignorant of security to the point that most people are walking around with devices and apps that can just completely own you. Yeah there's sandboxing but it doesn't really work, it's been sidestepped. The iPhone just hides what's going on, rarely fixing the issues.
4) Licensing, all that stuff. Companies reinventing the wheel, fighting, all the rest. You can't buy a phone that does X and Y because company X won't license tech X to company Y
5) Trying to get everything perfect in one device... it's a bit of an ask but needed for portability. If things were separate we could have the better of most worlds, but that doesn't seem possible
6) Closed source. Just a bit irritating to see the inefficiency of it all in general. Bit of a hash moan but for those who can imagine better it seems like the dark ages in some areas still.
7) Closed source binary blobs. See Replicant on Samsung phones as the best we can do... the modem is arranged such messily and it's just not true a solution because of that. Kind of irritates me that there is no phone that can really guarantee it's not recording my phone numbers, conversations and credit cards because it's fully open source. Certainly an issue for companies. Companies in general are happy to rely on the word of Blackberry for thier integrity but for those of us who can imagine a solution that is secure by design it's not the best.
8) App whitelisting. Similar to the reactive rather than proactive security we tend to see as the trend in general. Manually checking all apps in the app store, trying to block and check them all.... doesn't seem the best. We've also had censorship. There are alternative stores, that's good.
9) Wakelocks. The Dalvik VM not managing or helping us track them down. Further, it's hard to tell if the app that you want to use is going to shaft your battery... once installed it's hard to tell if the app is ruining your battery too. It's messy.
10) IMEI security is a pain in the butt. It slows down the criminals but it also slows down everyone more so. In the case of Turkey it's another way to screw people with tax. Again, imperfect design.
11) As a man, if you have a phone at waist level that reduces your sperm count. Almost nobody notices or cares.
12) Just the usual society things... people looking at phones rather than each other. Can't really complain about that... the interface of looking at a screen is a bit basic. I've had speech recognition available to me... but I don't use it because there's always people around me and I'd rather be quiet... just one of those funny inventions
13) Screen don't work in bright sunlight still. We've got Motheye coming though which is great but we've had eink for ages and still no eink phone. Further, it can't be hacked onto an existing phone. Some of us aren't interested in games and movies and are focussed on getting stuff done. I feel Mirasol & PixelQi are being blocked or delayed as they try to slow things down until the point we've run out of ideas to make things better so only then does that tech get deployed.
14) Networks interfering with phones. I always go prepay because it's cheaper if you do the maths in many countries and also it allows for freer trade. Networks are always trying to get thier fingers into the mobile phone pies. Thank you Samsung for helping get against that, and also custom ROMs.
15) Apple are great but it's not clear what's going on behind the scenes.
16) eink displays would help battery life. A NookTouch can last for a month. How much would that help a phone on standby? Yet no eink display or anything like that.
17) Great to see the back of proprietary connectors but they still come back sometimes.
18) I hate the way things are made to break. Watch out for this. There's usually one thing on a phone that is designed to break. Sometimes it's a moveable part, like a ribbon cable in a slide phone. Sometimes its the USB connector. You can't buy port savers. When they fail you're screwed. Mitigate against this if you can. Try to figure out what the weak spot on your phone is.
19) Lock in software. I have an old backup phone... but I still have to keep the sync software... bit annoying. One day it probably won't work on Windows9 or whatever. People say throw it away but that's just it, throw away society. No, fix it, get it to work and be in control.
All of these things can be mitigated against. But you have to think about these things when you select your new phone.
If the commercialisation of the industry, cut throat tactics and so on aren't good enough as they are for me one thing you can do is buy a slightly older, but popular phone. In my case I never buy a new phone and instead go for something that I already know is popular with the hacking community. I know you guys can give me an insight into what I'm really looking for in life. As an example my last phone was a Galaxy S i9000. Way out of date in a sense. That's the way I find the best way to go. Go with something popular. That way you have some real support like a real man able to handle things yourself, not AppleCare and a 1 year limit. A philosophy for life. You can't have it all but with a bit of thought you can do a lot to get a bit closer to it all.
I recently upgraded from the iPhone 5s to the Galaxy Note 3.
This phone is a revelation and I want to try and give some indication why.
I have been using iPhones for many years with a detor to Android every few months (itchy feet!).
Whilst Android is clearly the more technically advanced platform, I always end up dumping the Android phone a few weeks later and returning to the iPhone.
Why ? mainly for two reasons. 10 years ago we used to say that a phone is mainly for phone calls. Internet was a limited and frustrating experience. Today I realise that I only use my phone 5% for calls, the rest is email, general messaging and browsing. The keyboard and user experience therefore become very important.
Apple software engineers really "get" user experience. I don't know how they do it but the keyboard on the iPhone is psychic. My typing is terrible but it manages to mostly get the right keys and if not, do the correct word substitution. It must estimate if you hit between two keys then pick the best letter in the context of the word you were typing or something like that. And then the word lookup is terrific and terribly accurate
Now Android keyboards gave me much worse typing. Not only that, but the word substitution was not automatic (no way of setting it). I could never get used to clicking on the correct word substitution after practically every word. This whole keyboard thing made me feel like chucking every Android phone in the bin after a few weeks (aka to ebay).
Recently, epiphany! I discovered whilst testing an Android phone, that savvy users actually never used the default keyboard (duh!). I found that SwiftKey app was pretty popular, installed it and bing!, now I had 95% of the apple keyboard experience.
That's the thing about Apple, you see it works great out of the box. Android you need to fiddle with it, and for many users they just don't have time or want to do this.
Step in the Note 3.
Ok, now the keyboard is great. I don't know whether it's the latest version of Android or a Samsung developed keyboard but many of the issues have been solved out of the box. One other thing though, due to the size of the screen they have taken the liberty of adding a fifth row of keys, the numeric ones. Genius! You know how frustrating it is when you are typing in passwords or email addresses with a mixture of letters and numbers, always having to flick between numeric and letter keyboards. Now problem solved. For the first time it seems an Android keyboard is better then the Apple one!
The other thing that frustrated me was the speed. Despite having better specs, Android phones have always had the occasional stutter. This can occur anytime, when scrolling, opening an app, etc.
The Note 3 seems 99.9% free of this. Again not sure if this is software development or brute force.
So whilst we are on the subject of brute force let's talk specs. The Note 3 has 3gb of memory, a quad core snap dragon 800 cpu running at approx. 2.3Ghz and a Adreno 300 GPU (yes, thats right, a graphics co-processor). The screen is a full HD 1920x1280 and is an AMOLED with Gorilla glass 3. AMOLED was invented by Samsung and its simply the highest contrast phone screen you can get. IPS screens, as used by the iPhone, have slightly more accurate colours and a slightly brighter maximum brightness, but the contrast on an AMOLED is quite striking. As well as 32gb of internal storage it has a microSD card. I put in a 64gb one so now I have 96gb of storage. Note that with Android you can install apps on the external card if you want, which is very useful.
This spec approaches many full computers!
Completing the specs it has a truly monster 3200MAh battery and a removable stylus built into the body. A stylus you say, back to the Pocket PC ? not quite, this is a whole new technology. For taking notes (aka the phone name) or drawing, its really very good. It also has a switch on it for a pop up menu and other fun.
Lets talk about the elephant in the room, the size. Samsung have been crafty here, the screen size is 5.7", only 0.7" bigger then the S4 but of course a world different from the iPhone 5. Samsung do have phones with bigger screens (e.g. the Mega) but in this bracket have clearly restrained themselves, e.g. compared to say the HTC One Max , Sony Xperia Z Ultra, etc.
This has paid off. The screen is larger and much more comfortable to use then a smaller screen, but due to the extreme thinness, lightweight and minimised bezel of the device, does not feel gigantic in the hand.
Its a personal taste thing and you have to push yourself to even try a device of this size. But the danger you run is that there is no going back. Even 5" screens look pokey, let alone the iPhone 5.
It fits fine in a jean pocket and you get use to it faster then you would think.
The main reason for me trying this in the first place was to attempt to replace both my iPhone 5s and iPad mini, which I take to work every day, with one device. Also cutting the need for two contracts. On a side note I have 4G contracts from EE and vodafone. Again its something you don't think you need, but once you have you can't go back to 3G. The EE network is more mature and has better coverage, I assume Vodafone will come up to the same coverage in time.
Lastly lets talk accessories. Samsung just get this much better then anyone else. There are all sorts of things, from charging backs (so that you can use wireless charging) to docks and headphones. However the key breakthrough is the S-View wallet type cover. This has a window in to allow the phone to show status reports of phone calls and texts as they come in, without having to open the cover. The phone is "cover aware" and formats a small square window to fit this window. It also switches on when you open the flip cover and switches off when you close the flip cover. This is just sheer genius. It sounds simple but it raises the functionality to a whole new level. The final piece of genius is that the cover replaces the back of the phone, so it doesn't add much to the bulk (although it does clverely add a less then 1mm overhand to protect the sides).
Samsung has always made excellent phones, but its no use denying that its basic design has been influenced heavily by the iPhone 3, which it has kept to slavishly.
With the Note 3 Samsung has finally carved its own genuine innovation into the market and created something quite special which is going to permanently change the direction of phone development.
Put it this way, Apple will be responding to this either this or next year, and not the other way round.
Its not surprising that this is one of the world's best selling phones. A busy central London Vodafone shop told me recently that Samsung had long ago overtaken Apple with sales volume, especially the S4, but now the Note 3 is their best seller. No surprises there.
Hello guys,
i got really bored from the design and missing features of new devices from every manufacturer and didn´t understand some choices they made.
It all started really great back in the days, but nowadays the devices just get faster and lack a lot features and have overall some design issues.
So here´s a list what a smartphone should look like in the future ... i know everyone has his own opinions and taste :
First of all every builder should have 2 phones with the same hardwarespecs but different screensizes (Yes, Sony finally understood that point).
For the normal one handed user the small build should be max 5 inches in diameter with small bezels to ensure you can use it with one hand.
The (business/heavy user) model should have under 6 inches to be portable enough to fit in a pocket of jeans for instance.
Now the more important specs:
Most important: Replacable Battery and slot for microSD-Cards (Thank you LG for still mainting this option and Samsung go to xxx for you new devices).
Speaking of battery power, it should be enough to maintain 2 days before charging under normal usage.
Waterproof phones are not that usable in everyday life for the following reasons. The Z-Series and their hidden USB-Port are not good, if you charge them over USB. The dock is a nice option, but i like charging my phones everywhere with the microusb-cables out there in the wild.
So in my opinion if a smartphone must be waterproof the USB-Port should be too. If not there should be an extra waterproofversion from any manufacturer for people that drop their phones in the toilette or for voyeurs out there. In case of diving just a good old gopro.
There should be and option for everyphone to unlock the bootloader officially. (Thank you HTC!!! ) and there build be no exceptions from build to build or any possibilty for carries to modify this option.
I you buy a phone you should be to do with it as you please, even if it means losing the warranty.
Speaking of open bootloaders: If the manufactures would in implent a (encrypted) backupoption in their stock recoveries, t think many people would not root their devices or use a custom recovery.
The overall design of the corners should not be to edgy and not to round. (For instance the LG G2 was too round but comfortable, the G3 quite right and comfortable in hand and the pocket and the G4 is quite annoying to hold in the hand because of its sharp corners)
There should be a built in QI-Chargingpad to protect the USB-Port from to much mechanical usage (e.g. LG has made a good job by including that in the G3, but in the G4 i have to buy a leathercover (which i don´t like for everyday usage) or use a QI-Sticker for the cheap plastic cover which is always to thick to fit seemlessly)
The edges of the should habe any cheap material design (e.g. Samsungs cheap chrome-edges look like **** after a year, which is a lot better on the S6 with ist metalcase, but metal don´t like bumps to hard edges to, so the get dents after a while)
LG has done a better job on the G2 and G3, the G4 on the other hand got more vunerable.
Sony Z-Series is quite good in that area.
i hope i got everything in that list that bothers my mind, if i forgot something, just put it in the comments and i will edit this list if necessary.