Everything. We’re down to barebones and marketing now focus solely on camera software updates or phone materials (“now with titanium!” How fucking sad is that?) And they are all selling the same phone.
Some of the most important loses…
Swappable batteries changed travel for me. Always having two extra charged batteries in my backpack, that you could swap top 100% in 20 seconds, made me ONLY use my phone as a free and completely useful tool without any planning or restrictions on my use. Otherwise, you can’t take too many pictures or videos, stream music or video or make video calls too long or you might be fucked when you need phone, GPS, payment or to get a rideshare to where you’re staying.
Audio jack similarly meant freedom. Bluetooth headphones out of battery, broken or one earbud lost? Have a pair of wired in the backpack always add backup. Also better audio quality through wired with DAC on certain models and less daily device load to charge/babysit
secondary screens LG V10 had a bar on top, they also had the T shaped dual screen phone and the secondary screen phone case. There was just creativity and attempts at innovation.
microSD expandable memory, again less and less available and this was about freedom - fuck your cloud storage add its data leaks, corruption and redaction. I own my data, you don’t control it.
I also very much miss the removable batteries. I spent 8 years with my old phone simply because I didn’t want to give up it’s easy swap ability but I have to say that the headphone jack is the thing that really affects and annoys me the most. For years and years I literally carried a pair of wired earbuds with me everywhere I went (coiled up and carried in the small pocket of my jeans). No matter where I was or what I was doing, I could literally be ready to go music mode at any time. I absolutely loved it. Being saddled with the bluetooth buds now and their annoying battery life is not at all ideal for me. I often take very long daily excursions that end up seeing my headphones die on me frequently now and I miss my wired headphones nearly every single day.
My new android phone is waterproof, rugged, has 5 days of battery life, 2 microsim, 1 microsd (up to 1TB i think, for apps and/or photos depending on partitioning via adb), headphone jack, no stupid notch or hole in the display and a notification light for $100. Sure I only get 4GB of RAM, a 24MP camera without stabilization, 64GB of slow-ish flash and an 8 core mediatek cpu. But if Google or HTC won’t give me what I want, I’ll buy the Doogee S51 with the fake 2nd wide angle camera that is just a dummy lens.
I was really baffled when I got a November 2023 security OTA update. Didn’t expect that. Also it isn’t loaded with crapware like a Samsung or Lenovo. Overall I am quite satisfied with price/performance.
I think the reason why you get the OTA is because Doogee uses mostly non modified Android software, making the official releases available for your phone with ease.
Swappable batteries are coming back in 2027 because of the EU.
Under the legislation, consumers must be able to "easily remove and replace” portable batteries used in devices such as smartphones, tablets, and cameras.
I just tried a Pixel 8 for a few days after years of using a Pixel 6 - it is legitimately a worse phone. Even with its higher frame rate screen (which is considerably smaller), all the phones animations look like garbage because the CPU struggles to keep up. I found some menus that I tested side by side on the pixel 6 and 8… the 6’s reaction was instant and smooth, while the 8 took about half a second to register that it had been touched, after which the menu’s animation was glitchy. My wife tested one too, and was having issues getting her fingerprints to save.
Is there even an option for a decent modern android phone that doesn’t have bloatware (i.e… Samsung)? I was hoping the pixel would be acceptable so I could use Graphene OS, but it doesn’t look like that is going to be happening. Is there another device that works well with Lineage or something similar that would be a decent alternative to a Pixel with Graphene?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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…
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