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Advertising induced vanity fair rush into expensive smartphones

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It is clear that the industry exploits lemmings, who rushed to buy those toys. Satisfying their urge for small luxuries (the theme Steve Jobs exploited so adeptly). There are several tricks they are playing in this vanity fair game:

64Bit CPUs does not make much sense on smartphones, contrary to Apple selling it as the next best thing since sliced bread. 32-bit CPU can be a bottleneck only for applications needing more than 4GB of RAM. Few phones have 4GB of RAM and it is unclear why you need to much memory on this platform. Usually one gigabyte is an optimal compromise between increase energy consumption and speed of the phone. In a way even 1GB is an overkill (Windows phones use 512 megabyte with great success, despite the fact that Windows 8 for phones is equal or superior in capabilities to Android. They run Office for smartphones. Remember that PC DOS did great things with just one megabyte (megabyte not gigabyte) of memory and Windows 3.1 happily worked in four megabyte address space.
Two core CPUs are greatly preferable to four core. This is another "number racket" ;-). In for core phones battery life is usually inferior to two-core models. In case of four cores you typically can discharge the battery in 1-3 hour by intensive browsing. We need to understand that fancy-shmancy four core CPU has its price and generally is a "vanity fair" game. Two cores are more then enough for any application other then top Android games which nobody uses.
Size of the screen is more important then the resolution. It is almost impossible to browse Internet with less then 4" screen, no matter what resolution it has. 4.5" screen is greatly preferable for this task and 5" is good. Apple iPhone are junk from this point of view despite high resolution. Same is true for Blackberries.
- RAM size is important if you plan to browse Internet. It determines the responsiveness of the phone as with large RAM several applications (and multiple tabs in browser) can stay in memory without swapping to SSD. 1GB RAM is a must for a good Android 4.x phone.
Increased resolution on small screens provides diminishing return on investment. This is the game Apple like to play and which it polished to perfection (despite the fact older iPhones have had 3.5" screen which is too small for internet browsing). It is somewhat similar to Gigahertz game played by Intel against AMD in the past. IMHO the increase of clarity of text from increasing resolution from, say, 854: 480 (MultiPhone_5300_DUO 5.3 display) to 1080 x 1920 pixels on 5.7 screen (Samsung Galaxy Note 3) is marginal. High resolution displays simply kill battery life. And battery life can be question of life and death for smartphones.
Additional megapixels in camera in another marketing game played on lemmings and does not matter much. Fixed lenses on Android phones are of low quality due to form fact and that deficiency can't be compensated by number of pixels. Despite technological advances, fixed lenses and small sensor is a prescription for noisy images, poor tonal range, chromatic aberration and distortion. Samsung has Galaxy S4 zoom phone with retractable optical zoom lens, and Samsung Galaxy Camera which is a merge of smartphone and camera. Both models has good lenses. On a regular smartphone more the four megapixels sensor can can lead to deterioration of image quality as the sensor pixels became too small. As a rule of thumb, in this case any resolution above 5 megapixels should be viewed as just as a marketing trick -- a carrot for clueless lemmings.
Half of functionality of complex devices such as smartphones is not used anyway, so long list of specifications is mostly bragging rights. Many expensive smartphone users are entry level users as such they utilize probably 20% of features. At the same time some features matter quite a lot:
- Voice clarity is very important. Noise cancellation is a must
- Quality of speakers is extremely important. Some "super popular" models have bad speakers. Dolby is desirable.
- Ability to read display on the bright sun is more important then the resolution.
- Speed of playing games on 5" phone does not matter outside (somewhat crazy, but very vocal ;-) 1% of the users.
- Support of LTE matter much less then people assume.

From this point of view Samsung Galaxy S III $386.33 is overpriced (by, say, $150), but Samsung Galaxy S III Mini I8190 8GB looks very reasonable at $225 or so. Still this is a pretty high price for such 4" screen. You can get a comparable phone with 4" screen at $100-$125 price range (Lumia 520).

Also with a notable exception of Nokia (see Lumia 520) you sacrifice some screen size, screen resolution if you go with top tier manufactures. Using second tier manufactures with warranty might be more cost efficient (Huawei is one option, warranty is unclear; Blu sells phones via Amazon with one year warranty).