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I’d kill for a notification LED again…
I’ve been working on notifications the last few days and noticed I still had some legacy code there to set the notification LED orange. Broke my heart to remove it…
Still got one on my Sony Xperia 1 IV
Recently shot myself in the foot after buying a flagship sony, only to find they do not support bootloader unlock specifically on the US variant. It feels like a conspiracy, since it is practically the same hardware and software otherwise.
Still a great phone but I literally purchased it specifically because I thought it had all of these features and an unlockable bootloader
Time to trade in the pixel
For me the always on display on the pixel works well for this purpose. I like the little icons that show up when you have a notification, and I can just glance over to see what app the notification is coming from
Dozens of us, dozens.
Aren’t there phones which still have led? Though I guess you can’t test it
I’m sure they still exist, and I know there are apps that can emulate one on an AMOLED display.
Mine does, but then it also has a built-in thermal imaging camera, which is definitely not normal.
More than anything I want a hardware keyboard.
No, not Bluetooth, not tacked on, not in a case, not vibrating emulation of buttons, not a half kilo Linux phone for terminal use, just a regular vertical phone with a keypad ffs.
Don’t tell me it’s difficult, when we get a dozen new gaming handhelds a month. They have buttons and Android. Don’t tell me it’s too expensive if Chinese factories can make a phone or handheld under 100€. Don’t tell me there are no suitable displays, when there clearly are displays of all shapes and sizes. Don’t tell me there’s no interest when there are thousands of phone models on the market and everyone is fighting to find any niche to squeeze into. It’s clearly absolutely doable, it’s been done both well and cheap, just the phone vendors are absolutely dense.
I just realized a folding phone would be a great platform for a keyboard. When closed, the keyboard would be on the back, with a screen on the front. Open it to reveal the big screen on the inside, flip over to type on the keyboard using the front screen.
That could work on a flip-style foldable. Actually you don’t even need it to be foldable, just a regular screen on one side and screen+keypad on the other side. I wonder if that’s less or more likely to happen, since in the past few years we’ve had more phones with multiple displays than with keypads, and phone makers are obsessed with displays.
A problem is that we “have” to have those gigantic cameras with 15 lenses that take up half of the back, so with that mindset there’s not enough space for both a screen and keypad.
I heard it had something to do with Blackberry owning a patent/copyright/trademark (don’t know which), so phone makers would have to lease the right to do it from them. And Blackberry just… isn’t interested, I guess?
I heard the same, but that doesn’t explain how there’s been phone models with keypads both before and after BB.
Also, I doubt Chinese phone makers give a fuck about patents. There was a cheap qwerty phone with KaiOS sold only in India, and I suspect it wasn’t sold anywhere else exactly to avoid worldwide patent problems. But honestly who cares, just make it and people will import it.
I used to use a phone by Siemens that had a hardware keyboard, and an HTC after that. If they have something blocking, they must license it out. However, I doubt they do.
Particularly for work, geez.
I kept my old-ass text- only BBerry with the keyboard and side scroll wheel as long as IT let me have it, they made me go to a touch screen which, frankly, sucks for handling correspondence.
For my own phone, yes more screen real estate for videos and pics.
yeah maybe 6 or 7 years ago
I mean the ones that people still try to use today, but they can be from that era.
Is there a phone that still has all these features?
If a phone hit all of these, and added 6 years of guaranteed (timely) OEM OS updates, I would pay upwards of $2,000+.
OEMs hit me up - I’ve got a credit card ready to go right now.
FairPhone 5 is doing 8 years of software updates with 5 versions of Android updates and 3 more years of security updates.
Not small and no headphone jack, unfortunately.
No notification LED either, locked to /e/ in the US for keeping warranty, no buy.
Fairphone is damn close in spirit though, especially in the EU market.
What does locked to /e/ mean?
“Can I revert to Google stock Android?
Technically yes, but note that this will void your warranty and support with us”
I wouldn’t give them my money entirely because of this one line, personally.
Especially the cousin roms.
Xiaomi has all of these, but custom roms are hit and miss.
Xiaomi smartphones are such a pita… Everyone I know who owns one is glad to never buy them again.
True, Xiaomi software is bloat incarnate, but I’m hoping it becomes good with a custom ROM.
There’s nothing wrong with a Xiaomi or one of their subbrands, it’s just byos
Asus zenfone unfortunately doesn’t have a removable battery but good to go on everything else
Sony, except the battery, but that is coming with new EU regulation.
Actually cheap phones often have more of these things, although it’s getting rarer.
Sony’s phones aren’t small.
They’re skinnier and shaped in a more compact way. And I think the lower models are still smaller, aren’t they? Even if not exactly the compact/mini models they used to make.
Their aspect ratio is much wider. Still, they’re not using this to make smaller phones but simply make phones that are just as wide as other phones even taller, making the top of the screen even harder to reach. The Xperia 10 and 5 Vs are both 68 mm wide, which is just as wide as a zenfone, but 8.5 mm taller.
Yea, and Zenfone 10 is the “small” phone, isn’t it? So this is as wide as that, and much skinnier than usual phone sizes. The assignment said “compact”, not “small”.
The zenfone is sometimes called small because that phablet is absurdly one of the smallest phones you can get right now. Still, that doesn’t make it small or compact. The XZ1 compact was 64x129 mm. The zenfone is 68.1x146.5 mm. And with those bezels on the older Sony, the top part of the display were actually in reach of your thumb. The zenfone has a 5.92 inch display… That’s not small. You know which phone is just a μ wider but also smaller than the zenfone? The fucking galaxy S22. The Samsung flagship. Those aren’t compact or small and the fact that people call them that in the absence of actually small android phones doesn’t make it any better. The only compact or small phones right now are the iPhones 13 Mini and the se which are both the last of their kind.
Xperia Ace III (I actually imported one), love the size!
Fairphone
Not available in the US.
In US. Have Fairphone (thanks eBay).
Fairphone 4 is coming to the US market
Not small. No 3.5 mm.
im fairly sure fairphone is getting rid of the audio jack though :-(
What!
A phone for ease of repair removes the jack?
Darn…
I had a different reaction to the notification led. I don’t like my electronics glowing or blinking in the dark. I still liked my old android tablet, but it had to sleep face down because I could not turn the LED off.
On my phone the notification LED works as a charging/low-battery light. I can’t use my phone in the dark when the LED is on, because it’s so blindingly bright I can hardly see the screen.
I can’t tell if you mean you slept face down or you slept with the tablet face down haha
I’ve covered the lights on several of my devices with black nail polish. It works pretty well. Some of them have angles that it won’t adhere to very well, but even then it’s a lot less obnoxious.
One coat to dim slightly, 3-4 to block light effectively.
You realize that there is a built in android setting to silence notifications if you lay your phone screen down. It’s my favorite feature! No vibes no blinking lights. Silence.
Yeh, I thought I wanted a notification led again but once you have it you realise it’s pointless. So many things can notify you about stuff you don’t care about.
Nice to have and disable if you don’t like it though.
TIL: I am a cultist.
Same. Apparently demanding the bare minimum of user modifications, and tried and true technology, is being a cultist?
I’d apply that label to the iEcosystem users than us android bois.
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I want my notification light back so badly!
The Xperia Z2 had a notification light bar, I miss that one especially.
I saw a comment on lemmy some time ago about a foss app that mostly brings it back, but I can’t find it anymore.
It’s not the one I saw, but a quick google search led to this: https://github.com/Chainfire/HoleyLight
I remember reading about AODnotify on here recently. I’m not sure if it’s FOSS, but it was a very cool app!
I agree! And it flashed different colors for different notifications! Things were awesome!
How do you customize it?
There used to be a notification light settings panel in Settings. I don’t have a. Notification light anymore, so I’m not sure where yours would be.
Didn’t even realize the led was something that had been removed. Mine has it on the upper edge, which is fine, although I’d prefer it on the front face so it can be ‘muted’ by flipping the phone over
My android flashes around the edge of the screen when there’s a notification, whether I’m using it or not.
I just use the camera notification circle. It works just fine. I can set it to use a notification dot but the circle is cooler
Why do you need it with an OLED screen?
Wait, aren’t most phones OLED? Wouldn’t it be trivial to light up a few pixels in the corner of the screen when it’s off? Do phones not do this (I’m still running my S7 into the ground so I have a dedicated LED)?
It’s not trivial. An LED only needs power to light up, an OLED Pixel always needs the GPU to be powered on and it would be a significant power loss to implement a pixel sadly
None of this is true. It may happen in practice on some poorly-designed devices, but the “GPU” in the SoC can remain powered off, and the display controller remain in low-power mode.
The full Always On Display (which shows the clock + some notifications) uses less than 1% battery per hour on my ancient S7, are new phones not any better than that?
It doesn’t if the screen is connected directly to the frame buffer which can refresh independently. Whether that’s actually implemented this way in hardware, well who knows, but I suspect it is as that’s useful to display any static image. Then just power up the display driver for a microsecond to refresh the image if needed.
I mean there’s a ton of phones that have always on displays (AOD)
yeah samsung has a feature for this in good look
Which setting? I don’t think I see it
Huh, you’re right, I don’t see it anymore either. Could be they removed it, or maybe I’m just looking in the wrong place.
I have my always on display which gives me icons of the notifications in a predictable place on screen all the time.
My battery still lasts a full day so power concerns not an issue
OLED does see significant power benefits for black pixels but it’s no where close to lighting just a single LED
Oh look, phones from circa 2017!
Lol. My Samsung galaxy S3 did all this!
notification LED
but why?
I think it is useful when you don’t have an OLED screen. Else you can just have an AOD
I remember mentioning the LED on a reply, then one person replied to that saying that they miss the LED. Several people upvoted that.
RIP power user geared phones
Everything Android is now tooled for the hyper casual iPhone leaning demographic since they are the majority.
Bring back the IR blaster. No one apparently misses it but me.
I just hooked up a CD burner diode to my phone (also a DVD but thats a red laser)
How to kill IR receivers (fast)
I just bought a USB C adapter two weekends ago. Lives on my keychain for when I’m somewhere with a TV that’s a little too loud.
Forgot that. Actually, the Redmi Note 12 that I’m typing this on actually has one! But in the US, yeah.
Is that you FlossyCarter? 😂
I still have mine on my phone, one of many reasons I haven’t “upgraded”.
Just get yourself a flipper
I’d rather have an IR blaster than a headphone jack
I have a Poco X3 Pro and I have both + an sd slot
And a notification LED too.
why not both
You can have an IR blaster as an accessory for the headphone jack.
Do you remember the moment in time people were making accessories which took up the headphone jack? Pepperidge farm remembers.
I have a windmeter using the jack, and it still works
Some Xiaomi phones still have them
Yeah. I have one, I don’t really use it ever.
If you really want to control your TV from your phone, why not just use an app to control it over the local network that’s probably available if your TV has been released in the past 10 years or so? Doesn’t even have to be in line of sight for that.
In my experience, the apps are extremely spotty. That’s besides privacy concerns.
I was not missing it for about a couple years but now I’m missing it again, it was just so damn good and like why can’t our monitors and PCs get IR receiver then we would be about to use a remote to play/pause, control volume, and forward and rewind things on it (yes you can also use wifi based apps, but I don’t want to set up an ad hoc network every time I need it or connect to an open WiFi)
P.S. I’m aware my idea isn’t the best, but it’s just the perfect mix of convenience and usability for me
Shouldn’t it be possible to just use one of the cameras or even the light sensor as receiver and the screen as sender? At that point, you only need software support.
well, maybe. Neither cameras nor screens are optimized for the infrared spectrum (in fact, cameras in particular filter it). So that might be possible but I wouldn’t bet on it
Might not be as reliable and will be less efficient in just trying to encode and decode messages in them without needing an epilepsy warning every time you use it.
Edit: unless you meant generating and reading IR through them, in which case it might not work at all
I was annoyed when they removed it but a lot of electronics did add apps for the electronics so it wasn’t a huge deal then. But between the poor performance and privacy issues of the apps, I really miss the IR blaster.
My Fairphone 3 ticks all these boxes lol
Unfortunately, 1080p 60fps LCD display is way too bad for me to consider it.
Bruh what kind of extra special eyes do you have 😳
As a sidenote I do find it funny that my FP3 can record at 120fps… more than the built in display’s framerate lol
Fairphone 5 has 1224x2700 90 Hz
We are talking about fairphone 3 though? And fairphone 5 has really shit battery life, no headphone jack and a mediocre at best camera for it’s price point.
Is it the LCD display? I don’t even have a monitor on my PC that’s better than 1080p 60Hz should be fine for a phone
There’s a noticeable difference in higher framrates in phones even on general usage.
Just ordered the 5 despite them removing the audio jack… Yeah I’m a bit salty about that
My ultimate phone would be a fairphone with audio jack, fingerprint reader, sd slot, and support for custom roms like calyxos. I would buy that in an instant.
Again, Fairphone 3 ticks all those boxes. Though I’m not 100% about Calyxos. I know it can run LineageOS or /e/OS instead of stock android. If it can run those, its likely that it can do Calyxos too.
The only thing that it doesn’t do from that list is the audio jack.
Yeah I know what you mean. At the very least, you can get a dongle and use aux headphones that way, but we shouldn’t have to ffs
Samsung’s industrial smartphone line checks all boxes still
Even custom ROM? Genuinely wondering.
Not a lot of ROM development that I can see unfortunately
Link please… :)
Xcover
Custom ROMs should be first on the list
Oh yea. Even has Android 13!
I just upgraded to it the other day from /e/OS which was on Android 11 I think.
I wanted a FairPhone, but they have yet to sell officially in the US and I couldn’t afford to deal with the potential difficulties involved with not having the right bands.
To me its a no brainer for them to start selling in the US. Brands like Framework are getting a lot of hype for their reparability and longevity. Being a mobile brand stepping in to offer a smartphone to compliment Framework’s laptops could be fantastic. Plus there’s a wave of people demanding right to repair legislation in the US, Fairphone would do well to harness that I think.
man, i wish i had one
My Xperia phone has all of these except the removable battery. I think the EU is legislating removable batteries be brought back to phones so given another year or two I’d expect to start seeing them again.
Which current Xperia is small? They dropped the compact line years ago.
Either the 5 series or the entry-level Ace series (Japan only).
The Xperia 5 series looks almost perfect. Side mounted fingerprint readers are real annoying to use left-handed unfortunately
The 5 isn’t small and the ace isn’t available where I live :-/
I actually imported the Ace, sadly doesn’t work on T-Mobile 4G/5G. Also only has a 720P panel.
Yay, I’m not the only person with an Xperia! 😂
I’ve got a 1 III and I’m pretty damn happy with it. I don’t even care about the lack of replaceable battery.
I think “discontinued after one year” would be a fun punchline here, like the “perfect r/cars car” being a “brown, manual transmission, V8 wagon that’s used from the factory”
