Giving me annoying audible notifications that my battery is low. We moved to batteries that degrade when lower than ~40% and got rid of the notifications that let us know your battery is dead…
I hate this. I'd be perfectly fine with network bullshit if it was a universal standardized profile so it actually worked (and I could build a programmable physical remote for it) . But the App Store is flooded with "android TV remotes" that maybe support one specific obscure (unlabeled) TV. I've never found one that works for anything I've owned.
A built-in scripting language. The TI-83 line of calculators have an app programming language that requires you to side-load code from another computer, but they also have TI-BASIC, which allows you to write a wide variety of scripts right on the calculator itself. This should be standard on all ‘smart’ devices. It’s so stupid to have gigahertz of computing power in your pocket and not be able to do anything without writing the app on another machine.
I know Termux for Android exists and that’s a good start, but I’d like to see something baked right into the OS that has access to all my device’s cool sensors and gizmos. The camera, the microphone, the aux port, the usb port, the accelerometer, the bluetooth antenna… all of those things should be exposed to the user. This would be a really good use case for ‘visual’ programming ala Scratch, since you could assemble a script right from a touch screen instead of having to plug in a keyboard.
Try Kustom Widget (KWGT). It’s a scripted mini app maker that exposes a lot of the phone internals, and it keeps expanding. The developer is really responsive to feature requests. I use it with my home weather station and a pi-based sensor network to monitor home security. When I get my solar installed, I’ll add in the status of that system. The major limitation is that KWGT is event driven, with a minimum update interval of once a second. This interval has a major impact on battery life, so the default is one minute.
I rented a Corolla to driver Uber with. What I did for liking songs on spotify was memorize where I’d have to rest my hand in terms of landmarks outside the screen on the dash, so that just dropping my finger down would tap on the heart to like a song.
If you have an Android phone then you can enable a feature called TalkBack that reads up screen content and lets you control your device with touch gestures, so you can use the phone without having to look at the screen.
This combined with wireless earbuds is a real game changer for cheating in school.
I miss phone bodies being plastic. Sure, metal feels premium but you can’t drop your phone without leaving a permanent mark on it. Not to mention how stupid the idea of having glass background is. These days it’s hard to see a phone whose glass is not messed up.
To be honest, peak design for me was Samsung’s Galaxy S2. I loved that device. Thin, very light, perfect size for my hands. I’d kill for something like that but upgraded to modern standards. I’d also love to see devices with physical keyboard. I waited for BB Key3 to come out when they decided to discontinue the line. Ended up with yet another Samsung device.
I’ve ran into Uniherz, among others, when I was looking for a new device with keyboard. Titan is a nice concept, but it’s too big and bulky. Titan Slim wasn’t available at the time, but it seems like a more reasonable device for my use case. However I do worry about lack of software updates and third party support. If either was available, then I wouldn’t have an issue. But this way am on a mercy of their software development team to give me patches in timely manner.
For me the Galaxy Nexus was the peak of enthusiast phone joy. Notification LED was bright and colorful, replaceable battery (to be fair, this was necessary because battery life was so short), unlocked by default, slightly curved front glass made it a pleasure to use as a phone. I also liked the ceramic back of the Essential Phone. The back fingerprint sensors on most phone models were so much more practical than the in-screen options and provided a handy way to lower the notification tray. I miss the litltle touch navigation nubbin on my Droid Incredible, which was handy for scrolling around without touching the screen.
I also miss how open Android was; Google has been gradually cracking down on enthusiast use cases in the name of “security” like text backup no longer being possible for Play Store apps, email access locked down (requiring a security audit for apps to access GMail), scoped storage screwed up a lot of use cases as well.
When was the last time you saw a dedicated front facing flash? I think most of the time these days it’s a quick increase and brightness and your screen turning white.
it’s a small led that flashes if there’s a notification, you could customize it for only certain notifications or even different colors. it’s pretty much been replaced by AOD.
FM receiver on phones + 3.5mn jack was a crucial source of local radio transmissions. I suspect some phones still ship radio receivers but the popular types like Samsungs and iPhones don’t seem to care (or perhaps that competes with their music and podcast markets).
Here in Italy since 2020 it’s not legal to sell a device that has an FM receiver if that device doesn’t also have a DAB/DAB+ receiver, so many companies have been shipping software updates that disabled the FM receiver app even if they were compliant on older phones. Kinda sucks.
That sucks! As long as a device can decode the signals, I don’t see why they should phase it out just to be compatible with DAB+ (especially when infrastructural costs are not a major factor).
IR blaster. I could control just about anything in my house with my old Galaxy S6. Made it so convenient to have a universal remote built into the phone. Especially when you end up in a hotel or at a friend’s house and can’t find a remote.
Oh, my HTC One M8 had that. Really miss it for the IR Blaster and the air pressure sensor. You always had a really good weather station in your pocket.
I used to love having one of these while I was in college. I would use it whenever I went into the cafeteria for lunch and they had Cartoon Network on on the TV and Teen Titans NO was on. Yes, I know what I did. It is the only appropriate title for that steaming pile of radioactive waste.
It was also fun to mess with other public TVs when they thought that nobody would have the ability to change the channel.
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