Smartphones are brilliant little things, giving us the ability to contact one another and offer plenty of helpful applications to make sure we can manage our day to day schedules.

But what about the gimmicks we see in smartphones, the features that are hardly ever used or seem a little bit over the top for a smartphone? Let’s take a look.

Voice Commands

The amount of times I’ve tried to use voice commands number in the thousands and the amount of times I’ve given up nearly matches that number.

No matter how well worded you happen to be, smartphones, especially slightly older ones, made hard work of any command you would try and give it.

They would mistake names, places and numbers over and over until you genuinely felt that speaking in a foreign language might yield better results.

You would often ask to ‘call Mom’ and get sent to your latest text message from Tom, that’s close I’ll admit, but not what I asked for!

Siri, the voice assistant from Apple’s iPhone has proved a massive improvement, and with this type of assistant now being developed further, we might see the end of the voice command problems sooner rather than later.

Facial Recognition

Here’s a great idea, instead of typing in a password, why don’t we have our phones unlock when we look at it!

Unfortunately this was not a great idea, and still proves a more long-winded task than just unlocking a handset normally.

When trying to work facial recognition systems like this, you often end up looking blankly at your smartphone screen for at least 30 seconds until the handset recognises your face.

Plus, if you decide to add a bit of makeup, or if you’re a guy, grow a bit too much facial hair, the system has a bit of a hissy fit and simply decides that you aren’t you anymore.

We’re still waiting for a half-decent facial recognition system to come along, and it wouldn’t be a surprise if we were all still waiting in five years’ time.

Curved Screens

This is a rather new development in the smartphone market and is sure to stick around for a few years.

But is there any real need for a screen that isn’t flat?

No is the simple answer here, it doesn’t really offer extra screen size and will probably feel a bit odd in our pockets and our hands.

It looks pretty cool, I’ll admit that, but it doesn’t offer anything in terms of performance or comfort.

If the screen eventually gets curved enough that when you throw the phone it comes back to you, like a boomerang, then it has a use at least, but at the moment we shouldn’t really test that theory.

Two phones that are trying out the curved screen are the Samsung Galaxy Round and the LG G Flex, and we’ll have to wait and see just how they do before we can truly judge.

You can check out more of the biggest smartphone gimmicks in an article I’ve written for mobilephones[dot]com.