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Five features the iPhone 8 needs to have (but probably won't get)

Here are the top unlikely features I'd like to see baked into the next iPhone.
Written by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Contributing Writer
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Image: Sarah Tew/CNET

While Apple likes to focus on making new iPhones lighter, thinner, and faster, I'd rather the iPhone 8 get these five features.

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#1: Fast charging

Having to leave an iPhone plugged in for hours is unacceptable. There are plenty of high-end -- and not so high-end -- smartphones that can get a decent charge in a quarter of an hour, and it's time for Apple to add this to its premium smartphone.

#2: Shatterproof screen

There's no doubt that Gorilla Glass is tough, but it's still glass. Glass has a habit of shattering. And with rumors suggesting that Apple is putting glass on the back of the iPhone too -- to support wireless charging -- there will be twice as much glass to break.

A sapphire display would be awesome, but a seriously toughened display such as that found on the Motorola Droid Turbo 2 would do fine.

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#3: microSD card slot

Apple uses tiered storage as a way to ask big bucks for what is essentially a few dollars worth of extra storage. Also, the lack of an expansion slot means that if owners hit a storage wall, well, it's time to buy a new iPhone with even more storage.

I mean, if the tenth-anniversary iPhone 8 is $1,000 or more, then Apple should be bold and stop nickel-and-diming buyers for more storage.

Alternatively, you can add your own microSD card slot ... sort of.

#4: Higher-resolution camera

Twelve megapixels isn't really that much when it comes to a camera, and despite the fact that the Plus version of the iPhone has a twin-camera arrangement, it's time for Apple to push the megapixel envelope with the next release.

I know that image quality isn't down to just the number of megapixels, but at the end of the day, the more detail captured by the camera, the more detail will be in the photo, and the more processing and refining that can be done.

#5: More system RAM

While 3 gigabytes of RAM as found in the latest iPhones isn't bad, more RAM would allow for better and smoother multitasking, as well as allowing the operating system to process higher megapixel photos and juggle bigger files with less of a performance hit.

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