I think peoples' expectations for year to year progress in smartphone hardware are way out of whack with reality. Especially with Apple who it seems are being penalized in some peoples' opinions for having good hardware and software in place years ago.
I just don't see how it's apt to compare the year to year changes between a fairly mature product line (iPhones) to one that until a year and a half ago was a work in progress (Samsung's Galaxy phones). Of course the latter is going to see more change over the last while because it had a lot further to travel to even catch up to the iPhone, let alone surpass it. I'll be interested to see how much incremental progress Samsung can make on the Galaxy line after 5 years of it being out and whether their feet will be held to the fire in the same way. My guess is people will quickly realize that innovation and progress in technology is not linear.
That's not to say comparisons aren't valuable or that criticisms of Apple aren't warranted; but articles like the Economist one above where they give one of the 2 or 3 best smartphones in the world a 5 out of 10 rating simply because it didn't live up to their ridiculous expectations are silly. The thesis of the article seems to be that the iPhone 5 belies Apple's reputation as an innovator, but they completely ignore that since the 3G or 3GS, pretty much every version has simply been incremental upgrades (better processor, better camera, slightly updated software).
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