14 MEGA Smartphone Fails we’ll never forget.

all right 14 smartphone fails starting off pretty bad but ending up in some absolute disasters so first up is the palm phone which looks suspiciously like an iphone 10 for babies they're selling this as a companion phone for minimalists the idea being that you leave your main phone at home and take this tiny little thing with you when you're out and about and i kind of like this concept of something that can keep you connected without being distracting but this ain't it chief aside from the fact that it's almost invalidated by the existence of a smartwatch it just feels like there's an inherent contradiction here because surely as a minimalist the last thing i want is to have to split all my stuff between two different phones plus it's being targeted as a way to get away from your distractions but it's still a full android phone you can do everything it's just bad poor camera tiny screen slow processing and terrible battery life so i'm gonna give this one a two out of ten fail rating the consequences aren't major but it's a flawed concept and as a result has kind of disappeared off the radar in 13th place we have the myth the legend the escobar gold 11 pro a few months ago the escobar company announced that they were going to sell a gold-plated iphone 11 pro for 499 and without delving into the details of it they weren't it's a scam a scam that we debunked within four days of it being launched after which it very quickly disappeared from their website so three out of ten fail considering that the entire launch was stopped in its tracks now jumping back a few years the lg optimus 3d is one of those devices where you have to say you know fair play you tried on very first glance apart from the fact that it was a thick boy phone you might not have even noticed something was amiss but this was a 3d phone and they really committed to the idea it had a 3d display 3d applications and even dual 3d cameras on the back and this was a fun phone like going around taking 3d photos and even 3d videos was an incredible novelty all these years ago but there were just too many limitations the second you entered 3d mode the resolution of the screen would have to get the 3d to work you'd have to look at it from a really specific angle and i guess more important than any of that there wasn't really much 3d content available this phone was almost banking on 3d becoming the next big thing on being able to tap into a flourishing ecosystem of 3d content and to be fair had 3d taken off this phone might well have been a huge hit but as we quickly discovered from how well the 3d tv revolution went down people didn't really care so i'm also giving this one a 3 out of 10 fail saved in part because i don't think it was a particularly dumb decision lg took a gamble it just so happened that they took a gamble on the wrong thing all right next up is not a smartphone but it's something that xiaomi has been doing with their smartphones that i think is a bit shady so in a lot of markets like india the competition is furious companies just keep releasing device after device fighting to ever so slightly outspect each other and ever so slightly undercut each other so with that in mind xiaomi decided to start baking ads into their miui software skin the idea being that it gives them another source of revenue so that they can price their devices cheaper and to be honest i don't have a problem with ads it's how a lot of services are run it's even how youtube is run it's just the fact that xiaomi didn't tell people about it that's bad my friend c4e tech he made a full video just showing how many these devices were loaded with and it's crazy literally full screen ads came out of nowhere there were ads baked into a lot of the core pre-installed apps even the calendar and the phone cleaner and every time you installed a new app sure enough it serves an ad and probably the worst part of the whole thing is that there was absolutely zero quality control it's as if xiaomi just didn't care at all some of these ads would try to sign you up for fake scam lottery signs and others were just straight up vulgar so xiaomi faced a lot of backlash after this with a lot of people just boycotting the brand entirely and while they have now somewhat dialed back on this the damage has been done so four out of ten fail for this one and actually also i'd be curious to know what your stance is on having ads baked into your software if it meant to cheaper phone on the subject of xiaomi though late last year they revealed something which we can confidently say the world had never seen the mix alpha a smartphone with a 360 degree wrap-around display and i really do commend projects like this stuff like this keeps things exciting i'm all for it it's just a shame that for this launch the one thing that xiaomi couldn't wrap their heads around was how to execute it the logistics were all over the place i got an email actually back in december 2019 asking if i wanted to go hands-on with the phone i was so grateful for the opportunity but that early hands-on was delayed so many times that it didn't actually happen until the end of february 2020. the film was also meant to enter small-scale production in december but it just kept getting pushed back and pushed back indefinitely and it's not going to come out now it would get crushed by the samsung galaxy z4 2. the other side to this fail comes more from the fact that this is a completely new type of phone and when you're introducing a new product category like this your one job is to make it clear to people why they would want it the phone does have really cool potential uses and i talk about them in my day in the life video which i'll link somewhere up here but xiaomi failed to communicate them they talked about how in theory you could run a whole load of apps on the back of your phone but that's completely pointless when you can just swipe left on your home screen for the same result they showcase this crazy looking 360 degree battery charging animation but let's be real having this entire display lit up while you're charging is just gonna slow your charging down it's super counterintuitive so i'm gonna give this one a four out of ten fail because naturally a fail like this whilst it's not disastrous it does somewhat damage xiaomi's reputation as a company that delivers it means that next time they announce to the world that we've got something crazy people are less likely to get excited about it okay fill number nine comes from the lovely folks over at oneplus in an effort to build a new exciting feature for their flagship 8 pro they integrated something called a color filter camera and it was pretty weird the photos from it were low resolution with strange inverted colors but it could do one thing that was kind of amazing it could see through stuff you could pick up a tv remote and see the batteries and the entire circuit board inside of it but the reaction to this feature turns sour pretty quickly when people realize that you can actually see through some items of clothing slight privacy concern so oneplus very quickly nuked the feature in some regions and updated it in others so that you couldn't see through stuff but as well as disabling the best part of it this fix massively toned down the effects of the already fairly useless color filter camera so i'm going to give this one a 4 out of 10 again i think oneplus handled it well but at the same time nearly giving millions of people x-ray-like vision it's quite the pr nightmare but speaking of useless cameras it's time to talk about the 2-megapixel macro because of how cool it's become to say oh look at our phone we've got a quad camera set up for the more affordable phones which can't actually fit in for high-end lenses companies in 2020 have often just resorted to filling their camera setups with fairly useless cameras depth cameras monochrome cameras and the worst offender the 2 megapixel macro and as mkbhd said often the photos from this macro camera are actually worse than if you just use the main camera and get as close as you can and then crop in but the worst part of the whole thing is that the companies putting these lenses onto their phones must know that so this is almost as bad as grabbing your phone getting a permanent marker and just drawing a bunch of fake lenses on the back because they know these macro cameras are completely useless you can get great macro cameras but if you see one with a 2 megapixel resolution that won't be one of them so 5 out of 10 fail rating because of a how surprisingly prevalent this is and also how anti-consumer it is all right the general rule with smartphones is if you have a gimmick on top of an already really well-rounded phone then cool that can be a really good way to differentiate yourself but if that gimmick comes at the cost of other crucial functions it's probably a no-go and this is pretty much what happened with the samsung galaxy beam samsung made a phone with a built-in projector and you can see why this is cool it's kind of like how modern phones can cast their screens onto a nearby tv but with that phone you could do it anywhere on any surface but the problem is that having a projector built into your phone is very much a pro feature it's something that enthusiasts would be willing to pay more for but no pro is gonna want a phone that's had to have every other component inside of it sacrificed because of this projector the beam was specced like a phone that was already two to three years old on release so understandably no one bought one five out of ten fail quite a big miscalculation from a company like samsung now speaking of samsung a lot of people think that samsung were the first to make a phablet with a galaxy note supposedly the first smartphone that was a huge jump in size above the rest but i would argue that dell beat them to it the dell streak 5 was a 5 inch tablet phone which obviously sounds ridiculous five inches on a phone today seems micro but this was 2010 when most phones were closer to 3.5 inches and this was genuinely like the galaxy s20 ultra of 2010. the spec sheet was monstrous the dell street five was genuinely as exciting as it was surprising and that's what makes its failure all the more of a shame and i'd say there's two reasons one that being this big back in 2010 naturally made it a niche product and two that frankly dell tried to be a software company but they're not one they built a software skin just for their streak devices to try and take advantage of these massive displays but honestly it just made everything fiddly and pretty ugly a lot of the icons were tiny little things that were hard to click and they didn't even leave spare room to show the time when holding the phone in portrait also it was running on android 1.6 when it came out which was three major android versions behind its time it's a bit like a brand new android phone coming out today running android 8.0 except it was worse back then because each new android version brought massive changes being on version 1.6 you didn't have access to the facebook app you didn't have any flash support and just crucial things like multi-touch support weren't available the streak was the beginning of the end for dell smartphones which is a massive shame it would have been so cool to see what dell could have done in today's market so again five out of ten fail for this one okay now's where things get really serious so back in 2013 a russian company called yota devices came out with something that raised a few eyebrows the yotaphone traditional lcd display on the front and a paper-like ink display on the back now in theory this is a hit because all of a sudden all your reading tasks can be done on a display that a is perfect for reading a bit like a kindles display if you've ever used one of those and b one that barely uses any power the irony though was that in order to fit these two displays they had to massively shrink the battery capacity to just 1 800 milliamp hours which counters the main purpose of that second screen but the company persisted they came out with a yotaphone 2 and a yoda phone 3 which fixed a lot of these problems but were just too expensive for something that ultimately was a niche perk but it gets so much worse for this company because the yota company made an agreement with their supplier that they were going to order a large amount of units which makes sense if you assure your supplier that you're going to order a lot of phones they'd be willing to give you a better cost per unit but see the yota company quickly realized that they weren't going to sell as many units as they'd agreed to order so they very quickly tried to go back on it but ended up getting sued for 126 million us dollars so they're now bankrupt i'm giving this one a 6 out of 10 failed rating now one of the biggest smartphone fails of all time has been htc they went from being the maker of the first ever android phone to now having 0.05 percent market share and it's been this really sad slow decline with each successive flagship becoming less and less relevant but i've already covered this in a different episode of smartphone fails what i'm talking about now is htc's attempt at a revival because it got to the stage where agc was done the curtains were closed and we finally made our piece with the fact that htc was out of the smartphone game but then they posted this a cryptic save the date and the fans they still had went nuts this is it they've done it htc is back with a mid-range phone they released something called the u25g which is basically the spec of the oneplus nord but for closer to six hundred dollars instead of four hundred dollars they've teased returns in other regions too only to then release a bunch of hyper underwhelming wildfire phones that look like something straight out of 2015 and that is pretty much it like don't get me wrong i would love to see htc make a comeback but just because of how far they've fallen behind in terms of software and scale the ability to place mass orders for components i don't think they've got any chance of catching up and i think they should just steer their focus to other markets six out of ten fail for me okay let's talk about vine for a minute the smartphone focused social media platform where people would share these six second looping videos and the reason why i started thinking about this over the last few weeks is because tick tock which is literally flown over the last few years is very similar in a lot of ways and yet tick tock was downloaded over a billion times in 2018. so why did vine fail even though technically it beat tiktok to this game of super short form video well to put it simply it was out competed social media platforms are brutal as soon as one platform does something that works for its users you can guarantee that the others are either thinking about copying it or actually copying it so in this case it was the fact that instagram which used to be a photos only app at this point started offering video video that gave people flexibility to make longer content than just six seconds and video that could take advantage of instagram's filters plus instagram just had a bigger user base so if i'm a creator and i can choose to post something on vine or instagram i'm gonna pick instagram and on top of that snapchat came in with their stories which kind of took over the functionality that vine initially intended to have this idea of broadcasting snippets of your life to your friends the final nail in the coffin though was that there was no real way for viners to make money see if vine really wanted creators to come onto their platform to pour their heart and soul into making the most exciting six seconds of people's lifetimes they need to be compensated for that brands would pay instagrammers for sponsored posts youtubers earned ad revenue but because of how new and wacky the concept of a six second video was at the time no company felt like paying to sponsor people who made them so naturally those creators just moved to other platforms where they could monetize so the way i see it the success of tick-tock is at least in part because they learnt from the failures of vine vine was like a half-baked idea that tick-tock has now executed properly but in the process of vine lots of people lost their careers lots of people lost a lot of money so i'm giving it a six out of ten okay let's talk about motorola this one almost needs no introduction motorola was iconic motorola made the first transmission from the moon motorola was so ahead of the game that they pretty much became synonymous with the word communication and it really was looking like nobody could stop them in 2004 they dropped one of the best selling mobile phones of all time the razer v3 and just to try and quantify how successful this was this was a feature phone not a smartphone it sold for 450 the current equivalent of just over 600 and it sold 130 million units that's as much as the iphone 11 the iphone 11 pro the iphone 11 pro max the iphone 10s the iphone 10s max all put together it was arguably the first device that made phones not just useful but fashionable see in 2004 every phone looked like something designed by a geek practical plasticky clunky kind of high-tech looking but the razer was different it was this beautiful aluminium and glass designer piece in an era where there were very few caveats to making your phone slim you look at this and you look at other phones around at the time you can see why this was cool so how was this giant toppled iphone simple as that the iphone changed what people thought was cool and so literally within two years of its release motorola's market share had halved and within two more years it was just an eighth of what it once was they've done a lot since then they've been bought by google they were then sold to lenovo they came out with a foldable phone but they've not since even come close to the titanic success that they once had so i'm giving this one an 8 out of 10 failure motorola really has been an example of hero to zero but they have started making phones again now and they seem pretty good so who knows maybe they will rise up the ranks again okay by the way just before fail number one do remember that if your favorite fail isn't in this episode i do have another three videos in this series so i'll leave them linked up here and also if you enjoy this video a sub to the channel would be fantastic in first place then is the huawei u.s ban and this is one of those things that started off as a mess but it slowly got worse and worse and worse over the last decade huawei has very quickly become this powerhouse company they churned products out at an unbelievable pace and genuinely created smartphones that every year were at the very bleeding edge huawei was growing so fast that it looked like samsung was in trouble and even though huawei has always had a rocky relationship with the united states their success was so meteoric that it looked like they were going to break into that market too because in 2017 with the huawei mate 10 phones us carriers finally agreed to start distributing them but then something happened at the last minute they pulled out atnt verizon even best buy all of a sudden announced that they wouldn't sell huawei devices because apparently the us government told them not to and this is bad enough being excluded from quite possibly the most lucrative smartphone market in the world but then the us government put huawei onto their entity list which meant that now they could not only not sell in the us but that they couldn't do business with any us company this is not a good bit of news to wake up to it means no google so as you know huawei phones now don't come with core google services like google maps and gmail but it also means that the company that builds huawei's chipsets tsmc can't do business with them and that's actually a taiwanese company but just because some of their equipment is from the us it still counts and let's be very real for a second if huawei can't source chips it's got nothing and from that point it was just this rolling snowball that kept gathering momentum the wi-fi alliance the sd card organization they pulled out and apparently 130 companies who'd applied for licenses to work with huawei they were all denied and add to that countries left right and center started blocking huawei from having anything to do with their 5g infrastructure because you might know this is actually one of huawei's main businesses building networking equipment but since the us ban countries have literally been reaching into their networks and ripping out huawei components if nobody comes to their rescue huawei might only have a year or two more making smartphones the only potential silver lining is that they may start buying in chips from mediatek or even potentially qualcomm now qualcomm is a us company but they recently made a pledge to the us government saying please let us work with huawei because if they do that they'll bring more money into the us economy plus their justification is also that if qualcomm can be the central component in huawei phones then in the us's eyes they'll be more trustworthy but we'll see if this goes anywhere but yeah the huawei ban has been an absolute tragedy in a lot of people's eyes so i'm giving this one a 9 out of 10 fail all right if you enjoyed this video a sub would be incredible and do check out the other episodes i'll link them from this video thanks a lot for watching my name is aaron this is mister who's the boss and i'll catch you in the next one you

Channel: Mrwhosetheboss

Views: 5,822,875

Rating: 4.8888388 out of 5

Keywords: smartphone, android, android phone, smartphone fails, best smartphone, mkbhd, worst smartphones, samsung, samsung galaxy, tech, tech fails, smartphones 2020, smartphones, best smartphones

Id: JM8iUU3NkS8

Length: 19min 44sec (1184 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 17 2020