I’m just going to go ahead and dive right in to the very basis of what this article will be discussing: being the slimmest phone isn’t cool anymore. It isn’t necessary, it isn’t useful, and it just plain doesn’t have any real bearing on whether people buy the phone or not. I’m about 99.98% certain that not one single person has walked into a retail store, slapped their credit card down on the counter, looked a retail associate straight in the eye and said, “Go get me the slimmest phone ya got.” Not a single one.

Yet here we are with Samsung boasting about their new Galaxy A5 and A3 smartphones and how they are Samsung’s “slimmest phones yet”. Wow. That’s great! So that means that... wait, what exactly does a super slim phone mean for the consumer?

Oh, right. Nothing. Except for a trip to the land of lost opportunities where you could have had a phone with significantly better battery life. And maybe the battery life on these phones aren’t that bad, but I’m willing to bet an outrageous amount of money that between having the “slimmest phone yet” and a phone with “the best battery life yet”, battery life would win. I mean, come on. Would you rather have a phone that lasts you a couple of days or is having a phone as thick as a credit card really that important to you? I’ll let you think about that and get back to me on that.

I’m getting really tired of manufacturers zoning in on the thickness of phones. When you look at the evolution of smartphones from 2007 to present day you’re looking at the pancake-ification of smartphones: take a rolling pin, roll it over the phones, and there you have the modern day smartphone just like that. Then you have some manufacturers who take the pancake-ified smartphones and slice it in half for the sake of making a headlining feature. I’m looking at you, Samsung.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the A5 and A3 are actually fairly decent smartphones. They’re one of the few smartphones on the market that takes the front-facing camera more seriously at 5-megapixels, which I think is a feature that more manufacturers could zone in on. Both phones also feature microSD card slots that will hold up to 64GB of external memory. And they have a full metal unibody, which a lot of people have been yearning for in a Samsung phone, who typically goes for a smooth (or “cheap”) plastic design. These are the features you want to talk about - the ones that will actually sell the phone.

I also couldn’t help but notice that the phones feature a 2300 mAh battery (A5) and a 1900 mAh battery (A3). Not horrendous by any means, but umm... you know, they could both have been improved if the phones weren’t so hell-bent on being so slim.

I know that crazy super awesome fantastic batteries won’t be available for smartphones for quite some time, but we do know how to extend the life of smartphones currently - by providing more space for the battery, and putting in a physically larger battery. We are past the point where slim phones should be. Really guys. It’s all good now. We can focus on something else.