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
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
Everything. We’re down to barebones and marketing now focus solely on camera software updates or phone materials (“now with titanium!” How fucking sad is that?) And they are all selling the same phone.
Some of the most important loses…
Swappable batteries changed travel for me. Always having two extra charged batteries in my backpack, that you could swap top 100% in 20 seconds, made me ONLY use my phone as a free and completely useful tool without any planning or restrictions on my use. Otherwise, you can’t take too many pictures or videos, stream music or video or make video calls too long or you might be fucked when you need phone, GPS, payment or to get a rideshare to where you’re staying.
Audio jack similarly meant freedom. Bluetooth headphones out of battery, broken or one earbud lost? Have a pair of wired in the backpack always add backup. Also better audio quality through wired with DAC on certain models and less daily device load to charge/babysit
secondary screens LG V10 had a bar on top, they also had the T shaped dual screen phone and the secondary screen phone case. There was just creativity and attempts at innovation.
microSD expandable memory, again less and less available and this was about freedom - fuck your cloud storage add its data leaks, corruption and redaction. I own my data, you don’t control it.
My new android phone is waterproof, rugged, has 5 days of battery life, 2 microsim, 1 microsd (up to 1TB i think, for apps and/or photos depending on partitioning via adb), headphone jack, no stupid notch or hole in the display and a notification light for $100. Sure I only get 4GB of RAM, a 24MP camera without stabilization, 64GB of slow-ish flash and an 8 core mediatek cpu. But if Google or HTC won’t give me what I want, I’ll buy the Doogee S51 with the fake 2nd wide angle camera that is just a dummy lens.
I was really baffled when I got a November 2023 security OTA update. Didn’t expect that. Also it isn’t loaded with crapware like a Samsung or Lenovo. Overall I am quite satisfied with price/performance.
I think the reason why you get the OTA is because Doogee uses mostly non modified Android software, making the official releases available for your phone with ease.
Swappable batteries are coming back in 2027 because of the EU.
Full article here.
I also very much miss the removable batteries. I spent 8 years with my old phone simply because I didn’t want to give up it’s easy swap ability but I have to say that the headphone jack is the thing that really affects and annoys me the most. For years and years I literally carried a pair of wired earbuds with me everywhere I went (coiled up and carried in the small pocket of my jeans). No matter where I was or what I was doing, I could literally be ready to go music mode at any time. I absolutely loved it. Being saddled with the bluetooth buds now and their annoying battery life is not at all ideal for me. I often take very long daily excursions that end up seeing my headphones die on me frequently now and I miss my wired headphones nearly every single day.
When the iphone first came out, it was nice to be able to use the earbuds with my macbook too.
I don’t think I’ll ever forgive apple for what they did with the lightning jack
I just tried a Pixel 8 for a few days after years of using a Pixel 6 - it is legitimately a worse phone. Even with its higher frame rate screen (which is considerably smaller), all the phones animations look like garbage because the CPU struggles to keep up. I found some menus that I tested side by side on the pixel 6 and 8… the 6’s reaction was instant and smooth, while the 8 took about half a second to register that it had been touched, after which the menu’s animation was glitchy. My wife tested one too, and was having issues getting her fingerprints to save.
Is there even an option for a decent modern android phone that doesn’t have bloatware (i.e… Samsung)? I was hoping the pixel would be acceptable so I could use Graphene OS, but it doesn’t look like that is going to be happening. Is there another device that works well with Lineage or something similar that would be a decent alternative to a Pixel with Graphene?
I’ll miss LG. My Fuzic II had a headphone jack, full QWERTY keyboard, FM transmitter…