The things you listed (camera and chip speed) are basically the only things left that these companies can claim is better than last year's model, but only because it's so easy to use synthetic benchmarks and numbers that mean nothing to make them sound like a dramatic improvement despite the fact that we've reached the bottom of the barrel in terms of diminishing returns on the user experience for smartphones in their current form. More megapixels don't matter anymore, CPUs are hardly a limiting factor and yearly gains on their performance are marginal at best, and we have more than enough RAM for pretty much all use cases.
My point is that if these companies insist on re-releasing the same phone every time, maybe they could space it out a little.
A phone with upgradable parts and minimal bloat would be better than any recent phone I've had, but it would also be less profitable for Google so obviously they will avoid that as much as possible.
Middling specs. Huge battery.
I'm still on a Pixel 4a 5G now, because I haven't seen any reason to upgrade.
But I'm a "I want to be able to accidentally run over my phone with a car, shrug, and go get another one" type of person. (Despite the fact I've never actually cracked a screen...)
Battery lasts forever and a day and there's never been a situation where I've felt prevented or limited by the phone.
For me, the addition of satelite SOS introduced on iPhone 14 is a game changer. I do enough out of cell range activity that I carry a SPOT device.
The ability for one more device (and pricy subscription) to be eaten by my phone is fantastic.
For others it might be onboard ai capabilities.
Each incremental hardware update to an iPhone tips the utility scales for someone, and is a completely ignorable change for others. Some people don’t care a bit that the new iPhone has a 2k nit brightness, for others, that is the feature they’ve been waiting for to upgrade.
I don’t pay attention to androids much, but it is pretty rare for iPhone full number bumps not to have a hardware feature that is new.
It makes perfect sense that five non-significant changes can add up to a significant change.
So the suggestion would be 1 or 2 releases instead, after more of the changes build up, instead of 5 releases.
Personally I think yearly is fine for manufacturers that only have a couple models. But they need to actually support things for a reasonable lifetime, and should be mocked for having frequent releases if they don't have a good support lifetime.
The initial SailfishOS phone from Jolla was supported for 7+ years and was also a really nice experience.
This is not a replacement for a SPOT device. It's a backup. You might need to move around reportedly, point it very carefully to find a satellite, coverage isn't great, even minimal tree cover is a problem, etc. Plenty of cases where a SPOT device would be a life saver and where this would not.
I too would like to ditch mine. But I'd rather be alive in a real emergency than die because I broke my leg and can't walk around in a circle pointing the phone right.