IR blaster for smartphones. I still have one on mine and I can use it for tons of stuff, not just as a TV remote.
I even worked for a company who made lots of IR based products (taps/faucets, accessibility stuff) and it was amazing how many people had to buy the dedicated remotes for these products for extra money.
When I asked them if their phone has an IR blaster, so they could just download a free app and use it instead. “I have an iPhone” was the most common answer.
I don’t know about the ID and drivers license, but banking is no problem as you do not root the phones anymore. You can even use the google wallet if you want. I think the only thing not there is the google safetyNez verification, even tho you can install apps through the playstore. So I don’t know if the apps can determine if there on an official build or not.
Edit: Please take my words carefully as I’m only in the experimentation phase myself. All I really can say is: my banking app and PayPal work no problem
I agree the software is bad. All my phones bought after nexus 4 was made by Xiaomi. They give option to unlock bootloader and flash custom rom.
Not all the phones get official lineage os support, but almost all snapdragon versions get custom rom support.
I gave my Redmi Note 4 to my mom, which is 6 years old and running latest OS with recent security patches. None of the other OEMs were supported upto this period (just give exception to Samsung Galaxy 2).
I do have a Xiaomi phone and as I mentioned I am actively using the IR blaster, but the majority of regular users will not even think about checking the specs when buying new tech.
They will just go for the latest iPhone or the current trending android bestseller.
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
And then they completely bork the file system with separate storage for every app. Nobody needs a dozen different folders for storing pictures, with no way to combine them.
IR blaster! Iiss 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.
IR blaster was the shit. Back then, there was an app called beep and go (I think) that held the barcodes for your loyalty cards. For someone that collected them like baseball cards, it was really handy.
Anyway, Samsung actually had the ability to transmit the barcode via the IR blaster which some scanners could read if they couldn’t read the barcode on the phone.
It was awesome!
I agree that the heart rate monitor was a bit of a gimmick though.
iPhones are far too big and have too many huge cameras for me. Everything requires a subscription or some login to do anything. Applications and operating systems are updated at the whims of CEOs while the job of UX designers is de-prioritized. Software updates keep breaking established workflows. I can no longer rely on devices or apps to maintain a consistent experience from one year to the next. It’s just been years and years and years of disappointment and stress as technology changes for the worse.
All this is pushing me towards a more unplugged lifestyle. Which is a bit ironic given how it adds more complexity with the need to own and travel with more things. A bag of five ‘things’ that always work regardless of network connection is better than a little tablet that could crash or die or be updated at any moment and having a significant impact on your lifestyle.
There’s just no fucking zen anymore. I feel like I’m living inside a simulation built by the same people who brought us Windows 95.
One part about this you may be surprised about is that the random updates to software tend to be pushed by UX designers in my experience.
They want to do “something”, and that’s something often is changing something that currently works. Or pushing for design that goes against UI best practices because it’s their pet.
As a former UI I artist, I wholeheartedly disagree. The interfaces and operating systems that I’ve struggled with recently go against human interface guidelines. It’s more likely that middle management is creating projects to make themselves seem more relevant. Or, in the case with Apple, my assumption is that upper management is trying to push all their other devices towards synergy with Vision Pro - a product which has yet to hit market and find acceptance.
iPhones are far too big and have too many huge cameras for me.
It’s the same outside of the Apple ecosystem too. It’s as if everything is tied together. If I want a high end phone with nice build quality and a good, high resolution + high refresh rate display, I’m usually forced to also pay for 3-4 different cameras that I might never use. If I want to constrain myself to a more reasonable price, I’m limited to either a last year flagship or a current midrange model.
I kinda miss the simplicity of Windows 95. Pre-OSR2, the last version before the integration of Internet Explorer, one of the last few versions before the analytics era, where everything you do is collected, catalogued, compiled into data that drives further UX change (which A/B test did the best this week? Cool, now let’s change it up again). The last one where I could reasonably understand every process that was running. And it was even possible to shut almost every one of them off in the name of giving every CPU cycle to the processes that I wanted to run. (Back when 350 mhz was as good as I could get)
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.
Um, like 85% of my work and 40% of my hobbies utilize those features extensively so, yes, people do need those things. Literally for science. Them being baked into base design keeps costs down on tiny budgets. It also helps out students and citizen scientists who don’t have to go buy specialized gear- it’s already on whatever they have.
And that translate to us normal plebs in what way? And how much of a population you/your job/your requirements representative of the general population?
It seems my logical comment cause some of you camera junkies to get butt hurt. Good to know why even a below 200$ smartphone is coming with 5 different cameras.
Do you think users actually have to pick the camera and select rangefinder before taking a photo?
For the average user, which doesn’t mean teen social media user, the added cameras let them take better pictures. My mother in law doesn’t know or care how many cameras her phone has. It takes a good picture of her grandchildren.
That’s all that matters. The extra cameras and rangefinder is what makes that possible without her needing to know anything. The extra cameras are completely transparent to the end user. They don’t have to know or care.
Let’s see my old ass Samsung note 4 took the same quality of pictures with one camera module. Without the need of the range finder, laser focuses and bazillion extra cameras with different lenses. Somehow it managed.
Yes the average plebes like me doesn’t choose the fucking range finder and you don’t need bazillion cameras on your phone to took a decent picture. Your subjective experience with your in-laws doesn’t change the fact that you don’t need those extra bells and whistles.
Those extra cameras doesn’t bring ease of use or better picture quality neither your arguments in this discussion.
Let’s see my old ass Samsung note 4 took the same quality of pictures with one camera module.
Same quality as what? Because there are objective, reproducible tests that I can show where my Pixel 7 pro outperforms the Samsung note 4.
The note 4 has no optical zoom, where my Pixel has a 5x optical zoom. This gave me good photos of my son on stage in orchestra which would be a few pixel blur on a Samsung note 4.
The note 4 has no wide angle camera so getting that Christmas dinner table photo with everyone in the photo was an easy pinch zoom-out instead of attempting to stand in the far corner of the room and still missing some people.
Average users want their phones to take a good photo. I linked proof of that in the other reply. Average users don’t care what goes on behind the scenes for that to happen.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s one camera or 5. It doesn’t matter whether there is a rangefinder. What matters is the photo.
You claim to be an average user yet your obsession on how a good quality photo should be achieved, rather than how it is currently done is something only a technical user would care about.
Thank you for proving me right. Thank you for useless arguments and thank you for thinking that 24% of android users are a proof that 100% of android phones should have unnecessary camera tech. And thank you for letting me know why we have so many cameras on our phones.
It must be nice to have such an amazingly ignorant and stubborn mentality to just respond to what you think it’s instead of the reality. I wish you a happy new year and never to be came across in this world with you.
I actually use the rangefinding and other cameras quite a lot and im not anywhere near professional. The other day I took some measurements of my bike all through my camera without having to figure out weird geometries with a tape measurer. I can also use it to measure rooms to see if furniture will fit and conversely i can measure furniture on the fly. I had my doubts about using it at first but its suprisingly accurate
I don’t use them and I’m pretty sure overwhelming percentage of the user base doesn’t use them either. Because I’ve yet to see an argument I’m buying this phone because it has a range finder. All these extra cameras hardware are forced onto us because of the social media/selfie craze. As for your personal usage case I can understand you’re using range finder and measuring options but they are not utilizing different cameras. They are using phone sensors like gyroscope, acceleration, gps and algorithms not your different cameras.
As a side note you yourself admit that it’s not something you needed but found out and did even trust it.
Because I’ve yet to see an argument I’m buying this phone because it has a range finder.
No one looks for a rangefinder because they don’t need to care about the technical details. They only know that one phone takes better photos than another. That it’s because the phone has a laser rangefinder doesn’t matter.
No one looks for one because they don’t need it. Companies adding extras doesn’t mean it’s better for the end user nor they need it in case they are your in-laws and what good picturs of their grandchildren… Neither your bullshit argument about people don’t look for range finders because it’s already in the product.
WOW… 24% you don’t say!!! It must mean that remaining 76% doesn’t give a fuck and paying extra for the shit they don’t use or don’t need… How am I so blinded by my ignorance to see this!
24% of Android authority users. 24% of the most technical users in the world still pick the camera as the only important feature they look at in a new phone.
Did you even read the fucking page you’re sharing you ignorant dumbell? There are 4565 votes are cast at the time of my reading in that linked articles pool. Out of that 61% said they don’t care about the camera. 39% said it’s most important. In what way this is about most technical users or majority of the users you lying ignorant bastard? Let’s say this subjective pool is exactly representative of all the fucking smart phone users. How come 39% is the majority of the users? Your whole argument started with average users needing many cameras to have good pictures and turned into 24% of most technical users are wanting a good camera. Which is your argument you ignorant fuck?
How hard it’s to say that you like having many cameras and be done with that instead of giving these bullshit arguments and trying to prove something that’s only true to your subjective case and hoping that I’m an idiot like yourself and can’t see the difference between your bullshit and the reality?
Why the fuck are you arguing about wide lenses, different lenses while they are different camera modules with different optics and they all have different specs and pixels counts. You talk about technical necessities yet you have no clue about what the fuck you’re talking about. Most technical users my ass…
Just arguing with you is making me lose IQ points. Please I beg of you kindly fuck off.
In what way this is about most technical users or majority of the users you lying ignorant bastard?
iPhone users represent the majority of US phone users. How many iPhone users are going to read and reply to an Androidpolice poll?
Why the fuck are you arguing about wide lenses
You claimed your Note 4, with a single sensor and lens system on the back, is better. You claimed you didn’t see a need for multiple cameras. I explained, (and can offer objective test results) how the 3 cameras on the back of my phone are better than the single Note 4 camera.
The reason for all the lens’s on the back is technical. They can’t put a regular camera lens so they use multiple ones each with different focus ranges.
Even using a regular DSLR you need to swap lenses for different situations.
They are not interchangeable lens’s though are they? They are literally different camera modules with different optics. When you’re talking about a camera (not a phone) that makes sense. I’m not buying a camera am I? I’m buying a phone so all those optics and camera modules are forced on me to purchase when buying a smart phone. That’s the state of today’s smart phone market.
They can’t be large DSLR style interchangeable lenses because of the form factor. Nor can a single tiny lens even have the range of a compact digital camera because of the form factor. But by adding extra lenses to cover different focus ranges, a smart phone can replace the compact digital camera device. They can’t be as good as a DSLR, but I haven’t needed anything but my phone and DSLR in years where before I bought a new compact digital camera every few years.
You are either incompetent to understand what’s written or you’re deliberately trying to start a straw man style argument instead of coming up with a counter argument to what I’m saying. Since you took the time to wrote same bullshit under 3 different comments I’m guessing you’re an incompetent ignorant ass who doesn’t understand what’s being said but argue about what they understand.
First extra lenses are a very rare on smartphone/mobile phone cameras. it seems your ignorant ass thinks that all those came modules are different lenses… Secondly cameras on a phone is the result of social media and selfie craze not because people wanted to have good pictures of their grandchildren it their family. And lastly I don’t care if they are as good as professional cameras because it’s a fucking phone. I don’t need it to have a fucking professional camera experience nor I want professional camera hardware on a fucking phone! Because it doesn’t need that to function as a phone!!! Which part is this so hard for you to understand?
You must be one of those idiots that wants smart TV, smart fridge, smart cattle, smart washing machine that doesn’t work without an internet connection… To think that a phone having all these camera hardware is normal. You’re just consuming what’s pushed down your throat and justifying it to a point not ask why a phone has this many cameras but thinking that it should.
And if you really that much into taking good pictures and photography than you’re not seen average user are you? It’s your own subjective needs that doesn’t representative of what’s a phone is… Like my need to have less cameras and removable/changeable batteries. So kindly please go have an intercourse with your DSLR capable many lensed camera phone and have a happy new year.
it seems your ignorant ass thinks that all those came modules are different lenses
A camera is made up of a lens and sensor. In phones, there is a 1:1 mapping between lens and sensor. For example my pixel 7 pro has 3 lenses on the back each with their own sensor. If you know of a phone that has multiple lens feeding one sensor or vice versa, please link.
Secondly cameras on a phone is the result of social media and selfie craze
That premise isn’t supported by demographics. Over 80% of the US population is either over 50 or under 10, neither of which represents significant social media selfie craze.
Furthermore, point and shoot cameras used to be multi billion dollar market before smartphones. That market is now dead shotkit.com/…/smartphones-have-wiped-out-97-of-th…
Regular people were buying cameras. They replaced their camera with a phone. Regular people, before there was social media, took lots of photos.
I don’t care if they are as good as professional cameras
I didn’t say anyone cared about professional results either. I specifically mentioned in an earlier post that phones replaced the compact digital camera market. Regular people bought new compact digital cameras every few years to take better photos despite no social media.
And if you really that much into taking good pictures and photography than you’re not seen average user are you?
I already linked a survey that only 10% of technical Android users do not care about camera quality when deciding on a new phone. Regular users want a good camera. Regular users used to buy new compact digital cameras to take photos before social media.
While the LED notification light was awesome, it is something that I don’t really need. I also don’t need a removal battery because my battery life has been extremely good and I’ll replace my phone before the battery goes bad. I don’t need wireless charging. My phone had that years ago but it’s kind of a gimmick, especially when a phone can charge up in about an hour and a half from dead. I don’t need a 3.5 mm headphone jack because I don’t use wired headphones, I have Bluetooth headphones but they rarely get used.
I’m glad that you’re the only person who buys the entire global supply of phones then.
It’s not like some people might be harder on phone batteries and need to replace them sooner, or enjoys just setting their phone down to charge it, or has expensive non-BT headphones they want to use because BT compresses the audio and BT mics are absolutely horrible compared to even dollar store earbuds.
But, as we established, those people don’t exist because you are literally the only person on this planet that uses a smartphone, so the entire global market can cater to your use cases and no one else’s, and it’s great they have gotten rid of all those features just for you.
I never recall saying that my use case was everybody’s use case. I was just stating that sometimes things like this are fine for some people like myself. People like me are in the minority yet you made the assumption I was speaking for everyone. Options are always better. I wish the modular phone came to be.
Ad-Hoc wireless networking. I miss it, was useful back in the day if you needed to share files with multiple people without a wireless router at a location. Most laptops don’t support this anymore. To be fair, I’ve only really wanted to use it maybe twice in the last 10 years.
If you are looking for something to set up at home then you can buy one of those hockey puck looking things. They connect to Wi-Fi and you can teach them a set of IR commands that they can repeat.
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…
I’m still using my '18 Nokia 6.1 and '16 Samsung Tab S2 8". As phone I see no alternative apart from fairphone, haven’t found an alternative yet for the 8" tablet. (There are no 8" left it seems)
Main tablet is a Lineage running Samsung Tab S5e, no alternative found for that. No 10" (or slightly larger) tablet that has an alternative rom. (Or one I can start developing for with another device as base)
One big technical reason for this was actually the file system. Back when phones came with various types of sd-card support, they only had a few gigs of storage. fat32 was enough and was supported everywhere. But fat32 had some file system limitations and when sd-card sizes grew over 4gb there were comparability issues since windows was limited to fat32 and ntfs. I can imagine the support hell when a user couldn’t mount the sd card containing photos on his or her computer.
The solution to that was ExFAT, which is another patented MS system, so requires a license fee (I think) but otherwise is compatible with anything (because they all had to pay the fee…) But specifically compatible with Windows out of the box.
If anything, this thread kind of shows how much people fail to get informed about their smartphone before they buy one.
Literally every single one of these features is available on the market. Most of those phones are actually the quality stuff, like the German produced Gigaset/Volla, or the Dutch (assembled?) Fairphone. But no, you have to go out of your way to get the bottom of the barrel Iphone and Samsung made in China.
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
Not really, because to see that, you have to put your phone with the screen down on the table. That both ruin the quiet mode function, and increases risk of wear of the screen glass from hard surfaces.
Notification light built into the trackball with customizable colors depending on the app
Back plate came off, replaceable battery
Small and a one handed wonder, the trackball kept my fingers off the screen
It was a replacement for my jail broken iPhone OG, such a better interface for me than the iPhones and it had very basic multitasking when the other guys could only do one app at a time
For real, you sold me on that trackball. That sounds like the coolest feature a phone could have, right down to the multi-color led built in beneath it. I really really hope we see a return to something like that! Touch screens are very useful and have their place but physical buttons/controls are usually preferred when done properly. Here’s a pic of the Nexus 1, that trackball indeed appears to be cool as fuck:
Oh hey, it’s my 2nd smartphone ever. How nostalgic! This phone was built like an absolute tank. It really was a great little phone.
That said, the problem with physical controls is that you either need a larger device or smaller screen to accommodate them. For most people, the tradeoff just isn’t worth it.
For a while, I bemoaned the loss of the physical button bar. Having four (!) indicator lights was really useful to boot. Now I happily use gestures with no looking back.
Would be nice to still see some phones offer this for those who want them, though.
I loved my Nexus One, definitely one of my favorite phones ever. I too got one after being tired of Apple’s iOS restrictions and the “you’re holding it wrong” scandal with the iPhone 4.
I still have it in storage and take it out every one in a while. It surprising how small it is and hard to believe that cell phones used to fit in the palm of your hand.
I thought the digital trackball of the HTC Incredible was cool as shit. It was my favorite phone and I would still be using it today (not as a phone) if it didn’t have a restart bug that HTC refused to acknowledge.
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