For me it’s the notification light you used to find on older phones, was particularly good to know if your phone was charged without picking it up
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.
SD card slots, user-replaceable batteries, and headphone jacks.
Aren’t notification LEDs somewhat obsolete now that we have always on displays? One advantage could be that they are less power hungry than keeping the screen / touch panel alive all the time. But in theory one could just create a permanent “notification LED” with an always on display, then it’s the same thing from a user’s perspective.
Headphone jacks and small phones
3.5 headphone jack
Seperate fingerprint sensors, which were fast, reliable, and accurate, in contrast to the shitty in screen sensors, which are slow, inaccurate, and sometimes just dont work. I would like to kill all people who were part of this shit
Headphone jack.
Rechargable bat-trees, the headphone jack, nugget shaped phones (ie. BlackBerry Bold much), and the damn hardware keyboard >:(((
Privacy.
Fingerprint sensor on the back of the phone
I’m holding on to my Pixel 4a until it dies because of this.
Hard disagree here. Your fingers are already on the display to use your phone, fingerprint reader in the front makes far more sense.
Often my phone is on a table, all I need to unlock it is touch the screen. No need to pick it up.
I wouldn’t buy a phone with the fingerprint reader in the back.
My phone is face down most of the time if it’s sitting on a table. This turns on silent.
My problem with the fingerprint reader in the display is that it just doesn’t work well. I’m on a pixel 7 pro, and more often than not it will try and fail a few times, then require a pin unlock. My pixel 5 with the fingerprint reader on the back was nearly flawless.
I had a honor 7 and a Xiaomi Mi Mix 2 and the sensor was a thousand times faster and better than the one on my pixel 6.
My Pixel 7 fingerprint reader was unusably bad on Android 13 but now works well on Android 14.
The one in my Galaxy S22 works great. There is a trick though to make it work even better: Register the same finger twice (and really get all angles). That usually makes the unlock much more reliable.
Oh cool, thanks for the tip. I’ll give that a shot!
I jumped to the Pixel 6a to the Pixel 8, and the in display fingerprint scanner got much better
Mine has it on the side, also good.
It was literally a perfect design.
The phone was already on by the time it was at your face.
I am sad for its loss
Meh, I prefer it under the screen personally.
Pretty much everything the Galaxy S5 had
- Notification LED
- IR blaster
- Replaceable battery
- Headphone jack
- Heart rate monitor
- SD card slot
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
Wait, Galaxy phones no longer have a SD slot??
Even their $120 tablet has that. Why the fuck doesn’t a $1k phone have it?? 💩
Pretty much all high end phones outside of Sony have omitted the headphone jack and SD card slot.
Samsung low end phone and low end phones in general still have it for example the galaxy a54 has it.
The reason why is they want you to spend more on storage upgrades.
The higher tier A series phones are pretty solid if you really want a Samsung anyway. S series is overkill for most people.
A54 user here. I see no difference to upgrade to flagship except the camera
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.
I used to fuck with friends with my “universal remote”, and of course use my phone whenever i misplaced my own I miss that stupid feature the most
What is FP3?
Fairphone 3
Ah OK.
I presume it’s Fairphone 3?
Fairphone 3. I have one as well, but upgraded it to the +model by installing a better camera
Wow, cool that you can do that. 👍
All that while being water resistant, let’s not forget! What an amazing phone
What do you mean water resistant? Phone with replaceable battery and headphone jack can’t be water resistant! /s
IR blaster! I miss 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.
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…
In the gaming sector, nothing has adequately replicated the stylus used by the DS, 3DS, and Wii U. It was the best way to play a few signature games like Elite Beat Agents (now incarnated as Osu) and Trauma Center: Under the Knife. Touchscreens are just a bit too universal and resilient for us to go back to them.
Headphone Jack.
I also miss the little light
