I think even the best smartphone out there are crippled down. I’m not including iPhone here because as a closed-ecosystem product it doesn’t have the right to compete in the open market. As an Apple product iPhone may be great but as a phone it is just as good as a phone from Apple but not better than its best rival.

That said, I think for a phone to become a real ‘smart’ phone it should be able to perform these functions:

• USB wi-fi adapter
• USB bluetooth adapter
• USB touchpad – might already be made available by some apps
• USB webcam
• Secondary display

While I’ve found some apps that could turn an Android phone into a multi-touchpad, the 4 other functions mentioned above are still missing. I’m quite disappointed with phone makers as well as Google for making a phone and its OS without those functions, although they are technically possible, and not technically difficult to implement either. For being a secondary display for a PC, I’ve been thinking for a while now whether the recently released Ubuntu for Android have that function or not (I hope it does).

Tablets, despite being hi-end products could become failures too, no thanks to most of them not supporting call/sms. I mean the 3G models come with sSIM card slot yet they usually did not include call/sms function. Sure not many people would use tablets to make calls/sms but those functions are very cheap to implement (which explains why you could buy a dumbphone at $20-30 these days) so I see no point not to implement them.

Have you heard about ‘phablets? Yeah, they’re the newest, 5-inch+ display breed in the smartphone family, a more phone-tablet hybrid (thus the ‘phablet’) than the 7-inch GSM-enabled tablets. If you’re still unclear of what it is, the Samsung Galaxy Note is its prime example. While I do like them to a certain extent, there are a few things I hate about them, for example all phablets I’ve known so far don’t come with radio. Even the $40-50 dumbphone can have it so I don’t see any excuse why those phablets can’t implement it too. After all nearly all hi-end sub-4″ phones come with radio too so there’s nothing that justifies phablets can’t have it.

The NXT XPERIAS: Why SONY is doing it wrong

Since the “Sony Ericsson” become just “SONY” the electronic giant has released at least 4 latest XPERIA phones under the NXT series since earlier this year. I’m fine with their unique design and awesome features but WTH many of those phones (with exception of XPERIA sola) don’t come with microSD card slot! This is ridiculous, or should I say stupid? Although its a good thing that XPERIA sola comes with one micro SD card slot but sola is just mid-tier smartphone. One would normally expect a high-end model like XPERIA S comes with a memory card slot but disappointingly it didn’t. Well with sola just hit the stores recently I think I would get that then instead of XPERIA S.