- A good operating system. (Sadly both Android and iOS are shit nowadays.)
- Cheap price. I'm thinking.... $200 USD max!
- Bend resistance. Bending (even non deformation) is insidious as those stresses can break electrical connections on PCBs and stuff. It's a big reason we use underfill.
- Good security. Yes I consider me losing my data if I forget the password to be a green flag. Cryptography is a wonderful thing!
- VoLTE support.
- Headphone jack.
- SIM card slot. (I hate how that's something I have to ask for now. What is this? 2005 where CDMA phones were still a sizable chunk of the masses?)
- Two sdcard slots. One inside the sim tray. The other sits behind a flap. The one behind the flap is for shuffling files between places.
- USB-C. With power delivery and video output. Probably wouldn't ever use the video output, but I have a USB-C dock with an HDMI port, you never know if I'd use it.
- Trusted Platform Module. Or, well, on iOS devices it's called the "secure enclave". It's the hardened microcontroller core shoved inside the SOC that stores and manages cryptographic stuff. Like password keychains! And two factor authentication stuff! And it's hardened against hardware attacks!
- Competent camera. Doesn't need to be anything wiz-bang. It needs to be able to produce usable photos under crappy levels of light. I take a lot of reference photos. I don't need that "The viewfinder looks crisp when you press the shutter but the resulting photo is blurred from the phone shifting slightly" crap.
- Image stabilization for the cameras. I also kinda just have shakey hands.
- Wireless charging. Not because I'd constantly use it, but because charging ports eventually wear out and fail.
- Cold swappable batteries. -Unlockable bootloader.
......Imagine being a worker at a mobile phone service retailer. Most of the costumers who come in ask about reasonable stuff like nice screens and lots of storage.
And then one day some autistic trans woman comes in and she's inquirying about bootloaders, USB Video Device Class support, NAND encryption, etc. A bunch of hidden/mundane features. The "not flashy" stuff.
And the worker who's there is just like "By god what drugs is this woman on?"
I agree, but I'm pretty sure that's the whole point? It's just all about the Root of Trust and Attestation (Third-Party/Remote specifically, you can do attestation with your own keys). At least that's how I understand it.
If you could use your own firmware and fuse/rewrite your own key material you would still have all of the security benefit. but without* "trust" to the vendor(You still have to trust that you did not get sent a tiny CIA agent embodied in silicon still), while you can still kinda do that with modern TPMs but that is not how it's currently designed and with firmware still being completely locked down. if you would consider being able to overwrite the root keys physically unauthenticated a security flaw (hitlerparticle)(Bricked when stolen (Not always on android, different thing), keys still secure!) there can still exist a user authentication or in this hypothetical even fuse the keys yourself (There are some open source secure elements like this I'm pretty sure, so not so hypothetical... but not ideal still).
BUT. You would lose the main point of TPM to verify from someone else that the chain of trust to the vendor is intact (DRM) and not tampered with (By You!!) and is the main issue of TPMs and where everything just completely sucks.
Secure elements can be completely free and open, but not the Trusted Computing Group, Trusted Computing and TPM.
But you can make the most of a bad situation like with GrapheneOS and the Pixel SE, you can't write your own firmware to it but there is insider attack prevention (Prevents: vendor firmware update while unauthenticated, with keys remaining the same) but you still don't own the device so they could still hypothetically one day refuse anything booting not google signed for later updates. and it also wont pass "google certified" SafetyNet attestation, the "just completely sucks". but it's the best there is, and a majority of the others are cranks, hacks and/or annoying EU perverts... lol...
I also basically agree with all the features plus NO HOLE-PUNCH FRONT CAMERA >:( and also a display that's not store isle TV "enhanced" color quality.