No removable battery.
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 [email protected] 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.
- No good operating system preinstalled by default
- No headphone jack anymore
This plus no way to replace battery yourself or upgrade storage.
My fingerprint scanner was on the back, but now it’s on the front, and can’t identify me as regularly as it did before.
I’ve gotten used to the new location, but I can’t forgive making it less accurate than it used to be.
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
I went from a Pixel 3 to a Pixel 7. I hold on to my phones as long as possible.
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.
Motherfucking Bixby button.
I can’t remember how I did it but I finally figured out a way to turn that shit off. My phone is pretty old, though. They probably took that away on the newer phones.
bxActions, probably? Turn the useless button into something you want.
is that still around jfc
consider pixel with calyx or graphene as your next choice, you don’t have to suffer like this
It’s 8+ years old lol
i am shocked it is still alive… who da faq be using that shite
I am.
It’s not on the s24
my condolences
the constant surveillance.
Touchscreen basically being unusable in any kind of rain no matter how light
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.
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.
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.
KATIE LEAVING ME ON READ WHEN I ASK FOR FEET PICS
😱
Do we still say “name checks out” on Lemmy?
Be the continuation of a meme you want to see.
Have you tried asking again? Or maybe she just wants you to send yours first
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.
After getting a smart watch, I no longer miss that. But I certainly did for many years.
A rare Lemmy thread that has more comments than kicks.
How do you know how many in here are wearing shoes?
It’s still 2 comments for every kick, fresh.
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.
The fact that it’s got a dedicated hardware button that is locked to something useless/arbitrary (bixby…)
Which phone? You can change the bixby button behavior in the galaxy and Z phones
Google cutting off customization and generally being annoying and creepy. I know I can install some other OS on it, but at the same time I don’t want to deal with Google’s “play protect” thing.
Google
cutting off customization and generally being annoying and creepy. I know I can install some other OS on it, but at the same time I don’t want to deal with Google’s “play protect” thing.yes
I’ve been slowly migrating a lot of screen time from phone to laptop.
Phones can do some neat things, and they’re the best device class for one-handed use – and that does matter. You aren’t gonna poke at a laptop in the car to pause music or something. If you’re waiting in a line, easy to pull a phone out. And they have very low power requirements.
But a laptop running Linux is just a far more-open and configurable platform.
And even aside from the software restrictions, the hardware is generally a lot more capable. It’s a lot more-comfortable to type on a laptop than a phone.
A smartphone is dramatically better than a laptop at being a portable phone. Laptops don’t have a super-low-power-but-a-5G-modem-is-active mode.
But for most other things…a laptop is just a considerably-more-capable option. Web browsing. Posting on Lemmy. Editing text. Games. Has better hardware expandability and connectivity. Easier to repair. Better diagnostic tools. OS doesn’t EOL in a few years; I can probably run current Linux distros on truly ancient computers.
And I don’t really think that the smartphone industry is going to dramatically change on this direction in the foreseeable future.
I agree on all points but the last.
Over two hundred phones have been ported to postmarketOS and every person giving it a shot will improve it. Together with grapheneOS, there are huge possibilities to mix a phones versatility with the freedom of linux. Combined with manufacturers like fairphone and pine64, phones also become more easily repairable.
The issue currently is that we have become ver accustomed to phones being very polishe. a lot of folks dont appreciate the free and open source phones and OSs due to their freakishly expensive, subscription ridden devices being optimized better.
If tech interested folks would default to repairable phones and open OSs, we would make a considerable jump towards being mainstreamable.
I‘m not saying people are at fault. Its just the way it currently is. We‘re seeing big improvements. I hope this continues.
