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
Absolutely the damn LED. I would love to trade the stupid never-being-used selfie-cam for a damn 5 cent LED.
And swappable batteries. And a headphone-jack. And root by default (imagine you winpc came with no admin-pwd. Lol)… And…
I used to love customising the notification colour on my old phones, so good.
I miss my headphone jack so damn much, I’m over Bluetooth earbuds breaking constantly and being so damn expensive and low quality.
Then buy phones with headphone jacks. Mine has one, I dont buy ones without it.
If it matters for you to have it, dont buy phones that cut it. If models with it keep selling, theyre less likely to ditch it.
I’d rather just buy a DAP than randomly replace a perfectly good phone with one that sucks in comparison.
Lol I only buy jack phones, and if you think they suck you need to shop in places that arent back alleyways
It was a perfectly good MacDonald’s, thank you very much!
But in all seriousness, I just have particular needs that literally can’t be met by anything else.
U could try a usb to jack converter. Looks stupid but at least there’s a jack. Quality sucks anyway as they all use cheap dacs now 😩
I’ve got a suprisingly good pair of USB C earbuds that I found in my mailbox at the moment, but yeah at some point I’ll probably get a DAC
What I don’t understand is why the notification LED was removed in the first place? It can easily be put under the screen.
The LED was so helpful, and it’s so annoying when I don’t see an important message for hours, because I haven’t used my phone.I’m guessing… they don’t want us deciding whether to engage with our phones, they want us looking at them more. If that means less convenience for us we can get fucked
Because if you can read an LED notification system you have no purpose to pick up the cellphone.
Cellphones are not designed FOR YOU. They are designed by marketeers for you to use.
Once you realize this, all the anti-consumer shit makes sense.
Root by default is an awful idea.
Of course not by default, that’d be dumb. Every app that wants it pops up a Y/N-dialogue. That’s how I want it. It’s my phone, goddamit. I might’ve phrased that a bit misleading :-)
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3.5mm headphone jack
People keep going on about that and I get it from the point of not having to charge headphones all the time. But to me that is a very mild inconvenience compared to having to deal with those fucking cables all the time. I hate cables so damn much.
It’s more than just having to charge them I wouldn’t even really consider that much of a downside with how long they last. I haven’t yet ran out of charge before I was ready to take mine out. The actual downsides are- Wireless earbuds are expensive. The batteries in them wear out over time and you have to buy all new ones which is wasteful. Bluetooth adds a noticeable delay that sucks when watching video. My car doesn’t have bluetooth so I need a headphone jack for AUX. I have both and like wireless ones when I’m on the go but if I’m stationary wired don’t cause any problems.
Here’s the crazy thing tho… You could just not use it and choose to use blue tooth still.
Oh, my problem isn’t with charging them. They actually hold a charge for a super long time.
I’d like bluetooth earbuds a lot more if I could find some that aren’t “smart.” If I put on a beanie, I bump them. If I remove one earbud to converse, I bump it. I’ve not once intentionally used a gesture-based control on an earbud for anything else other than undoing the situation I’ve caused by bumping them. Otherwise, I control everything with my phone. If I’m working out, I just select my playlist, mute notifications, and I don’t have to touch anything after that. Gesture-based earbuds are not for me.
I really don’t think there are dumb bluetooth earbuds, though. At least, I haven’t been able to find any.
And I don’t mind cables as much as you do. I think my favorite earbuds would be those that are connected to each other by a cable, but again – only if they were not smart.
Not sure what brand you have but mine you can turn off the functions on the buttons in the app.
Which app? I usually use YouTube or Spotify. I doubt I need a dedicated app for earbuds.
The brand is Jabra, they have an app associated with them where you can change various settings on how the earbuds work. One of them is what the buttons do.
You can turn off the touch controls on Samsung Galaxy Bud Pros, maybe the other galaxy bud models too
For most of these, turning off touch controls means that when you accidentally trigger the touch commands, it plays a little jingle and pushes a notification telling you that youve disabled touch controls and you need to reenable them.
Completely defeating the fucking point of turning off touch controls, and making me want to wrap my hands around the throat of the idiot who designed that
On my buds if I turn on “block touches” and I touch them nothing happens, no jingle or notification. But yeah that does sound like a stupid feature
There are often enterprise versions that still have it. Like the S10E for example.
Yes, and I’m thinking my next phone will be one of those.
I have a much better time with wired earbuds than with bluetooth.
Forgot my bluetooth headphones the other day on a long trip and the 3.5mm jack saved my rear end.
Just needed to stop at a shop briefly for some cheap plug-in buds and I was no longer listening to babies screaming on the journey. As a bonus, it also didn’t interfere with me charging my phone
I’d like bluetooth earbuds a lot more if I could find some that aren’t “smart.” If I put on a beanie, I bump them. If I remove one earbud to converse, I bump it. I’ve not once intentionally used a gesture-based control on an earbud for anything else other than undoing the situation I’ve caused by bumping them. Otherwise, I control everything with my phone. If I’m working out, I just select my playlist, mute notifications, and I don’t have to touch anything after that. Gesture-based earbuds are not for me.
I really don’t think there are dumb bluetooth earbuds, though. At least, I haven’t been able to find any.
I have a pair of cheap Skullcandy’s that have physical buttons instead of touch sensors. The buttons are basically impossible to use without smooshing the earbud into your ear trying to click it, but it also means it’s really hard to accidentally click them. Probably as close as you can get to dumb Bluetooth earbuds.
I don’t even understand why someone would want controls on their earbuds, much less for it to be such a widespread issue, but honestly I’m just going to make sure my next phone has a 3.5mm jack
Could always get one of the beanies that have bluetooth speakers in 'em. It’ll solve your problem of bumping your earbuds, (though not through a necessarily “good” option). Or, you could use the wired bluetooth headphones like these.
As another alternative, there’s the apple airpods, which, as far as I can tell, have not gestures but some weird-ass pseudo capacitive button that makes a sound when you press them. I did just realize though, that if you have an apple device they’ll automatically pause playback when you take a headphone out (I think), so that may not be your cup of tea. However, if you have an Android, this addition won’t work unless you have an app like CAPods (which you can turn on or off in the app, so no worries there). There’s also the downside of not having access to many features like toggling through the different modes (active noise canceling or whatever other bullshit like that), not being able to natively see the battery of the case or earbuds (though, like with the aforementioned feature, using an app like CAPods you can see it), and some others that I can’t recall at the moment.
Sorry about the length of this reply, I was originally just going to mention the bluetooth beanies as a joke, but I have nothing else to do at the moment, so why not share my experiences? Anywho, that’s my two cents, this could help, it could be utterly useless, you could already know all of this, you may not even read the wall of text, etc. etc… Do as you will with this.
You don’t happen to know if there’s some open-source software for Android that might be similar to CAPods? Tbh I’m probably never going to buy either airpods or the brand-name Samsung ones, but I’d imagine there might be a more universal solution?
Yeah, I don’t actually recommend buying airpods unless you got them for free if you’re an Android user (that’s the only reason I’m using airpods atm).
As to open source, I believe CAPods is, unless you’re referring to an open source app for most headphones (which upon second thought you probably are).
As to that question, CAPods, according to their GitHub page, supports a few Beats devices, this app for Galaxy Buds on Windows/Linux devices, and this one for Huawei Freebuds device(s?).
Overall, the closest I could find was GadgetBridge, which has support (partial or full) for a few Samsung devices, one Nothing, a few Sony, and Bose(?), though, I did keep running into internal server errors, so it might be out of date.
Not really, it’s mostly only budget phones that have it nowadays. The S10E(which stands for ‘essential’ btw, not ‘enterprise’) is almost 5 years old, not exactly representative of the modern phone market.
This going away has just make the Tiktok tide that much more horrendous. I work in a school. The hallways are nothing but that horrid shit blasting out of hundreds of bad speakers.
You don’t think it’d still be the same even with the headphone jack still there? Wireless headphones and converters for wired headphones do exist, they just don’t care.
HTC just came out with a phone that has a headphone jack AND expandable memory. I hope they go for a gen 2 in the near future since it had some kinks to work out, such as a curved glass screen, becase then it would be just about everything I could ask for in a phone.
Privacy.
Try to let go of Google everything. Start by ditching Chrome and Chromium based browsers
I switched to duck duck go who knows how many years ago. Haven’t looked back.
Can’t even remember when I started using Firefox, but that was probably around the time when Opera became popular. Before Crome existed, I was already on FF and never regretted staying there. At that point, I was already somewhat aware of privacy matters, so switching to Chrome seemed completely stupid to me.
Have you tried not shitting with the door open?
That’s funny. Every time somebody says “If you have nothing to hide, what are you worried about,” I reply, “Do you shit with the door open?”
But now the door isn’t just open. It feels like Uncle Sam is pissing between your legs.
Physical buttons in cars
Repairable phones
Repairable laptops
Resoleable shoes
Hand-crank drills (for those quick and easy projects where dealing with batteries or cords isn’t worth it)
External frames on hiking packs
Actually tough jeans that need to be broken in and last a while
Headphone jack
I miss physical buttons on everything. We’re a tactile species living in a digital purgatory
I agree with all but hand crank drills. If you own a battery drill it’s probably stored with it’s battery and with keyless chucks (that don’t work on a hand crank drill) getting a battery drill ready for work is faster than a hand crank, and it will do the job faster too.
also it looks cool when you change the battery like a gun
There are some products that buck the trend for a couple of your points:
Repairable phones - https://www.fairphone.com/
Repairable laptops - https://frame.work/
I have a framework 13 and absolutely love it. Not used a Fairphone yet, and I believe the latest model might have sadly scrapped the 3.5 headphone jack, but will still be a strong contender when I next need an upgrade.
Actually tough jeans that need to be broken in and last a while
Doesn’t that have to do with the fact that modern jeans have some stretchy materials added in which makes them more comfortable?
Surely one could buy old type jeans if one really wanted too.
By far replaceable batteries. You used to be able to purchase physically larger and higher capacity batteries to get insane battery life, but because they would include a larger rear plastic for the phone it would still look normal. Now we have to waste space and lose efficiency with external power banks.
Thank you European Union for creating a law mandating replaceable batteries.
Swappable batteries in mobile phones.
It will most likely come back due to EU legislation.
Maybe, but swappable =/= replaceable, in my opinion. I could be wrong, but I’m not sure that EU legislation says that phone batteries should be swappable, only replaceable
“ Portable batteries incorporated in appliances shall be readily removable and replaceable by the end-user or by independent operators during the lifetime of the appliance, if the batteries have a shorter lifetime than the appliance, or at the latest at the end of the lifetime of the appliance. A battery is readily replaceable where, after its removal from an appliance, it can be substituted by a similar battery, without affecting the functioning or the performance of that appliance.”
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A52020PC0798&qid=1703805580803
So we see here that batteries must be replaceable without affecting the function of the device. Yet waterproofing is important. What seems more likely to me is that batteries need to be replaceable without opening the entire device and therefore destroying liquid protections as per the proposed law. Easiest way to do that would be something similar to a SIM card tray where a hidden button is pressed to release the battery to swap it. The designers would have to go out of their way to make this process difficult, which the EU also doesn’t want, to avoid making them swappable. And that feature is attractive. Knowing Apple though, it’ll be harder on the base models or batteries will cost too much.
The snippet “if the batteries have a shorter lifetime than the appliance” worries me. Seems to me that modern engineers are capable of making their crap’s lifespan just barely shorter than the projected batty lifespan, and people might just be stupid enough to still buy it.
I mean, the disposable vape market is an extreme example, but somewhat relevant I think.
That being said, if the processor on the LG G5 had kept up with the market better, I don’t see how that couldn’t have been a starting point.
As for waterproofing, my GoPro stays waterproof but the side door opens to give access to the SD card, battery, etc, so it’s absolutely possible.
Not really. EU legislation is about the right to repair, not about swappable batteries on the run
How does one safely repair a lithium-ion battery without just swapping it for a working one?
It’s the difference between sitting down for 20 minutes unscrewing various components to get to the damaged battery you need to replace, vs. popping off the back cover and simply swapping out one dead battery for a charged one anytime you run out of power. The former is replaceable. The latter is swappable.
This. Like ten years ago, when Samsungs had swappable batteries, they were super proud of it. They would advertise it as a feature that Apple doesn’t have.
When I was at a festival, Samsung had an activation where you could tweet at them with your phone model and location and they would send someone with a full battery to trade you for yours. It was an amazing free service that I used so many times, and every time, the jealousy on the faces of all the iPhone people was palpable. Then one year, they quietly removed the swappability from their new phones.
Swappable batteries are such a huge feature that most people don’t even know that they want.
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
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.
HEADPHONE JACKS
Dear god yes 😭 I miss those so much
i do have a cheap Samsung with a headphone jack
Headphone jacks and small phones
Not a feature but I do miss phones having side bezels. You could firmly hold your phone and not disturb the content on your phone. I can barely use youtube now because i keep touching my screen apparently
Fingerprint sensor on the back of the phone
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.
Meh, I prefer it under the screen personally.
SD card slots, user-replaceable batteries, and headphone jacks.
Where did they go? Just vanished?
There are several advantages to not having them: without all the extra parts needed to support these features you can make the phone thinner (thickness is traditionally a key marketing point for smartphones) and cheaper to make.
Additionally, it seems that a lot of people no longer need these features, making them prime candidates for exclusion: Bluetooth headphones have become very common, internal storages have become large enough, and people buy a new phone often enough nowadays that battery wear is not as much of an issue.
Of course, if you are one of the people who still do want these features you’re pretty much out of luck. Which sucks.
without all the extra parts needed to support these features you can make the phone thinner
I don’t think the 3.5mm jack is the limiting spec on how thick phones are. The latest iphone (15) without the jack is 7.8mm thick, while my phone that has one is 7.9mm. The 15 pro is 8.3mm. Thickness may have been a selling point in the past but I don’t think people care anymore bc essentially everything’s pretty thin these days–size concerns are way more focused on length/width.
The idea that people don’t need headphone jack seems pretty weird. Phones removed the 3.5mm jack, so people had to buy Bluetooth headphones, because now there is just 1 port on the phone.
And now, because of this change, you’re looking back and saying that that’s a not needed feature.
Does that sound right?
I guess people don’t use sd cards to increase storage but to keep their data handy when device dies or somehow renderes inaccessible.
Excellent, I love when my phone is so thin it risks bending.
Real buttons that you can feel. Hence could use them without looking at the screen.
The audio port for headphones and headsets. Replaceable batteries. Extendable storage. Fuckers charge 100x more for every little upgrade now.
To be fair, expandable storage as we’ve had it sucks. MicroSD cards cause a lot of issues, and a good chunk of Android apps block the ability to use them. Connecting an SSD to your phone is a much better experience.
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It’s a better experience for higher speeds and better stability, not for convenience.
Fuck modern features; gimme back my god damn 3.5mm audio port.
I don’t understand why people love the 3.5mm port so much. Can you enlighten me?
I’ve always been a bluetooth lover, and maybe it’s my noob ears, but I can’t tell the diff between 3.5mm sound and bluetooth sound.
Bluetooth is compressed garbage
Are you seriously carrying a FLAC connection on your phone? Please…
It’s another things to charge and keep track of. Have a long flight and forgot to charge your phones? Too bad.
There are no flights over 30 hours long, so it’s irrelevant. You also cannot listen to music non stop for so long and you can charge them while you sleep on your flight.
