Why no one will make a flagship rugged smartphone

In almost every topic that talks about secure smartphones, there are commentators who worry about

for the fact that the device is expensive, and itscharacteristics are very far from models of comparable cost. And no reasonable arguments stop those who want to get a smartphone with flagship characteristics, moisture protection of at least IP68, shock resistance according to MIL-STD standards, a ten-ampere-hour battery and, of course, an eyelet for a carabiner. Of course, this mythical smartphone should not have brand and niche markups. In general, we could finish on the last argument, but in this article we will analyze the question of why secure smartphones appear the way they enter the market, and not at all the way extreme lovers would like to see them.

Once upon a time, on the net, I came across a comicanalysis of the reasons for the impossibility of the existence of Santa Claus "If Santa is alive, then he is already dead." The short text clearly explained why a mythical creature cannot be a part of our reality, in which the laws of physics operate: the monstrous speeds and masses that are needed in order for Santa Claus to give gifts to all good kids in one Christmas night will be killed with a guarantee and Santa and his reindeer, no matter how fabulous they are. In the same way, the harsh reality will kill any attempt to create the ultimate secure flagship. And that's why.

Frame

Develop the body and chassis of an impact-resistant apparatusan order of magnitude more difficult than creating similar parts for a conventional apparatus. If you declare reliability under certain loads, then you need, firstly, to achieve these characteristics, and secondly, to obtain certificates from the relevant laboratories. The first represents the complexity of the material plane - either the weight will increase, or more expensive materials will have to be used. The latter is difficult for a mass model, because it will be necessary to look for other suppliers, and possibly other processing equipment. Excess weight in the case is also very bad, since even an unprotected flagship already weighs at the limit of comfortable use. The moment with laboratories seems harmless, if you do not remember about the tight time limits that are set by the market in the release of actual devices. Laboratories for certification work slowly, in the wrong rhythm. In addition, the presence of a certificate creates a problem for the company with the examination of a damaged device, simply wrapping a model with traces of moisture penetration or mechanical damage will no longer be possible. This causes some brands to refuse to certify their models altogether: in fact, you get protection, but there is no evidence of this.

Oukitel WP2 received an ebonite plastic case (photo from the manufacturer's website)

Massiveness is also an important issue.body and chassis. The size of a person’s hand varies widely, but the averages are close for everyone, so making the device brutal, but very thick or wide, worsens its ergonomics. This means that the hull reinforcements will grow not only outward, but also inward, thereby eating up the usable volume. At the same time, such a case will present a problem in terms of antenna placement, and, most importantly, heat dissipation: thick plastic or rubberized surfaces will act as a heat insulator, which will impose significant restrictions on the use of the chipset.

Even something as simple as minimizingholes and the absence of weakened zones (cutouts for connectors and buttons significantly worsen the rigidity of the case), leads to the fact that the smartphone will not have a flagship experience. At a minimum, the tricks of acoustics to create the illusion of clear and surround sound will be seriously limited.

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Screen

The largest part of a smartphone in terms of area givesits developers have the hardest choice. Install a modern high-quality screen, covering it with additional protective layers, or take a model with not such high brightness, contrast and image saturation, but not have problems with impact resistance. The first option is almost never chosen. Simply because the installation of additional protection kills the quality of the picture that the user will see. The second option saves money, but deprives you of the feeling that you have an expensive model in front of you. However, the banal requirement to cover the screen with frames so that it cannot get hit in the end already automatically throws you away from the familiar experience of frameless and rounded panels. In fact, no one makes such panels for the mass market; you will have to order a non-standard solution. This will weed out small producers, and large ones will force them to spend a little more “extra” money.

Ulefon Armor X5 Pro is claimed asconforming to the MIL-STD 810G standard, but the manufacturer directly on the site offers to additionally protect its screen with a "hydrogel film" or "liquid NANO-glass" (photo from the manufacturer's website)

Camera

At first glance, the simplest detail - takemodule from the flagship and just put it in a protected case. However, no. Above, I already mentioned the problem of a protected case - there is not enough space in it, not in any part of it you can just make a hole. It turns out that the introduction of a large photographic module is already associated with certain problems - the camera competes for space with other elements. Considering that a smartphone for extreme sports, in addition to a good main camera, should have very good zoom and macro, the choice of ready-made solutions is even more reduced, and the price continues to grow.

Another aspect is the strength of the photographicmodule. Protecting it from external factors is simple, but vibrations and shocks are not something that the optical stabilization system will like. Nobody designs periscopic cameras with the expectation that their carrier will be dropped from the height of an adult onto concrete. That is, either create a separate R&D department that will deal with the adaptation of cameras with increased impact resistance, or come up with some kind of internal shock absorption system, for which, most likely, there will be no place. Or choose what is simpler, but goodbye, dreams of premium and the level of flagship devices.

Blackview BV9900 Pro even got an IR camera, butits main module is Sony IMX582, which can be found in POCO X3 Pro and Xiaomi Redmi Note 10, devices 20 thousand rubles cheaper (photo from the website of the Russian representative office of the company)

Chipset

Same story as with the camera.It seems to take and put what you need, but there is a nuance. And not alone. I have already mentioned the problems with heat dissipation through a thick case made of materials with low thermal conductivity. The impact-resistant case will be a good heat insulator, which will help the protected smartphone achieve good performance at low temperatures. In all other situations, the developer will have to think about how to organize heat dissipation, what to sacrifice, where to place radiators and how to organize the discharge of excess calories from the case to the outside. Considering that the chipset is not the only one in a smartphone that heats up more than necessary, there will be considerable competition. A task that is practically unsolvable in a purely hardware way.

AGM Glory Pro will cost 90 thousand rubles, but it will “please” with the Snapdragon 480 chipset, which is positioned by Qualcomm as a 5G solution for budget devices (photo from the company’s official website)

The bad old throttling is a well-known way out ofsituations. When asked if the consumer wants to have a cool processor, but without the opportunity to realize their performance, different marketers answer in different ways. However, one way or another, when developing software, you will have to spend a lot of time optimizing the chipset. An order of magnitude better than in a regular smartphone, where the layout is not so tight on the chassis, where there is no need to carefully fill everything with a compound. And where there are no amplified wireless antennas.

Connection

An important factor influencing the entire developmentsecure smartphone, which will be actively used in nature, is the need to ensure the best quality of reception and transmission of wireless signals. First of all, GPS and mobile communication modules. The navigation component for an “off-road” smartphone plays a much greater role, and it will often be impossible to use auxiliary data, because even the base station signal may be completely absent. A good antenna and a good GPS module not only cost a lot, but they also take up space and generate heat. The same story with mobile communications - a standard modem is optimized more for urban use, where the signal is good in most cases. Programmatically, a modern smartphone to the last will cling to the possibility of data transfer, and not voice communication. In an emergency far from civilization, the opposite is necessary. And even better, since we have AI, load it with the ability to recognize the situation in which the device found itself. This will significantly add to the premium and usability, but will complicate the development.

Software

In general, if some of the top brandsreally got confused with the creation of premium-level secure devices, then first of all he should have dealt with software. Do not remake the launcher and add a bunch of unnecessary programs to the shell, which many Chinese can handle, but create two modes in the smartphone: urban and tourist. Modern AI capabilities in this regard would be very useful. A smartphone on top-end hardware would be good for everyday use, and outside the city it would demonstrate much more confident signal reception, excellent navigation and miracles of autonomy even with a standard battery. However, the battery in such a device is always and everyone wants as capacious as possible.

The Ginzzu brand does not offer smartphones with Android OS newer than version 8.1 on the Russian market at all (in the photo, the RS9602 model is from the official website of the company)

Battery

Last on the list in the fight for a place in the corps andheat sink, but one of the first in importance for an “off-road” smartphone is the battery. Actually, if we are talking about secure devices, then batteries of 5000 mAh and more have become the standard for them. Moreover, there is exactly the same story as with megapixels in cameras. The consumer wants as many ampere-hours as possible, and no explanation that due to better optimization of hardware and software, a better product can get by with a less capacious battery, will not convince him. On the other hand, capacity is capacity, it cannot be too much if we are talking about a model that can be hundreds of miles from the nearest outlet.

Oukitel K15 Plus is a rare owner of a 10 Ah battery, most of its competitors have half the battery capacity (photo from the company's official website)

So far, breakthroughs in lithium battery technologydid not happen, and the larger the capacity, the greater the weight and size of the battery. In order for the charging time of such a battery to correspond at least to the worst indicators of the “civilian” flagships, the charge must be at least 30 watts. And this is another source of heating. Wherever you throw - everywhere a wedge. Everything needs as much space as possible and the best possible heat dissipation.

By the way, a thick body will “give” ourthe hypothetical secure flagship has another problem - poor wireless charging. There is no way to get the induction coils in the battery and charger as close as possible to each other, and the efficiency of wireless charging directly depends on the distance between them. It doesn't really matter if you're buying a relatively inexpensive device, but when it comes to flagships...

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Development timeline

Another important point when we talk aboutflagship devices are the presence of all the latest in them. Almost all models that were based on outdated hardware, but were positioned as flagships, failed in sales. It didn’t matter what “chips” they had, how much money the companies burned to promote them. Save the model on the old iron can only low price and the rejection of the flagship positioning. Why did I immediately start talking about obsolete hardware? Yes, because the development period for a protected model will be longer than that of a conventional smartphone. For a flagship, this is from 8 months or more. Yes, there are models with "intermediate" flagships, but they do not have commercial success, and two protected flagships from the same brand in one year is generally a direct path to a complete failure in the market. For the development of a protected model, the terms will increase, if not at times, then at least for several months.

This is assuming that a large company quitsmaximum effort to develop the device. And do you know what she will achieve in this way? The fact that its protected flagship will debut right in the middle of the announcements of the next generation top devices. In more realistic scenarios, the time-to-market lag will be about a year, i.e. the device will be released along with the first models on the next generation of hardware. In general, it would be tolerable if it were not for the price issue.

Cost of

The price of the device on the shelf is the main sellerfactor of any model. In a crisis or not in a crisis, the buyer is not ready to pay the cost of the goods, which he considers unfair. And at this point we come to the last nail in the coffin of the protected flagship. There is only one way to solve all the problems listed above - by investing more effort, money and time. They can pay off only with mass sales and high sales costs. With mass sales, everything is very clear - by definition, a device is niche, no one can sell it on a scale larger than, for example, the Galaxy Fold. At the same time, if flexible smartphones act as a technology demonstrator, then the whole complexity of a secure smartphone will not be visible to anyone. An expensive flagship from an A-brand will have a look that will easily repeat any B-brand, investing an order of magnitude less in development and not chasing any technology. The buyer will not receive a product that screams expensive and unique. Accordingly, there will be a category that clearly understands what it buys and why.

Such an audience is always, in principle, small,but in the case of a protected flagship, it will turn out to be completely vanishingly small. The device will cost not just expensive, but very expensive. Only its components will cost 20-30% more in the end, so there will be an increase of 50% or more on the shelf to the price of a regular flagship. At the same time, according to its characteristics, the device will be last year's. Yes, these characteristics will be enough for the next 3-4 years, but what will happen to software support? Android flagships are actively updated for 2-3 years, from which a year can be deleted immediately - it will be spent on bringing the smartphone to the shelf. There is a year or two left. A year or two for a model that costs one and a half flagships! Not the most rational purchase, agree.

Santa is dead

As you can see, if you are only in the very firstapproaching, you start the project of a protected flagship, it already becomes clear that there are a number of almost insurmountable difficulties on its way. They can be circumvented by releasing devices that will be a little more secure than ordinary smartphones. This is exactly what Samsung did at one time, offering good models in the Galaxy Active line. But another move turned out to be the most popular - to add moisture protection to the flagship. It is an order of magnitude easier to do this than to create a shock-resistant structure, and the wow effect of the fact that the device does not die from spilling a glass of juice on it is no less. Sony tried to refuse a high-quality screen in favor of greater durability, once again demonstrating to the world the fact that we love mainly with our eyes.

It is also important that no matter what protectionnor possessed the apparatus, it can be trite to lose. And to do this being in nature is much easier than in the city. And in principle it is impossible to create a phone that will survive anything. Accordingly, there is no certainty that a protected flagship will live for 3-4 years, therefore it makes no sense to pay 3-4 times the cost of a simpler device for it.

So a secure flagship is an examplea device that is hard to make and even harder to sell. This means that it can appear on the market only in one case - if someone continues to believe in Santa contrary to the laws of physics.