The triangle / circle / square (or back / home / app tray) navigation system.
I’ve had to re-enable it on my last phones because they come with the much less usable new gesture navigation, and I dread the day it’s not an option anymore.
The classic app drawer.
If I wanted an iPhone (with their cluttered, unusable, and extremely user hostile design) I’d get an iPhone.
I don’t want my screen cluttered with random icons, I want multiple sliding screens with widgets for the apps I need to be able to check at a glance, with a row of quick access apps / app folders at the bottom (slidable and hidable if possible), with an icon to access the list of less used apps on the top right, where it used to be back when android was useable instead of a cheap iOS clone.
Luckily third party launchers are still a thing.
None, I buy Motorola. Still have all the features.
- 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).
Removable battery is #1. My old Galaxy S3 (not even my first phone-yes I’m old) has absolutely godawful battery life but I had I think 4 total batteries around to make sure I could always have it even on a heavy use day. That sucked, but at least it was doable with a really easy process (peel off plastic back, pull out and swap battery, snap the backplate back on).
I keep an old phone around and sometimes use it to play like a video for my cats to watch if they’re laying on my bed when I’m not in there. But it has to stay plugged in because it loses the first 20% in about 15 minutes.
And that phone in particular (a pixel 2) is particularly a pain to replace the battery in the first place.
Screens without holes in them.
I’m a Xperia weirdo because the one I have still rocks a 3.5mm jack, expandable storage and a camera outside the screen. Not only are some of those gone from this year’s equivalent, but it is 1500 bucks now, which is absurd. I went to a phone search engine and looked up that exact feature set and it turns out there are exactly zero phones that include those now.
I genuinely don’t understand why people think the way to compete with Samsung is doing a worse version of their exact product. It’s so dumb. Or maybe it’s true and it’s the people who are dumb. Because everybody says these things, but people seem to buy candybars with puncholes and no physical headphne support or expandable storage or IR blasters.
(also Xperia weirdo, checking in)
This year’s 1vii - which I did unfortunately pay said $1500 for - still has all of those. Hole-puch free display, SD card slot, headphone jack.
It’s lost the dedicated notification LED, but - aside from the change from a 21:9 to 19:9 display which I don’t love, but is far from a deal-breaker - that’s the only other outward change from the 1ii I had before.
Still the best waterproofing in the industry too, absolutely can’t fault Sony there.
I hate how the camera on my phone blocks part of the screen. Can’t they just have the lens a bit higher up
I have never understood this argument. The camera never blocked the screen. The screen moved up and around the camera. It’s either that, or you get a forehead/chin.
What do you people want? Pick one.
I don’t want a camera in the first place. I haven’t taken a selfie since 2014.
But if you’re going to have one you don’t need a forehead/chin. My Xperia can fit a camera in a “forehead” of under 2mm. Thinner than most punchholes and on par with the “forehead” of many mid-range phones WITH a hole. And it gets more room for a full second front firing speaker, to boot.
They could have spent all this time making the “forehead” thinner like that. Instead, they obsessed with fitting the body to the screen and added an annoying hole to it. Typically one that is deeper into the screen than a small camera space would otherwise, so if you want to give up the screen space to avoid the distraction you end up with a WAY bigger “forehead” than my Xperia has.
So no, punch holes and notches are dumb, they don’t expand the screen meaningfully and they provide no functionality. They’re a bug, not a feature. I’d take an under-screen selfie camera at most, and those are very rare these days, too.
My Xperia can fit a camera in a “forehead” of under 2mm. Thinner than most punchholes and on par with the “forehead” of many mid-range phones WITH a hole. And it gets more room for a full second front firing speaker, to boot.
And people wonder why the Xperia costs so much lol. That shit costs a lot of money to properly engineer, money most people don’t want to pay.
It certainly doesn’t cost more than an under-screen display where you need to both engineer a tiny screen of less dense see-through pixes AND the right setup to counter the blur you induce on the software side.
All the Xperia needs is a camera small enough that you can put it right against the top edge, so… I mean, it’s not going to be a huge high resolution sensor, but it’s good enough for what it needs to be. It’s certainly not the major driver of cost for the device. The rear tele camera that has a movable optical zoom is probably a bigger issue (and not particularly good, they could have gone with something cheaper).
It certainly doesn’t cost more than an under-screen display where you need to both engineer a tiny screen of less dense see-through pixes AND the right setup to counter the blur you induce on the software side.
But that’s my point. It’s cheaper to just build the screen around the camera.
See what I did there? The camera never removed screen real estate. The screen never had that real estate to begin with, unless it was engineered in a way that allowed it, which is not common yet.
I used to hate the notch - until I bought a OnePlus 6. Only then did I understand that the camera didn’t cut into the screen, rather the screen grew around the camera. The holepunch is an evolution of that. Apple made it work for them with the whole “dynamic island” thing, and at this point nobody really seems to care about the cutouts anymore anyway. Except for a few overly vocal morons online.
Don’t get me wrong here - I’m not arguing for holepunches and notches to stay forever, and progress in that area should be appreciated and more widely adopted. That said, I’m getting really fucking tired of seeing the same “holepunch/notch bad because Xperia exists” argument hashed out over and over again. That Xperia is $1500, and the fact that it’s not a Galaxy or iPhone puts it at a massive disadvantage already. The average person has never heard of Xperia devices, and refusing to consider that viewpoint puts your argument at an even further disadvantage.
I do not, in fact, see what you did there.
You need a small camera to put it on a small bezel. But also, you need a small camera for a small punch hole, which is something that all flagship devices actively try to follow.
It’s clearly true that the camera removes screen real estate if the screen of the Xperia 1 and the screen of the other phones have the same aspect ratio and size (the Xperia 1 is on the small side of modern flagships, but… yeah, they do), so the difference is between having a screen with a 2/3 mm bezel above it or having the exact same size and resolution screen with a hole in it. The screen is the same, one of them has a hole in it… so the hole is taking screen away.
And even if that wasn’t the case and the screen was getting smaller, the hole is in the middle of your image. A smaller uninterrupted screen is better than an image with a hole in the middle. I don’t understand how that is debatable, unless one is, you know, a bit of a moron. Yet here we are.
Now, I will give the notches that at least they poke from the top of the screen, so one could make the argument that the image isn’t supposed to go over the line of the notch, and instead that space is for notifications and images should be coded to stay below that line. But of course then you have a WAY bigger “forehead” than any notchless phone would, and that still doesn’t hold with the fact that most modern notches and punch holes are very clearly designed for the image to wrap around them in normal media viewing.
I do concede that most morons do not seem to care about the selfie camera, but hey, most morons also do take selfies, which is something I can’t really wrap my head around. Then again, if truly nobody cared, then the industry wouldn’t have spent a ton of money engineering under-display cameras and all sorts of flip cameras before deciding the compromises weren’t worth it.
It’s just a thing people have learned to live with on their least important device, like non-replaceable batteries, fixed, overpriced storage and lack of connectivity. The industry decided that was the weirdly enshittified trendy thing and consolidated around it and a lot of people find it annoying, just… not annoying enough to do anything about it. Welcome to the 21st century, I suppose.
Weirdly, you may have sold me on the 1 VII better than the guy telling me it’s good. I may need to anchor myself into the sensible choice even at a premium before the enshittification train leads to a single design (two, if you count foldables that turn into a shitty tablet in exchange for being exceedingly frail and expensive).
Because too many reviewers and buyers complained about “foreheads” and “chins”. As soon as the big makers went edge-to-edge in all four directions with notches/holepunches for cameras everyone else hopped on the bandwagon.
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.
The ability to not have a lock screen.
I had a Google pixel 3a which had squeeze sensors, with lineageOS I had it assigned to my flashlight which was super handy. Also I enjoyed the heart-rate sensor on my GS5. Also really liked the DAC in my LGV20.
What is a squeeze sensor? Isn’t that just a button?
Yes, but no. Squeezing the whole phone is recognized as a gesture.
Agreed, I opened this thread just to be sure the squeeze sensor was mentioned.
Built in IR blaster
I’ve got a oneplus 12 which has it. Random thing for them to bring back but welcome
don’t be evil.
Wild cards for number blocking. You could block whole area codes. Goddamn worthless fucking Nazi bastards took it off.
radio
In the US, carriers colluded to disable phone radios to sell more data.
damn, that’s messed up.
My Motorola Moto Z had a shake shake flashlight feature. Not sure if this was Android or Motorola but it was very useful.
My Moto G Power has it, super useful feature.
They still have it as a built-in feature. Had Moto Z, g 5g plus and now rocking g85. All of them have it. Too useful.
It’s a Motorola gesture. I don’t have a Motorola anymore, but I think shaking is the best gesture for turning on the flashlight.
Doesn’t it activate when it’s in your pants and you are moving about in a rough manner?
Holding the power button when the screen is off works pretty great and won’t ever activate on accident. It is also a default Android feature I believe.
I loved that feature. Karate chop for torch, twist for camera, twist again to swap camera to selfie, flip face down for silent…
One of those things that should be introduced in to mainline Android, but no doubt patents are probably an issue.
Rear fingerprint scanner PLEASE
I’m hanging on to my pixel 5 for this reason. And the smaller form factor.
About a month ago I lost outlined text. Currently I can only do highlighted text, which looks awful everywhere. I can’t believe I need to post this in 2025:
