I am going to be buying a new smartphone in the next month or so.  It’s either going to be an Android or iOS device and I explained last week why I won’t be buying a Blackberry.  There are a few things that I need my device to be able to do, and any smartphone that falls short will not be considered.

A 4-Inch Screen or Bigger

Screen size is something that is fairly important to me.  I read a lot of articles using my smartphone and occasionally like to watch a video or two.  For both of these activities, screen size is key.  My current phone, a Samsung Galaxy Gio, only has a measly 3.2 inch screen and I find myself using my iPod touch for some things whenever I am in range of a Wi-Fi network.  The 3.5 inch screen that is used by both iPods and iPhones is much nicer but bigger would be even better.  I think the 5-inch-plus screen size of the Samsung Galaxy Note is too big for me and I think my sweet spot is somewhere between 4 and 4.5 inches.

There are a few devices that fall within this range on the Android platform, but the current iPhone, the 4S, is too small for me.  For Apple to catch my eye, the next iPhone needs to have a 4 inch screen or bigger.

A Good Quality Camera

Eight megapixels or so should do the trick.  I want to be able to take some pictures with my smartphone and not have them look like they where taken through the eye of a drunken streetwalker.  The 3.2 megapixel on my Galaxy Gio is good enough for taking pictures of meals and uploading to Instagram, but for anything more it doesn’t quite cut it.  The 8 megapixel camera of the iPhone 4S is kind of my baseline for a new smartphone.  Anything less and I’m probably looking elsewhere.

The front-facing camera is less important to me and simply having one is good enough for me.  It will be interesting to see what kind of camera the next iPhone sports.

Something New

I want my new smartphone to have something that no other smartphone has.  It could be something like “liquid metal” (I have no clue what it does other than sound cool but it could be in the next iPhone) or Apple’s Siri that was exclusive to the iPhone 4S.  The built in projector of the Samsung Galaxy Beam is also a really cool new feature.  With the way technology progresses and companies steal ideas from each other; any exclusive feature is likely to be copied.  But who cares?  At least I will be the only one out of my friends for those first 2 weeks.