Fixed battery and removal of headphone jack and SD card slots were 1000% anti-consumer practices designed to cost you more money and make your device lifespan as short as possible. I don’t see the battery problem going away - why enable your phone to last twice or three times as long when they can just force you to have to buy a new device when the battery is shot? At least we got our card slots and jacks back (mostly).
I am also salty that phones USED to have IR blasters and they don’t anymore. IR LEDs cost next to nothing, another feature that was amazing but thrown away to save 5c per unit.
battery
I don’t think that this is a conspiracy by phone manufacturers to force purchases of phone hardware.
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All kinds of devices use fixed batteries these days, not just smartphones. It’s cheaper, lighter, makes the device stronger, avoids them having to deal with “User X bought a counterfeit battery that then caught fire” – that’s a real issue for lithium batteries, unlike traditional alkaline/NiMH-type removeable batteries. Virtually the only device class I can think of where removable lithium batteries are the norm is high-end flashlights – anything on !flashlight@lemmy.world probably supports removable 18650s or similar. I have gone out of my way to get a lot of devices that use AA batteries or maybe 18650s, but there are just tons of products, including in highly-competitive, low-barrier-to-entry industries like gamepads, where it’d be impossible to form a cartel to refuse to offer a device with removable batteries. And yet they’ve mostly moved to fixed batteries. There is no industry convention for removable, BMS-enabled, lithium batteries the way AA or the like were traditionally used in devices.
If there were a cartel driving this against consumer wishes as a whole, you would have just smartphones doing the fixed battery thing, not the consumer electronics industry as a whole.
If it were cartel-driven, I’d also expect to see, in a situation like that, manufacturers making hefty use of price discrimination – like, think of how some laptop vendors charge a premium for devices with a lot of RAM when they have soldered RAM. But in the market today, the differences in battery size are minimal. Google makes a “large” version of the Pixel, and they barely bump the battery up, even with a slightly larger screen.
Instead, it was associated with the shift across consumer electronics to non-removable batteries with the move to lithium batteries, which is what you’d expect if sketchy batteries were a problem.
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Phones in particular have a space and weight premium, so compared to a lot of devices that aren’t held in your hand, using removable NiMH batteries or the like is more of an issue.
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I was super stoked to find out my OnePlus Open has an IR blaster! I missed it on my old galaxy note 4. It is surprisingly convenient, and doubles as a fun way to mess with TVs in public spaces.
I can get the battery replaced on my phone for a fraction of the money it would cost me to buy a new phone. So I have to take it in to the shop for an hour. Big deal. I can do that once every few years. And I can still use wired headphones with my phone even though it doesn’t have a headphone jack. Sheesh, I wonder how that works.
The biggest anti-consumer practice to make your device lifespan as short as possible is whatever software update practices the manufacturer has. Annual major versions increase hardware requirements - I can tell every day how my 5 year old phone is getting long in the tooth. Lack of long-term software support is another way to make sure the average user buys a new device well before the old device has reached end of life.
- No good operating system preinstalled by default
- No headphone jack anymore
This plus no way to replace battery yourself or upgrade storage.
My god, I upgraded from an S9 to an S22 and seeing the fingerprint scanner on the front baffled me. With a screen protector on I unlock it on the first try maybe 25% of the time
There’s a setting you can turn on that increases the sensitivity, which should fix the issue. It works perfectly fine for me with a screen protector
Yeah I pretty quickly figured out I needed that, without it it straight up doesn’t scan my finger
If you have issues with it detecting your finger try doing the “Check added Fingerprint” thing a bunch, apparently it can scan all of your finger more accurately, and get to the very edges and weird angles that the original scan never got. Seemed to improve the accuracy of mine a bit (never had big issues with it tho)
I assume that it must be cheaper or something. I really preferred having it on the back too; was more ergonomic.
ponders
I guess that the front is maybe easier to use a thumbprint or something on.
That being said, regarding accuracy, it might also have a lower false-positive rate, which is maybe something that you’d want.
why on earth are people so comfortable giving private companies their fingerprint and face scans?
Knowing how Lemmy is, I’ll probably catch shit for this, but it’s the truth:
I just don’t care.
I won’t say you’re being paranoid because, I don’t know for sure that there won’t be repercussions, but I don’t see a realistic downside considering the cops and FBI already have mine for clearances.
The fingerprint is stored on your device. You don’t give it to a company.
My understanding is that these fingerprints are specific to your device and don’t get stored in the cloud. If you buy a new phone, then you’ll have to rescan your fingerprints.
the constant surveillance.
No fucking mini jack for headphones.
I don’t need a headphone jack all the time, but I really do fucking want one when I need it. Dongles suck.
A big reason I replaced my old S10+ with a battery that wouldn’t even hold half a day with Xperia 1 VI is that it has both the headphone jack AND an SD card slot. Might be the only flagship left that has both…
It’s not on the s24
Touchscreen basically being unusable in any kind of rain no matter how light
The lack of a fucking headphone jack
That’s the exact reason I have only bought budget phones. That, and they actually have a sim/sd card slot.
I ‘downgraded’ this year and realized what an upgrade having one of those was. We cannot cede those things.
I’m relatively content with my Pixel 4A running LineageOS (with root), but that’s an experience that’s really only suited to very technical users, in large part because some apps actively resist running in an environment the device owner actually controls.
My complaint is with the smartphone ecosystem as a whole: it’s designed to empower the OS vendor and app developers over users. The entire tech world (outside Microsoft and maybe some corporate IT types) saw Microsoft Palladium as a nightmare scenario a couple decades ago. Now we’ve let Apple and Google do the same thing with barely a grumble out of the mainstream tech press.
Missing status LED. I’d like to deactivate the always on screen feature.
I remember using an app on my Samsung Galaxy Nexus where you could set every notification to a different color, for every app. Cost me like $2. Last phone that had a notification LED (dunno if it was the Note 4 or Note 8) had only some basic configuration and the app was no longer maintained. Now, I don’t have the LED anymore. Sad.
Maybe if I could have always-on display, but only with a virtual notification LED, I’d be happy.
That shit used to baked into vanilla android.
I loved doing that with the LED in the tracball on the Nexus One.
After getting a smart watch, I no longer miss that. But I certainly did for many years.
Least favorite things? Hmmm…
Things that I want on my phone:
-headphone Jack
-user replaceable battery
-micro SD
-good camera
I know the specs would be terrible nowadays, but in terms of physical features and overall design, I think phone design peaked around the Samsung S5.
Take a look at the Sony Xperia VI
I was looking at that at one point. Looks nice, but pretty expensive for what it is and software support is not great (last I checked they only had like one major android version update). Honestly I just want a Pixel a series with the above features. Likely to run GrapheneOS on my next phone.
I hear you. My last phone was an ancient Xperia from about eight years ago–but I finally needed to get a new one. I love most everything Sony is doing with the Xperia series, and I would have gotten another. But the update guarantee was so abysmal I just couldn’t do it. So now I have a Pixel which I think is worst in design in a lot of ways. But at least it will be updated. (And can run GrapheneOS).
I wish the Sony still made a compact Xperia.
How much Google controls the software experience and locks it down.
Currently I wish I could run a local HTML/CSS/JS App on my browser (like you can easily do in any desktop OS) but I can’t.
From what I know, we’ve been able to do this for at least 15 years.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36632649/running-node-js-on-android
Thank you, I’ll look into this! Unfortunately, since my phone is Android 13, it doesn’t look like Termux would function properly, and the rest of the answers are very old and seem to require lots and lots of setup. What is the easiest way?
Install the f-droid store and see if you get it through there
Installing it isn’t the problem. Getting it to run without randomly quitting is the problem.
Ah gotcha, yeah I guess battery saver features would cause some issues asides possible os extended support
Update: I got node.js to do a simple program. Now, I want it to run a much larger program involving playing audio.
Update 2: I can’t get node.js to play any audio, and I cannot install the non dependencies for some reason.
My least favorite thing is it is getting old and I can’t find a good equivalent to the Pixel 4a to replace it with. They are all too big, have no headphone jack, and are too expensive for what I get out of them.
Oh, I know what you’re talking about. I got a “new” phone a few months ago. Was thinking about either the pixel 4a or Samsung S10e, and went with the latter.
The cool thing is that both of these phones have LineageOS support. I didn’t try it yet, but LOS sounds pretty awesome, I hope that I won’t be disappointed.
LOS is fine, though I haven’t used it in a while. I may just try and get a new battery in my 4a as the screen is still perfect and all the ports work fine. Still after using this phone for four years, I’d love an upgrade.
Zenfone 9? Pixel 5a? About the only remotely close options I found out there. I went with the 5a, but it’s getting close to end of life, so I’m debating the slightly newer zenfone 9 now…
I did look at the Zenfone 9 actually and my biggest issue was the locked bootloader and no custom rom support. It may not be a total deal breaker, but it was enough to give me pause. The 5a would be great if it wasn’t nearly as old as the 4a. I would still be considering Pixels if they hadn’t ruined the “a” line.
It’s too big. I couldn’t get a phone the same size as my old one without sacrificing the micro sd slot so I ended up with something bigger than ideal
I don’t even want removable anything, I just want more small phones.
The last iPhone mini was a good size but I couldn’t stand iOS. My Pixel6a is a little too big for my tastes.
That it’s 7 years old and I can’t find a replacement that isn’t a downgrade in functionality.