but who is going to spend £800 on a Huawei phone?
In the mind of most buyers, Huawei = Chinese = cheap
Armed with tools to send most smartphone manufacturers into a cold sweat, the team at iFixit have found the Huawei P20 Pro is going to be a tricky beast to repair. So best not drop it, OK? The Register found much to like about the £799 smartphone, but the camera left us wanting when compared to Android rivals such as the Pixel …
Cheap phone = easy to dissemble and repair.
Expensive phone = nearly impossible.
Feature Phone Companies (Apple/Samsung etc) claim "we made it that way because it's expensive to do otherwise", yeah, I think they are [see icon].
Cheap phone = lasts forever, nothing breaks.
Expensive phone = drop it once, it's a million pieces.
Feature Phone Companies (Apple/Samsung etc) claim "we made it that way because it's more reliable!", [see icon again].
I think they may not be being entirely truthful.
And irritatingly, it's nigh on impossible to find a case that protects the full length of a Galaxy S8/9's curved screen. The case I've got protects the rear of the phone with about 3mm of rubber and polycarbonate (so I must be careful to only drop the phone in its back!) but leaves the edges of the screen exposed. Luckily, I've got some good glue so I'll add some plastic strips.
The curved screen doesn't do much for me - it makes the phone look lovely when it's not in its case, but it's never not in its case. Fortunately, the glass screen protector has stayed in place so far, and has already earnt its keep.
Um, surely that depends on the case ?
In the Samsung LED View cover the only "unprotected" parts of the phone are (when the cover is open) the screen (duh!), about 1" around the power, 2.5" around the volume and Bixby buttons and about the same at the bottom for the ports and speaker.
"Unprotected" in scare quotes because I would have to drop the phone onto a particularly pointy thing to impact those specific areas in a way that wouldn't be protected by the rubber case either side of those areas.
And the phone still looks pretty lovely, even in the case (and the LED View cover functionality is almost as lovely and a real conversation starter when people notice it).
Sure, the LED View cover is not cheap, but actually not much more expensive than the official but basic Samsung flip covers. And I've never understood the logic that results in someone being happy to spend many HUNDREDS of dollars on a phone but baulk at spending more than 20 bucks on a case to protect it.
The curved screen doesn't do much for me - it makes the phone look lovely when it's not in its case, but it's never not in its case.
You may have a sound reason for owning it, but more generally I'm not sure why buyers generally keep pandering to phone makers:
"Oooh look, the new Brandphone 10 Xtrawide is out! I know it is vastly expensive, elegant, thin, small battery capacity, and fragile. And I know that it has a binary future of being used for years with case scars and a cracked screen, or forever living in a rhino-hide case that hides the elegance, makes the package thicker, but I can't help myself. Please take my money!"
There's lots of free advertising for individual phones on this site, but not so many comparative reviews, assuming your reviews are 100% independent? How about when the major manufacturers have released their annual handsets, doing a big roundup review across each sector of the market? Tables of specs, a summary of +ve and -ves, what niche(s) each phone is best for. Examples of the highest / lowest real-world prices, popular accessories, security updates released, cost of standard repairs, non-removable applications, real-world battery tests, water / scratch resistance ratings etc.
With the recent emphasis on cameras, perhaps you need an objective way of measuring picture quality? Is there image analysis software that can do this?
You could also compile some statistics about the manufacturers based on their previous phones - average devaluation at 1 / 2 years, a measure of past security update provision, hardware failure rate and common faults of previous models, data from phone insurers about how often they need repairing / replacing.
Speaking for myself, I don't want the Reg filled with hundreds of reviews of (mostly) dull, me-too handsets with forgettable names.
How about you look to the reasonable number or web sites that do that as their main business? Or buy a subscription to a consumer review organisation?