What I find most annoying regarding cases right now is the trend of rounding the edges of the front bezel and making the screen edge as close to the edge of the phone as possible, making it difficult to put a proper protective case over the phone that also gives you full access to the touch screen.
The battle to make the thinnest, most expensive, most breakable phones and tablets is getting to be really annoying. Were it not for the big plastic case on my phone and tablet they’d both have shattered multiple times over. :-/
I dropped my phone two months into owning it and shattered the back glass. Why does the back of my phone need to be made out of one the relatively few substances that is known to commonly break on impact with the floor? Who the fuck knows? Either way I covered the back in black rubber afterward, but if it was something I was supposed to do beforehand, then what’s the point of making the back pretty?
But if you say you want a more “durable” phone you get something with an inch of rubber all around. I don’t need that. I’ll settle for literally anything that won’t break when dropped on a tile floor from waist height. And a replaceable battery. And before someone says it, multiple phones have been on the market since around 2010 that offered varying levels of water resistance and a replaceable battery. No glue required. Don’t even get me started on notches.
Yes, I did that with my old Nexus 4, shattering the rear glass - a seriously annoying instance of Google copying the worst of Apple. However, unlike Apple, I was able to order a replacement and swap it out myself, though it did have components in it, so it wasn’t an entirely trivial fix.
Things no mainstream phone has AFIK: A protective lip all the way around the edges of the phone that is raised above the height of the screen bezel, preventing the screen from ever touching a flat surface when the phone falls or is placed face down. The higher the lip, the more protective it is on surfaces that are less than perfectly smooth and flat. My phone and tablet cases all have that. None of my phones do on their own - not even the ones from my pile of old cell phones.
So, for me, cases are a requirement. I’m interested in the Samsung “active” phones, but they are limited release phones.
I’m reluctant to give up my Note 4 with it’s flat screen and replaceable battery. (Though finding a reliable replacement battery is harder since it needs NFC in the battery (there’s no NFC in the rear cover, so they put it in the battery) and Anker no longer makes replacement batteries (and finding a reasonably priced, definitely not counterfeit Samsung OEM is tricky).
