For me it’s the notification light you used to find on older phones, was particularly good to know if your phone was charged without picking it up
Physical keyboards. I want a modern Blackberry that actually gets some half-assed OS support. Unihertz Titan was a neat one but had some quirks.
How hard is it to get into the phone game in terms of regulatory stuff? Like if I had the device designed and manufacturing ready to go, what legal hoops would I have to jump through to become a phone maker?
Is it a closed space? Can I enter it? Do I need to register with FTC or get other huge corps to cooperate with me or anything?
for what it’s worth, you can make your phone’s flashlight serve the same purpose as those old notification lights. more harsh and no colors, but it’ll get your attention
Fingerprint sensor on the back of the phone
I’m holding on to my Pixel 4a until it dies because of this.
Hard disagree here. Your fingers are already on the display to use your phone, fingerprint reader in the front makes far more sense.
Often my phone is on a table, all I need to unlock it is touch the screen. No need to pick it up.
I wouldn’t buy a phone with the fingerprint reader in the back.
Meh, I prefer it under the screen personally.
Most features that smart phones had. Most prodomimantly the micro SD card slot, headphone jack and IR blaster.
i wish my pixel 7a had those
I miss IR blaster on my phones, so handy.
There are lots of phones with micro SD and headphone jacks.
My Motorola G60s has either dual sim or sim with SD and a headohone jack. Also has a 120hz screen. Just missing the ol IR blaster
Yeah but they’re all the lower end phones, all the major flagships removed the features three or four versions ago, I don’t want to have to sacrifice camera or screen quality in order to have features that should be built into phones by default
Then dont go for the flagship phones?
What does a $1000 phone do that my $250 phone cant?
Shit this POS im using can even record at 240 fps
I’m going to say that today, even on lower-end phones, the screen, processor and camera are all pretty decent.
I have a Motorola G31, which cost about 200€ one year ago, when I got it. It has a Micro SD Card Slot and a headphone jack. The screen is plenty good (1440p,60hz) (why would you need 120hz or 4k on a phone) And the camera is also quite nice. It has no fancy features, but it takes pictures and that’s all I need.
From my perspective, flagship phones are impractical and overpriced to say the least.
120hz is amazing for scrolling through feeds, it is absolutely night and day. It is like turning off the annoying motion blur in a video game.
Ive been using 144/165hz monitors for years now and it’s jarring going back to 60 hz
I only spent $290 Cdn after shipping and taxes for my moto g60s. I 100% agree, flagship phones are unnessesary.
I miss how gadgets used to be nifty and little. Every time I get a new phone now I have to stretch my fingers more and more just to hold it.
3.5mm headphone jack
People keep going on about that and I get it from the point of not having to charge headphones all the time. But to me that is a very mild inconvenience compared to having to deal with those fucking cables all the time. I hate cables so damn much.
Oh, my problem isn’t with charging them. They actually hold a charge for a super long time.
I’d like bluetooth earbuds a lot more if I could find some that aren’t “smart.” If I put on a beanie, I bump them. If I remove one earbud to converse, I bump it. I’ve not once intentionally used a gesture-based control on an earbud for anything else other than undoing the situation I’ve caused by bumping them. Otherwise, I control everything with my phone. If I’m working out, I just select my playlist, mute notifications, and I don’t have to touch anything after that. Gesture-based earbuds are not for me.
I really don’t think there are dumb bluetooth earbuds, though. At least, I haven’t been able to find any.
And I don’t mind cables as much as you do. I think my favorite earbuds would be those that are connected to each other by a cable, but again – only if they were not smart.
You can turn off the touch controls on Samsung Galaxy Bud Pros, maybe the other galaxy bud models too
I’ll look into it. The only bluetooth earbuds I currently have are an off brand called SYNRGY. Maybe there’s some setting that I’m not aware of to disable touch controls too. I’ve also considered applying a few coats of clear nail polish. Maybe that would work?
I actually don’t know anyone who has the official Samsung ones.
For most of these, turning off touch controls means that when you accidentally trigger the touch commands, it plays a little jingle and pushes a notification telling you that youve disabled touch controls and you need to reenable them.
Completely defeating the fucking point of turning off touch controls, and making me want to wrap my hands around the throat of the idiot who designed that
On my buds if I turn on “block touches” and I touch them nothing happens, no jingle or notification. But yeah that does sound like a stupid feature
Not sure what brand you have but mine you can turn off the functions on the buttons in the app.
Which app? I usually use YouTube or Spotify. I doubt I need a dedicated app for earbuds.
Here’s the crazy thing tho… You could just not use it and choose to use blue tooth still.
The newest Asus zenfone is still rocking it!
This going away has just make the Tiktok tide that much more horrendous. I work in a school. The hallways are nothing but that horrid shit blasting out of hundreds of bad speakers.
You don’t think it’d still be the same even with the headphone jack still there? Wireless headphones and converters for wired headphones do exist, they just don’t care.
There are often enterprise versions that still have it. Like the S10E for example.
I’ve had an S10E for a while and didn’t even know the headphone jacks are no longer the norm!
Clinging to my S9+ so hard.
Not really, it’s mostly only budget phones that have it nowadays. The S10E(which stands for ‘essential’ btw, not ‘enterprise’) is almost 5 years old, not exactly representative of the modern phone market.
Yes, and I’m thinking my next phone will be one of those.
I have a much better time with wired earbuds than with bluetooth.
Forgot my bluetooth headphones the other day on a long trip and the 3.5mm jack saved my rear end.
Just needed to stop at a shop briefly for some cheap plug-in buds and I was no longer listening to babies screaming on the journey. As a bonus, it also didn’t interfere with me charging my phone
I’d like bluetooth earbuds a lot more if I could find some that aren’t “smart.” If I put on a beanie, I bump them. If I remove one earbud to converse, I bump it. I’ve not once intentionally used a gesture-based control on an earbud for anything else other than undoing the situation I’ve caused by bumping them. Otherwise, I control everything with my phone. If I’m working out, I just select my playlist, mute notifications, and I don’t have to touch anything after that. Gesture-based earbuds are not for me.
I really don’t think there are dumb bluetooth earbuds, though. At least, I haven’t been able to find any.
I have a pair of cheap Skullcandy’s that have physical buttons instead of touch sensors. The buttons are basically impossible to use without smooshing the earbud into your ear trying to click it, but it also means it’s really hard to accidentally click them. Probably as close as you can get to dumb Bluetooth earbuds.
I don’t even understand why someone would want controls on their earbuds, much less for it to be such a widespread issue, but honestly I’m just going to make sure my next phone has a 3.5mm jack
Could always get one of the beanies that have bluetooth speakers in 'em. It’ll solve your problem of bumping your earbuds, (though not through a necessarily “good” option). Or, you could use the wired bluetooth headphones like these.
As another alternative, there’s the apple airpods, which, as far as I can tell, have not gestures but some weird-ass pseudo capacitive button that makes a sound when you press them. I did just realize though, that if you have an apple device they’ll automatically pause playback when you take a headphone out (I think), so that may not be your cup of tea. However, if you have an Android, this addition won’t work unless you have an app like CAPods (which you can turn on or off in the app, so no worries there). There’s also the downside of not having access to many features like toggling through the different modes (active noise canceling or whatever other bullshit like that), not being able to natively see the battery of the case or earbuds (though, like with the aforementioned feature, using an app like CAPods you can see it), and some others that I can’t recall at the moment.
Sorry about the length of this reply, I was originally just going to mention the bluetooth beanies as a joke, but I have nothing else to do at the moment, so why not share my experiences? Anywho, that’s my two cents, this could help, it could be utterly useless, you could already know all of this, you may not even read the wall of text, etc. etc… Do as you will with this.
You don’t happen to know if there’s some open-source software for Android that might be similar to CAPods? Tbh I’m probably never going to buy either airpods or the brand-name Samsung ones, but I’d imagine there might be a more universal solution?
Yeah, I don’t actually recommend buying airpods unless you got them for free if you’re an Android user (that’s the only reason I’m using airpods atm).
As to open source, I believe CAPods is, unless you’re referring to an open source app for most headphones (which upon second thought you probably are).
As to that question, CAPods, according to their GitHub page, supports a few Beats devices, this app for Galaxy Buds on Windows/Linux devices, and this one for Huawei Freebuds device(s?).
Overall, the closest I could find was GadgetBridge, which has support (partial or full) for a few Samsung devices, one Nothing, a few Sony, and Bose(?), though, I did keep running into internal server errors, so it might be out of date.
I have the Samsung Galaxy Buds Plus and their app has an option to disable touches, so that’s what I do, because I’m the same as you. I bought them used and have been using them on a daily basis for at least three years and they’re still working well. Might be something to look into. I hope you find something that works for you!
Nobody needs bazillion cameras, a range finder, laser focuses and shit that’s needs to be in a professional camera hardware in a phone. You just need total of 2 cameras and a decent hardware. I don’t want to pay for a extra N cameras in a phone.
Also what the fuck happened to changeable batteries. I had a Samsung note 4 and used that shit until 2019 when I broke it ( had some anger issues that year). Waterproof dust proof excuses can go have an intercourse with their phones. I used that phone in 6 different countries and all kind of weather nothing happened to it.
Absolutely the damn LED. I would love to trade the stupid never-being-used selfie-cam for a damn 5 cent LED.
And swappable batteries. And a headphone-jack. And root by default (imagine you winpc came with no admin-pwd. Lol)… And…
I got all three on my XCover 6 Pro
But probably no easy root? That is imperative for me. I don’t buy gadget i wouldn’t own.
I have no idea honestly. It’s quite esoteric device so probably not.
I had an XCover 4 and hated the specs and the Samsung aspect. Too much bloat for my tastes.
I’m glad there are others still buying these phones though, and the “Pro” makes it sound like it has modern specs!
It’s very much a mid-range device but so was the price. It was still an easy decision since it is literally the only modern smartphone in existence that matched my minimum requirements. I’m coming from LG V20 so I still had to let go of FM-radio, optical image stabilization, IR blaster and the hi-fi DAC.
Root by default is an awful idea.
I used to love customising the notification colour on my old phones, so good.
I miss my headphone jack so damn much, I’m over Bluetooth earbuds breaking constantly and being so damn expensive and low quality.
U could try a usb to jack converter. Looks stupid but at least there’s a jack. Quality sucks anyway as they all use cheap dacs now 😩
I’ve got a suprisingly good pair of USB C earbuds that I found in my mailbox at the moment, but yeah at some point I’ll probably get a DAC
Then buy phones with headphone jacks. Mine has one, I dont buy ones without it.
If it matters for you to have it, dont buy phones that cut it. If models with it keep selling, theyre less likely to ditch it.
I’d rather just buy a DAP than randomly replace a perfectly good phone with one that sucks in comparison.
Lol I only buy jack phones, and if you think they suck you need to shop in places that arent back alleyways
It was a perfectly good MacDonald’s, thank you very much!
But in all seriousness, I just have particular needs that literally can’t be met by anything else.
What I don’t understand is why the notification LED was removed in the first place? It can easily be put under the screen.
The LED was so helpful, and it’s so annoying when I don’t see an important message for hours, because I haven’t used my phone.Because if you can read an LED notification system you have no purpose to pick up the cellphone.
Cellphones are not designed FOR YOU. They are designed by marketeers for you to use.
Once you realize this, all the anti-consumer shit makes sense.
I’m guessing… they don’t want us deciding whether to engage with our phones, they want us looking at them more. If that means less convenience for us we can get fucked
Pretty much everything the Galaxy S5 had
- Notification LED
- IR blaster
- Replaceable battery
- Headphone jack
- Heart rate monitor
- SD card slot
I currently use a FP3 which has 4 out of the 6 features above, which I feel is the best we’ll get right now.
Admittedly the Heart rate monitor is more of a gimmick nowadays, especially that it’s standard and automatic on most smartwatches and sports watches. Back then when stuff like the Sony Ericsson LiveView and LG W100 watches were popular, they did not have heart rate sensing built in
IR blaster! I miss that feature. When my wife was sick in the hospital they had a TV with 10 stupid channels. But I found that the TV had a USB post. So I used a flash drive and my phone as the remote to let her watch TV shows while she was stuck in bed.
Privacy.
Try to let go of Google everything. Start by ditching Chrome and Chromium based browsers
I switched to duck duck go who knows how many years ago. Haven’t looked back.
Can’t even remember when I started using Firefox, but that was probably around the time when Opera became popular. Before Crome existed, I was already on FF and never regretted staying there. At that point, I was already somewhat aware of privacy matters, so switching to Chrome seemed completely stupid to me.
Same, but I find for about 1% of sites I have to load them in chromium. Just works much better
Have you tried not shitting with the door open?
That’s funny. Every time somebody says “If you have nothing to hide, what are you worried about,” I reply, “Do you shit with the door open?”
But now the door isn’t just open. It feels like Uncle Sam is pissing between your legs.
Tactile buttons, all my homies hate cap-sense
Headphone jacks
AodNotify almost replaced the LED for me. It always locked up my display black every few days so had to stop using it.
My phone is 4 years old and this sounds like a horror story to me. I have no idea what I’m going to do next.
Replace the battery and use it for 4 more years.
My issue is that I no longer get updates for a over a year now, I’d be happy using it until it no longer works otherwise.
Might be able to get a more updated ROM, idk if Xda is still the best place for that kind of thing or not.
Man I did this to my S10, forgot, dropped it in water. Bummer. I wanted to have it at least 5 more years.
I had to use my Moto G5s Plus again for 2 weeks when my current phone (Poco X3 Pro) was broken. It made me realize how usable it could still be, it’s just that the battery is basically dead. Also the micro-USB connector is so worn it doesn’t work with some cables anymore, and it is soldered-on. Well, OK, there’s a few more problems. It only has 32GB of storage, screen gets burn-ins within 3 minutes now, the main camera’s focus is mostly non-functional (it just makes weird noise while shaking the view, but if you hit it just right it can be used), it’s very laggy, it keeps losing cell signal,…
OK, it does have a few more issues, but I could still use it if both the micro-USB and battery were fine. The bezels and navigation button/fingerprint scanner are a large enough positive. But I can’t do micro soldering. I don’t even have money for a soldering heat gun…
Headphone jack, bigger batteries, front facing speakers, SD card slot, IR blaster, magnetic field to let you use your credit cards at check out from your phone (MST) - THROUGH THE ACTUAL CARD READER SO THEY DIDN’T NEED GOOGLE/APPLE/SAMSUNG WALLET WHATEVER THE FUCK. I also agree that I miss the light too lol
That said, here’s what I can’t stand in newer phones: camera bumps. Unless you’re a droid x or Nexus get that rocking on any flat service while I’m trying to type shit outta here. I don’t give a shit about my cameras but if they need to be that fat and advanced, just make the rest of the phone that fat and give me the extra battery instead of making a tiny stovetop in the corner. Fuckin weird and dumb. Also camera cutouts in the screen, put that shit under the screen or set it next to a front facing speaker on the bezel. Also bezel-less phones, I know we’re trying to fill our phones with screens but my fat palms don’t care about that when I’m accidentally touching everything on the side while holding it
My personal pet peeve is pre-installed, un-removable software and apps. My current mobile phone for example has apps that link to twitter, facebook, amazon etc. none of which I will ever use, but you can somehow not delete them. Why do I need to have that virtual junk in my phone?
I was going to mention the IR blaster. I had one on my LG G4 & G5 if I remember correctly. It was so cool! I was so bummed when they stopped having it.
What was it for?
Changing the channel on tvs in public spaces mostly.
