Most of these gripes are solved by simply not buying the flagship and instead purchasing the $200 unlocked version.
Now the battery, that’s the one that pisses me off the most. But at this point we’ve been doing it for 10 years.
This goddamn camera built into my screen instead of above the screen pisses me off so fucking much. So often I have to move a picture down to read the top of it.
IT’S BLOCKING MY MEMES GOD FUCKING DAMMIT MY MEMES
How often do you come across tall pictures? Most pictures sit well below the camera for me
At least a couple times a day
I drift through this world in a mood of indifference, frequently moving into disgust.
But at times I read a comment like this and see that there is still beauty in the world. I love you.
I’m sorry but I think we should just be friends
- the home button now being a part of my screen instead of… a button.
You don’t need a navbar if you switch to gesture controls
Fuck gestures, gice me back my buttons
If you’re talking about physical buttons, please no. Gesture navigation is an incredibly useful feature for those with short fingers like myself, who have problems with reaching the “Recents” button without weirdly tilting the phone and then stretching their thumb to the point that it gets painful over time. And while it’s technically possible to use gesture navigation on phones with physical buttons, it would definitely be weird. Not to mention that it’s also wasted space, because physical buttons obviously can’t just disappear when needed like on-screen buttons do, so you can have a bigger and more efficiently used screen. There are a lot of things that are dumb to remove from phones, pyhsical navigation buttons, in my opinion at least, are not one of them. I can’t even think of an advantage physical buttons would have over on-screen buttons.
If you meant that you want to keep the option for on-screen button navigation, I’m all for it. Can’t hurt to have more options :)
Well i meant physical buttons but i also think phone displays should be 5 inches, 5.5 at absolute most. Also, by the by, the main advantage of physical buttons is a) useabilty while gloved or with wet/dirty hands and b) being able to know precisely what button you’re on by touch
I don’t think this is a common use case for most people, but I can see how that might come in handy for some, so you’ve got some good points.
Thx. It’s more about versatility in my eyes. A smartphone should be, above all else, practical. So a perfect phone for me would be something like Fairphone but with a 3,5mm jack, physical front buttons, and 2 cameras on the back (wide and normal/narrow lens). Mby additional sensors like a barometer, assuming that can be scaled down or done digitally/electronically.
That’s another thing they ruined! Oneplus had amazing gestures, but then Google enforced using their gestures only, and they’re so much worse! I especially hate that back is swiping in from an edge, which is in conflict with every side drawer and cropping tool in every app ever!
Yeah, I have the most problems with it in Thunder. I avoided using gestures for so long but they’ve grown on me.
With Oneplus gestures back was swiping up from the bottom left or right. So much better. And the screen-off-gestures with drawing the pause symbol for play/pause or < or > for jump back/forward in a podcast or song. I miss them.
Hey man, I know this is a rant, but in case you didn’t know there should be a setting to resize things to make a black bar at the top. Google it for your phone, but for samsung it’s something like “full sceeen apps”.
Just looked. Not a thing for pixel 6A :(
Googled it, try this
https://mashtips.com/hide-display-notch-and-cutouts-on-pixel/
Holy crap that did it! Thank you!!
That seems like a weird thing to want. You’ll have less screen space because the notification area is now using your useable screen area instead of being up in the unusable dead space.
MY. MEMES.
Not actually how it works. There’s two options. One of them has the notifications in the “dead space”, but the content never gets eaten up.
(Pinging @[email protected] , just in case you didn’t know about this!)
I wouldn’t use this myself. Most apps are designed so content fits underneath the camera hole so nothing gets eaten, and even if it does get eaten, the camera is so small that it’s not an issue for me
Edit: this is what you have to enable, by the way.
People look at me like I’m fucking insane when I get as upset about the blighted notch on my screen as I do. This screen technically has more real estate than my Razer Phone 2 back in 2018 did, but between the obnoxiously tall aspect ratio and the fucking notch, it has like 75% of the usable screen space. You know what was really nice? Watching TV shows on my RP2, with the 6" screen, all of which was used for the video. You know what sucks? Having a half inch of black bars on either side of the screen so that the 16:9 aspect ratio video can fit on the 18:9 aspect ratio screen. And it’s even more ass than that, because the top and bottom of the video look like shit because the screen wraps around the fucking sides.
If the FBI could hear what I have to say about the engineers at samsung, I would have been arrested years ago
Who tf used an IR blaster? And what sane person misses the flimsy plastic back on phones with removable batteries? They didn’t cut a hole in your screen, they removed a half inch of dead useless space at the top and bottom and gave you more usable real estate while also cranking the resolution and refresh rate to 11. Buttons? WHAT BUTTONS EXACTLY? The single enormous one that ate up nearly 25% of the phone and all it did was GO BACK?! And don’t even mention the cameras. Your five cameras you didn’t ask for are why you can film yourself in 4K doing whatever brain dead tiktok fad you saw on your enormous HD screen, and why you can pretend you had front row seats to a concert you sat in the nosebleeds for.
Headphone jack is fair, no argument. I use Bluetooth headphones but I get the rationale. Everything else is stupid.
I’ve been trying to acclimate my Dad to digital stuff-- get him reading the news online for when the local rag finally goes weekly or closes.
He would have an easier time with a device with 5% less screen, but always-present physical home/back/menu buttons.
I’m not sure what the ideal device would be for him; I’ve set him up with a Kindle Fire with the Play store and a handful of prevetted apps because I had it handy and it seemed more approachable than a 6" phone or a laptop with keyboard and trackpoint. But I’m all but sure the right device is NOT a new phone.
I do miss removable batteries, they had the added benefit of having a heavy mass (the battery) get thrown out when the phone falls. That helped save the display from getting damaged because a lot of the momentum was transferred to the battery popping out
Your argument against removable batteries is that they had a “flimsy plastic back”? seriously prefer being unable to change the battery when its capacity decreases, being unable to carry a spare battery around, and having to pay dumb service fees, all just to not have a back that you barely even notice is made of plastic?
Also removable storage is extremely useful as well, not only for being able to cheaply increase space when needed, but also to minimize the effort of swapping devices or sharing large files more quickly.
Modular is always better. The only good argument against it is shareholder profits.
It doesn’t even need to be plastic. The battery could slot into the side of the phone on a tray with a gasket to try and seal it.
Personally I don’t think the battery needs to be as easily replaced if it lasts longer. Lithium ion cells degrade too quickly but a lithium iron phosphate cold last for 10 years before dropping below 85% charge capacity.
The only drawback is they have about 30% less energy density but imo making the battery 30% larger is not a big deal. Phones have obsessed with being pointlessly thin for so long. Basically just remove the dumb camera bump.
For real? I use the IR blaster every day when the wife/kids have misplaced the TV remote or CBF getting up to grab it
genuinely dont understand the logic behind having that many cameras. Surely it would just be better to have a singular better sensor, and some additional hardware for it?
I am never buying an expensive Smartphone again. Just something that works for emergency calls and 2FA and lets me buy a ticket for public transport. I am not gaming on it, I rarely listen to music with it, I only have about 6 apps on it in total. Give me a long lasting battery and let me replace it. The only thing that I need is a big screen, because I am handicapped and have bad eyesight and it is easier to see and use the software if it isn’t too small, otherwise I would prefer a smaller size and I give a f*ck how slim or thick the phone is or how water proof, non of my phones ever got even a tiny bit wet. In the 7 years I own my current phone I have taken about 50 pictures and 48 got deleted shortly after. I also do not need a lot of storage.
I bought a Sony Xperia 1 V mostly because of this. No hole on the screen, it has a 3.5mm jack and tooless access to its SD/Sim card tray
I’m still on the Xperia 1 III. I’ve sworn by Sony phones for years. The price point does put off a lot of people, but it’s worth it IMO.
That said, unlike a lot of people, I don’t care for the 3.5mm jack nowadays. I’ve had wireless noise cancelling headphones for long enough that I actually forget this phone has the jack. 🤷🏼♂️
And the cameras have to be quite possibly the best on the market!
Sony does a lot of things right, but I’m not spending €1200 on a phone that gets a measly 2 years of updates. With that hardware and that price tag there’s no excuse for that bullshit.
Unstoppable full screen ads you have to watch before you can answer a call or view a text on your own phone
… and they still won’t connect two people when they try to call each other.
They’ll take away volume control (SW/HW buttons) and replace with dynamically adjusting “magic volume” so that you can’t mute ads.
These people need stabbed.
Oh jesus christ I think you’re right
Oh Christ. You’ve just triggered a premonition in me–the Galaxy S32 Ultra will be the first smartphone with no physical buttons or ports. You can turn it “off,” but that will only turn on a sort of extreme power saving mode. It will still ping your location once every few minutes, and will keep the fingerprint scanner active. You will “turn on” the device by holding your finger on the fingerprint scanner for four seconds. They will advertise the “quick startup” as a new feature. Volume will be controlled by sliding your finger along the right edge of the phone, which the screen will wrap around all the way to the back. It will be impossible to hold the phone without touching some part of the screen.
It will only allow wireless charging. You will not be able to connect it directly to a computer. In marketing, this will be to meet rigorous water safety standards. In reality, this will be to prevent you from using ADB to remove apps that come with the phone. You cannot turn off mobile data. You cannot turn off location. You cannot use a third party SMS application. You cannot choose your own wallpaper. You cannot set a private DNS. You cannot install applications that haven’t been approved by Samsung. You cannot block ads. This is all covered on page 74 of subsection 32(a) of section G8 of the terms and conditions that you agreed to when you set up the phone.
They will meet the physical limitations of how well a small lens can focus light. Zoom will cap out at 150x. Nevertheless, there will be seven cameras.
This is when I go back to having a “dumb” phone 🫡
correction a bit, you can use adb via wifi. That’s what I do to sideload an app to my Android TV
Why are people up voting this? This is such ridiculous FUD that I can’t take it seriously.
I know, right? I mean, does he seriously expect virtually every smartphone manufacturer to put holes in his screen and take away his headphone jacks, removable sim cards, SD cards, replaceable batteries, and IR blasters, and switch to an aspect ratio other than 16:9? That would be ridiculous. They never make user-unfriendly changes!
They’re not user unfriendly changes if 95% of users just don’t care.
And which of the changes he listed would the 95% figure you mentioned care about? By your definition, short of literally turning each feature into a micro transaction, there’s no such thing as user unfriendly changes - and knowing the general public, not even then.
You will not be able to connect it directly to a computer. In marketing, this will be to meet rigorous water safety standards.
Making devices water-proof is also a marketing scheme to avoid replaceable batteries :
Some manufacturers are already eyeing an exemption for batteries used in “wet conditions” to opt out electric toothbrushes and possibly wearables like earbuds and smartwatches. The exemption is “based on unfounded safety claims,” states Thomas Opsomer, policy engineer for iFixit, in Repair.EU’s post.
Despite the coming up regulation on batteries and waste batteries by the EU Council batteries in water-proof devices will probably be exempt from being replceable, because the water proof feature of the device cannot be guaranteed. This undermines the right to repair and manufacturers can hope that customers replace their entire devices soon. Making phones water-proof is a loophole to seal off the device so that it is not to be repaired, at least without keeping the water-proof features after repairing.
I dropped my phone in the bath once, so it’s worth it 🤣
I dropped several flip phones in water ranging from bath, to sink, to ponds and creeks in the mid 00’s to mid teens before getting a smart phone. Out of probably 10 phones used only one was ever ruined by the water, the rest all dried out fine when taken apart and left to dry for a day or two.
Yeah pretty sure the Fairphone 5 and its predecessors have a pretty good IP rating, despite their ability to have the battery removed.
The Galaxy S5 did it first :)
(for a competent smartphone that is)
That’s when I go flip
nahhh you’ll be able to choose your own wallpaper, the average user will eat up all of those “feautres” but god forbid Keighleeeigh can’t put her little baby Xaileeyn as her screen saver
Obligatory, “The rise of -leigh, -lee, and -den names”:
But Keighleeeigh will happily pay for it.
Or her baby daddy, Jaxxon
Physical keyboard? Notification LED?
The notification LED is the only feature I truly miss
I miss the LED for sure. How much money could that have possibly saved?
For the physical part? A couple cents per phone sold.
But it’s also one less part for for the circuit board designers to accomodate in their ever-shrinking layouts, one less part to inventory, track, and warehouse, one less behavior to verify by Q&A, one less SW and/or HDL code module to maintain, etc etc etc. When you look at the entire design, verification, and manufacturing process, multiplied by millions of units, every part and behavior carries a cost.
There are plenty of valid reasons to crap on the major phone manufacturers, especially when they take away features and capabilities we like. But “it’s just one small part” usually isn’t one of them.
Controversial: it was much easier and safer to text while driving with a physical keyboard. You could type with one hand, hold the steering wheel with the other, all while still looking at the road because you could feel where the buttons were.
Controversial: Drinking while driving was easier and safer with a beer helmet since you can just sip directly from the straw instead of looking down to pick up the can.
I’d still prefer you didn’t do that
Ditto lol
My car has T9 input which is much better than a full touchscreen keyboard, especially since I have a ton of practice from the old Nokia days
Back in the flip phone days that raised 5 let me text behind my back in class. I mean, I have no need for that now but it was pretty fucking sweet back then.
OLED displays have obsoleted notification LEDs. And phones with physical keyboards don’t sell.
No they don’t.
Also, keyboard phones don’t sell because they don’t make good ones.
OLED displays certainly could, but there is no baked it app that wakes up the screen only if you have a message, blink in different colors or frequencies depending on the message and use the low power always on display api.
Yeah, you can glance at your always on display and make out the little symbol. But that’s not an adequate replacement to the notification LED. If I had to guess, it was removed to drive up engagement with your phone.
I wouldn’t call the “always on display” some kind of innovative technology that makes notification LEDs obsolete… AOD is a battery draining complement to notification LEDs, not a replacement – we just don’t have the latter anymore because of corporate greed and consumer mentalities :/
There are notification apps to replicate the feature. A single pixel lighting on an OLED screen uses no more energy than a physically separate led. The CPU isn’t sleeping to update the notification led either way.
Appreciate the response. Figured this was “easily” do-able, but I honestly remember not being able to find anything pre-implemented for this a couple years ago when I last checked. Maybe my search, then, idk… Anyways, yeah, physically separate LED do sound a lot more obsolete with that in mind
Subscription to the camera on your own phone, capped # of photos per week and only basic adjustment/editing features for the entry tier.
Google is already doing this with their photo editor app. All the new features require a subscription.
They’d make bank on influencers.
User serviceability is intentionally not a focal point especially when it comes to anything a person has to use day to day. Any kind of tool or appliance- and especially electronic devices, forget about it. Luckily there are off the beaten path companies like framework and fairphone, but these are hard to market to regular joes and some are unavailable in a lot of regions.
Tech enthusiasts like presumably a lot of this comment section is are lucky there’s at least something out there.
I still have an S9 with a notification LED.
From my cold, dead hands.
still using the 3.5mm on my S8 every damn day
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The phones with a headphone jack also had Bluetooth support though.
This isn’t an either/or
It’s not better, it’s more convenient. Bluetooth earbuds are basically not repairable and they’re more expensive than their wired counterparts if you want something decent. The call quality is also worse due to bluetooth’s limitations.
Both types of headphones have their pros and cons and both can coexist. Don’t be dumb, don’t defend companies taking away options for no good reason other than planned obsolesence.
Same. I’ve used the 3.5mm port for my truck daily for the past 10 years. Don’t need it as much now that I got a new truck, but I still use it when I ride my motorcycle. Bluetooth earbuds just don’t fit under my helmet.
Bluetooth intercom with helmet speakers are a game changer!
Can also keep earplugs in, which is good to avoid worse tinnitus than what I already have…
Aye, super happy with my Cardo and plug combo!
Wouldn’t those be warm hands? Pretty sure the S9 was the one that caught fire all the time? Or was that the S7?
I miss this so much. It is extra annoying cause my phone has a similar LED it uses for other things.
Maybe https://github.com/Chainfire/HoleyLight will be up your alley.
While I’m all about options because everyone has different use cases, I’ve found that over the years as these features have been removed, I haven’t really missed them
Do many people know that there is actually a patent for the idea of an advertisement that plays to a certain point… and then does not end, will not let you skip it, until you as the user, via a camera and microphone, can be verified to have assumed a pose, made a facial expression, and/or said a specific phrase?
The actual patent shows a smart tv ‘owner’ standing up and saying McDonalds! in order to like keep watching Netflix.
We quite literally have the tech and the legal framework for ‘Drink Verification Mountain Dew Can’ to actually be a thing.
The illustration of that patent practically a meme, many on Lemmy should know it.
Though it should be kept in mind there’s thousands of patents that were never actually applied, and this one was filled back in 2009.
We quite literally have the tech and the legal framework
Do patents necessarily have to follow the law?
Though it should be kept in mind there’s thousands of patents that were never actually applied, and this one was filled back in 2009.
This is genuinely a good thing, then. If you patent something and “accidentally” never use it, it prevents other companies from using it legally. Screw over advertisers and save the consumers from their terrible ideas by hoarding patents and working with a patent troll firm :)
Not really. Patests expire and then they can just read the specs in your idea. No reverse-engineering effort required.
It takes 20 years for patents to expire, and you can’t commercially use the patented invention until then. If I “invent” and patent 50 different methods to track viewer attention during video advertisements, that’s 50 fewer ways that some company would be able to achieve it.
It would be impossible to cover every possible method to achieve the same thing, but the risk of violating a patent held by a highly litigious patent troll might be a good enough deterrent to stop the whole idea from making it to market for a couple decades.
Yes, but after 20 years you’re not at square one, others have free reign to use and abuse your expired patent. Sure, you can tacticize patents in a way where you make a starting patent, then before it’s about to expire “expand” it with a new one in a way which invalidates use of the previous, but I don’t know if that “loophole” is patched and if not, how it looks in real life.
That is an entirely valid concern, and I see where you’re coming from with that. It would be short-sighted to introduce something revolutionary, only to open the floodgates for everyone else to start implementing it two decades later.
I was thinking of using patents more along the lines of “throw shit at the wall and see what sticks.” Rather than trying to come up with every conceivable method for tracking user attention and patenting those, the hypothetical patent troll would create and patent hundreds of different smaller, novel processes that may or may not be needed as part of a larger system for tracking user attention. The overall goal being to make it likely enough for one or more of those patents to be violated that a company would consider it too risky to go anywhere near the idea of commercializing attention tracking software/hardware.
Eh? Do patents necessarily have to follow the law?
…no? They are ideas.
They are also a legal construct to organize business uses and control of ideas around.
Hence a patent and the patent system are a legal framework.
Legal frameworks are often involved in things that later end up being determined to be illegal.
Large businesses usually like to set up some kind of comprehensive legal framework before they roll out a new product or feature.
Not saying they will. I am saying setting up a legal framework is usually groundwork before you do though.
There are different categories of removable.
With my old Note, I had an extra battery that came with case/charger combination. If my battery on my phone died, I could swap the battery in 10 seconds.
I agree. I used to carry a spare at all times as well. So nice to be able to swap as soon as you get close to empty. I’m hoping we’ll get back there eventually.
It states that any battery should be removable and replaceable by the user. So this slap on tactic will only work if your device has no internal battery.
I also noticed this is for all batteries. Not just phones, but also cars etc.
EDIT: As any EU law there is a lot of nuance and exceptions. I dig a little further and found the following:
The regulation introduces requirements that say that portable batteries should be easily removable and replaceable by the end-user and LMT batteries and cells in LMT batteries should be easily removable and replaceable by an independent professional.
So what is LMT?
The regulation defines five battery categories depending on how the battery is used:
- Portable batteries
- Light means of transport (LMT) batteries
- Starting, lighting and ignition (SLI) batteries
- Industrial batteries
- Electric vehicle (EV) batteries
I couldn’t find any concrete wording for “easily removed and replaceable”. But I sure hope it means no more glue for the portable batteries.
Source: https://www.intertek.com/blog/2023/08-17-battery-regulation/
What do you mean only if it has no internal battery? This will make it so they can’t fuse a battery in place and call it internal. It has to be removable.
That is what I meant?
That it is nice the op has a battery-case for their phone, but that it will not fly under the new law unless the phone has no internal battery.
You mean an internal battery in addition to a main removable one? Sorry if I’m being dense.
“Replaceable by user” has a lot of wiggle room. It could still be a 20-minute process that risks damaging other parts and requires specialized tools.
If phones are to keep their water resistance, they almost certainly won’t be tooless, and will involve swapping out gaskets. It’ll be something you can do to replace a failed battery, not a quick swap because you went camping for the weekend and threw an extra battery in the bag since there are no outlets.
Could you read and understand the information behind the link before replying with nonsense?
FYI: there were waterproof phones before replaceable batteries disappeared. Also the Fairphone for example IPS rated for resistant, so not perfect, but it’s possible.
None of that addresses his point that “removable by the user” is not clearly defined. I didn’t see any definition for it in the link you posted.
“User replaceable” just means that they have to make it possible, not easy.
Usually legislation is intentionally vague like that, ultimately courts will decide what that really means in practice.
It will end up being just reasonable. Any person can have a reasonable expectation that they will be able to replace the battery with a reasonable amount of time and effort, with readily available tools, with a reasonable amount of guidance.
If you were a judge would you say that it’s reasonable to expect people to be able to replace soldered components on their phones?
Yeah, Apples replacement kit requires like 11k deposit and comes in two 75 pound pelican cases.
No. This law keeps being misquoted, and people are going to be disappointed if they go into 2027 thinking we’ll be able to pop out batteries like the good ol’ days.
It does not necessitate battery removal like that. Only that it not be too difficult to change out for a repair (i.e. stuff like gluing it in place with a strong glue, or necessitating removing the display before the battery). That’s still a good change, I’d be happy if it were something like removing 4 screws then unplugging, but it’s not the same as what everybody makes out.
It also doesn’t apply at all for batteries over a certain capacity, or so long as the battery retains 63% capacity or more (presumably this means throughout the warranty period, but I’m unable to find a timeframe for which this standard gets applied) from 2027, or 73% from 2030.
There’s also a 2 year grace period after the law comes into effect where it won’t really be applied.
No. This law keeps being misquoted, and people are going to be disappointed if they go into 2027 thinking we’ll be able to pop out batteries like the good ol’ days.
I know. While I didn’t read the full legal text, tech news sources are saying it needs to be replaceable by an independent third party or the customer themselves with regularly available tools. I’d love to have easy slide in/out batteries, but I know this is not that.
It also doesn’t apply at all for batteries over a certain capacity, or so long as the battery retains 63% capacity or more (presumably this means throughout the warranty period) from 2027, or 73% from 2030.
I didn’t know about this clause. That’s too bad. :(
