Your posts usually make a lot of sense but occasionally they deserve a head scratching facepalm.
That's probably whenever my posts come from real life experience instead of what people (often sensibly) _think_ must happen
I've helped design a few custom touchscreen devices and phones over the past two decades.
Regional differences and even individual ideas make a lot of difference. This would be especially true in the case of the iPhone where only a very tiny handful of people ever even saw a complete working model before the final version was revealed to the mass public.
So yes, being designed in a very secretive insular and WiFi-rich environment with almost zero field testers would've made the decision to leave out 3G to save money on parts and data plans seem more palatable to a few execs. Ditto for not worrying about cold weather when the designers were stuck in California and the first customer came from Texas.
As for individuals, somewhere there is a single Apple programmer who changed everything by showing Jobs an example of finger flick scrolling. Just imagine if that one person had not done that... the current iPhone could easily instead have a home button surrounded by a cursor pad. That's the way real life works: no magic, just hard work and lucky timing.
This is totally irrelevant. I understand these physical properties but for a mobile phone these are irrelevant. A common range is chosen which is based on universal standards and based on these universal standards, the product is designed. Humid conditions in florida or low temperature in Antarctica is irrelevant.
No sir. The only "universal standards" for building phones are related to the radios and consumer and environmental safety.
Here's a list of such standards that I can think of, off the top of my head:
- Radio standards - required compliance
- Safety standards- required battery materials and temperature protection
- Charging stds - for the EU, universal charger connection
- US State rules - required avoidance of materials mined in the Congo
- Security rules - required avoid certain crypto methods for export
- Toxic standards - required or optional limits on mercury, lead, etc
- Green standards - optional amount of recycleable material, reduction of packaging, etc
There are also universal testing standards that anyone can use to compare their phone to, but they are totally optional.
(Otherwise, iPhones would never have been made of glass instead of a more drop resistant material. They'd have their moisture sensors hidden deep under a removable battery back like every other phone on the planet, instead of being very exposed. They would have heater elements in the LCD so it would work in the Arctic.)
For common example:
- Dust & Water - International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) IEC60529 standards, e.g a phone might be rated "IP54", which means protected from dust (not dust proof though) and protected from splashing water. Optional drop test results can be added, but rarely are for mass consumer items.
- Then you have the infamous MIL-STD-810 which manufacturers can make up their own tests for. So if you read "complies with MIL-STD-810", it's not very meaningful.
In other words, there is no required "standard" that a phone must be designed to for humidity and so forth. Different levels are chosen for different markets and models. That's why say, Verizon makes a big deal out of their Boulder phone which is more hardened against drops and water.
TL;DR - outside of radio and safety standards, there are no required minimum performance standards for phones except for what the maker or customer dreams up.
