I have to use cameras just out of politeness and I also do a bunch of audio only calls and frankly the video calls are much more stressful and often less productive.
It has a flagship SoC, but it also has a SD card slot, a headphone jack, no notch or cutout, front firing stereo speakers and a nice blocky look without a massive camera bump.
The downside is software support can be a bit spotty and the cameras are made for manual use, as opposed to being AI-driven point-and-shoot things. That last one could be a positive depending on your preference, though.
But overall? I'm very satisfied, and I went there specifically because I was tired of the ongoing Apple-ification of Samsung in the first place. You may want to consider coming to the dark side and incentivizing Sony to keep making a phone with a feature set, instead of copy-pasting Apple's or Samsung's playbook.
And you know what? It makes sense. A big part of making a moment of a media launch is to get like-minded people talking about it. It's harder now that media is largely on-demand, so it's great to have a place to go for the discussion afterwards.
Which is why staggered, inconsistent launches make no damn sense in the 21st century. When pirates can deliver a way to join that hype moment and you can't, for the content you're creating on the service your followers are already paying for you have entirely missed the point.
I'd agree that can be an issue, but my guess is that trying to resolve those preemptively just adds to the perception of flamewars and drama around the platform. I'm a big proponent of not bringing stuff up to newcomers unless it's very directly in their way.
Ultimately a new user moving to a new OS needs two things: for everything that used to work for them to still work AND for at least one thing that didn't use to work to work better.
A useful guide for newcomers should drive to making those two things true, IMO. Sitting there choosing the nicest looking UI is a great passtime for tinkerers, but newcomers need exactly one option: the one that works. They can get to the fun customization later.
To me at the moment this reads less like a welcoming introduction to a exciting new alternative and more like a cautionary tale of why I shouldn't try. Oh, so my Nvidia hardware is a no-go, most of my apps may not work, I have to choose from a bunch of stuff that all looks the same to me and apparently there is a crapton of drama about things I have never heard about or understand, but that people seem to have very strong opinions about. Well, I guess my old printer no longer being supported on Win11 is not that big of a deal...
I'm not trying to be mean or anything, I'm saying this constructively. Experts have a tendency to underestimate how lost newcomers can get and to misunderstand what the real roadblocks and churn points are. I'm trying to provide a perspective on those.
If property rights are still enforced in the turmoil probably indefinitely. Doesn't mean I'd enjoy it, though.
I come from a place where survival agriculture was the norm well into the 1980s. Would have to start having cows and pigs again, need to work out a salting station, which we haven't had for a few decades. I remember soap making was a mess. We got rid of our wood-fueled kitchen at some point, so that's a problem until society settles back in enough to start selling those again. We'd probably have to go back to setting up a corner for a fireplace in the meantime. That's before my time but it should be possible.
FWIW, our universal health coverage here will cover medical dental care, but not cosmetic. They'll patch up or remove your bad tooth, but I think it'd be harder to get an implant or a crown without paying for it. Weirdly, dentists are still one of the two or three basic services where people here are still willing to pay for uncovered medical attention, the others being eyecare and pediatrics.
When I needed surgery my private dentist still sent me over to the public system, though. Took a look at my X-rays, told me she wasn't gonna touch any of that without an MRI and an OR on standby and told me to go to my public doctor with a note and tell them to get me booked with a maxillofacial surgeon, which I did. It wasn't that big of a deal in the end, but the reaction was... revealing.
How to make that relevant again: Get a time machine.
The fascists are already on the ballot, in case anybody missed that detail.
I swear, this stuff barely played back when it seemed like an idle concern of the politically inclined. Today it seems entirely detached from reality.
But hey, by all means, absolutely get the kind of reform that would make this make sense again. I want a world in which this thread doesn't feel like either disingenuous trolling, a conservative psyop or entirely delusional. I want a world where Americans can vote for multiple parties and get proper coalitions and stuff.
But seriously, until that point, just vote for whoever the Democrat is.
Don't make me break out the spacetime diagram, young man. Because I WILL break out the spacetime diagram.
Anyway, doesn't matter. Star Trek has messed with time travel since TOS season 1. And that was after they started introducing magic men with god powers, which they did in episode 3. It makes zero sense to get nerdy about it. That's my point here.
See, for me it's often the other way around. Wtih the usual suspects we're often just in each other's ears for a while and moving around to get a coffee or even just pacing up and down to stretch our legs. It's the outside-facing stuff that requires the face time.
That depends on your business, I suppose. Either way the audio only stuff is definitely the better choice IMO.
Here's a controversial thought: The worst Trek is at the absolute worst kinda decent, and it only goes up from there.
My Trek power rankings don't line up with most (Discovery is pretty great, DS9 is kind of annoying, all the Kelvin Treks are fun and the first one is pretty great), but even the parts I don't like I can watch and be chill about it.
Picard is bordering that line, honestly, but I can't be actively mad at Patrick Stewart and I actually would have watched a cheaper, longer show about the La Sirena crew without the TNG baggage.
Being old enough to have Voyager and especially DS9 be my "nuTrek" and also never having let it go I can feel your nerdrage as a warm, fuzzy winter fire.
Can I interest you in how DS9's focus on greed, war and moral compromise is a betrayal of the concepts behind Star Trek and if they wanted to make Babylon 5 they should have just made Babylon 5?