I think this is a One UI 7 thing, but the battery indicator for connected Bluetooth devices has completely disappeared. The only way to check the remaining battery life of my connected headphones or speakers is through a third party application, I can no longer find a way to do it in the OS itself.
I can see it on my pixel, but it might be because I have the app for my earbuds. I’ll test.
I have a pair of Galaxy Buds (1st Gen) and they are the only headphones that still display a battery icon. Not sure if I’m missing something obvious but it feels very much like the type of anti-consumer walled garden change Samsung would make these days in its “copy Apple” era.
higher dpi/4k screens.
oled pixel layouts already have fewer subpixels than they should for say a claimed “1080p”, leading to weird blur or aliasing in places.
My high dpi phone has made my eink reader redundant; the sharpness simply makes it way more comfortable to read, for me enough to be on par with print.And now I can only await how long my phone will remain usable, knowing no new phones with higher dpi (600ppi+) are being made.
Gimmick features in general. So many android phones are just designed to be android flavors of an iPhone, removing all the character that used to be one of the benefits of not going with Apple.
I had a phone that had a built in kickstand. It was both useful for propping the phone up and as a fidget toy. My last phone had a camera that would pop up out of the top of the phone so they could put a better camera for the selfie cam while also not having a hole in the screen.
- IR blaster
- Headphone jack
- Expandable storage
- Physical keys, especially a D pad (I loved my Samsung i7500 for this)
That’s probably my top 4. Easily swappable battery I can do without, but able to replaced with basic tools would be nice (like a screwdriver, not a specialist kit that involves regluing the damn thing).
Reading through this thread gives me serious nostalgia. My first smartphone was a Motorola Droid, which really had it all: physical slide-open keyboard, headphone jack, removable battery, configurable notification LEDs, shake guesture for the flashlight. Good times. Kept on running with CyanogenMod well beyond the official support.
I might be the only one, but KEYBOARDS!
I even designed my own keyboard attachment to get one back.
I miss them dearly. Luckily there is some options, I currently using clicks but it is not without its flaws mainly that my phone feels like a tv remote.
I was watching this Janus Cycle video at the weekend, and god it made me wish I could buy a folding keyboard case for my Pixel 9.
A lot of people miss physical keyboards actually F(x)Tec Pro1 X has a physical keyboard. There is a modern clone of Blackberry Passport. There is the Clicks keyboard case for iPhones.
I think I’m one of very few enthusiasts who likes software keyboards better at this point lol.
F(x)Tec Pro1 X
Super-weird formatting aside, that looks pretty interesting. Out of stock though.
The formatting most likely didn’t help with people being able to google it, or to remember the name even.
It’s quite old now and has been out of stock for a long time.
Yeah, I just noticed that it was released in 2023. Not necessarily a bad thing, really, but damn I’d like one of these devices if not for that form factor on its own. Still has official LOS support, too.
I miss the days when everything wasn’t glued together. The biggest hurdle to battery replacement or screen replacement is all that damn glue.
Rectangular screens without missing parts. I hate rounded corners.
I bought a modern off brand with an audio jack and micro SD, because why would I spend 3 times more for less features?
Wish it was ranked choice voting. For me the list is: removable battery, expandable storage, ir blaster, headphone jack. I think repairablity is the most important and i never use the headphone jack but do use ir sometimes so thats the only reason its last. On phones with oled screens notification light is a software feature and fm requires the headphone jack.
I got Motorola with a headphone jack, and I use it surprisingly often. All my Bluetooth stuff has fallen apart faster than my wired stuff.
They are one of the few OEMs that still offers headphone jacks and they are overall decent midrange phones. If they weren’t so damned big and had an unlocked bootloader for ROM support I’d be on one right now.
Yeah, I’ve given up on bootloaders long ago. After I broke my last phone, finding a decent mid range phone with expandable storage, a headphone jack, stylus and nice colors was pretty nice. The cameras are decent, and the processing power is fine for most stuff. The only time it slows down is if I’m cropping and editing a video or screen recording, which is a pretty seldom thing.
My Pixel 4a was perfect, but it is sadly gone now. I ended up with an 8a to I could keep using grapheneOS, but without a headphone jack I just started using a standalone portable music player. It seems ridiculous because it is, but that is what they forced on me and I will never forgive any of these companies for it.
IR Blaster, Headphone Jack, swappable battery.
Ultimately…
Less thin, I hate this constant race to be the thinnest phone - lighter I would maybe be for - but thinner, fuck off.
Why I didn’t buy a Fold7 recently:
- Too thin
- Cameras slightly below other flagships
- No S Pen support, because they wanted to make it thinner
- Bad water resistance
- Awful battery size and life
- Overall, one of the more underpowered and under spec’d foldable on the global market - all because they wanted to be thin
I’ve been impressed by my Ulefone 27T. It’s an armoured brick with a 10,000mAh battery. Waterproof, with IR and headphone jack. It also has a thermal camera.
Across the board, in product survey after product survey, consumers agree with you every time about thin phones. At best nobody cares beyond being briefly conceptually impressed (in a way that doesn’t translate into sales), at worst people actively hate how fragile it looks (or actually is). They always would rather have more battery life than a thinner phone, and actually below a certain weight most consumers prefer a phone to be heavier.
So why do companies keep racing to make the thinnest phones?
I honestly have no idea. This isn’t one of those things where I pose a rhetorical question and then answer it. The planned obsolescence of the battery seems plausible, but a thinner battery doesn’t really correspond to a shorter lifespan, just a shorter duty cycle. Maybe it’s just a vanity thing, like a competition between companies, but the bean-counters don’t usually let that sort of thing keep going if it doesn’t sell. Maybe it’s marketing, but that never really succeeds either. I really don’t know.
So why do companies keep racing to make the thinnest phones?
Because Steve Jobs’ ghost still haunts and demands all designs to be as anti consumer as possible
Anti-consumer for the sake of the bottom line is to be expected, but they’re burning millions of dollars on this.
Kind of a weird poll when I still have all those features, except maybe the IR blaster. Like, yeah, I would miss those, but I don’t currently…
Let me guess a Sony smartphone?
Nope, it’s a smaller manufacturer called “SHIFT”. Kind of like a competitor to Fairphone, in terms of repairability, sustainability, Custom ROM support and being expensive AF. 🙃
SHIFT
I just looked at the site and it looks great, but parts of it didn’t look available in English. Do you have any idea if it’s fully compatible with US networks?
Hmm, I found this German forum thread from 2019, which says it doesn’t support all frequencies used by US carriers.
Of course, this may very well be different with more modern models. You can try also asking on their forums, or maybe you’re able to contact support directly. So far, I’ve always gotten a response fairly quickly.
Also just to note, I’m on the SHIFT6mq, which isn’t being produced anymore.
I believe, they’re currently in a bit of an awkward in-between phase, where you can only really get the SHIFT5me, which is an even older model, while they’re planning out the SHIFTphone 8. That might still take some months, and quite possibly more than a year.
I don’t think they have the capacity for two flagship models at the same time, so you just get these fairly long pauses in availability, which I just can’t sugarcoat…Thanks for looking. I’ll see if I can poke around in their forums.
I’d forgotten all about the notification LED. I wonder, could you flash a small part of an OLED display to achieve something similar while still being low power?
Samsung S21 absolutely has a multicolour notification LED, but the only time it gets used is POST.
I loved it. I set up all these different colors to tell me what the priority was for checking. SMS was green, email was yellow or something, and FB (so cool back then) was blue. I really miss that, could just glance at it and know if it was worth risking pulling out your phone in school
Miss this too. And you could customize the number of flashes so 3 rapid green flashes was so-and-so’s WhatsApp message.
Animated and spanning backgrounds.
