Lack of physical keyboard.
Being a flimsy piece of shit comes in second.
I’m aware how that applies to basically every smartphone from 2013 - today. Currently rocking a used Galaxy S8
I often wish for a little slide-out keyboard at the bottom end of my smartphone.
I was disappointed that the Android “BlackBerry” phones have such a bad keyboard. I still remember the one on my Bold 2, and I absolutely loved the shape of the keys. Touch typing at great speed was a breeze!!
The lack of basic things that used to be standard many years ago. Namely headphone jack and micro-SD card slot missing.
Battery life
Keeping too many things running in the background, making things laggy. (I do close out apps when I’m done using them, and I solve laggy times with the Optimize widget. I just wish it would automatically optimize)
Makes we wonder what OS you’re running. Most modern phone software “freezes” the app state when it’s in the background and frees up the memory for the frontmost app.
I have the opposite issue with background apps - I have 12 GB of RAM (16 on the tablet) and it still closes utilities sometimes and forces me to relaunch them (in some cases going back into settings and re-enabling accessibility services for example. That should never happen, in case it’s Really for accessibility)
No removable battery.
I recently got a de googled Fairphone 5 which has a number of removable parts, including the battery! Can recommend.
Fixed battery and removal of headphone jack and SD card slots were 1000% anti-consumer practices designed to cost you more money and make your device lifespan as short as possible. I don’t see the battery problem going away - why enable your phone to last twice or three times as long when they can just force you to have to buy a new device when the battery is shot? At least we got our card slots and jacks back (mostly).
I am also salty that phones USED to have IR blasters and they don’t anymore. IR LEDs cost next to nothing, another feature that was amazing but thrown away to save 5c per unit.
I can get the battery replaced on my phone for a fraction of the money it would cost me to buy a new phone. So I have to take it in to the shop for an hour. Big deal. I can do that once every few years. And I can still use wired headphones with my phone even though it doesn’t have a headphone jack. Sheesh, I wonder how that works.
The biggest anti-consumer practice to make your device lifespan as short as possible is whatever software update practices the manufacturer has. Annual major versions increase hardware requirements - I can tell every day how my 5 year old phone is getting long in the tooth. Lack of long-term software support is another way to make sure the average user buys a new device well before the old device has reached end of life.
battery
I don’t think that this is a conspiracy by phone manufacturers to force purchases of phone hardware.
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All kinds of devices use fixed batteries these days, not just smartphones. It’s cheaper, lighter, makes the device stronger, avoids them having to deal with “User X bought a counterfeit battery that then caught fire” – that’s a real issue for lithium batteries, unlike traditional alkaline/NiMH-type removeable batteries. Virtually the only device class I can think of where removable lithium batteries are the norm is high-end flashlights – anything on [email protected] probably supports removable 18650s or similar. I have gone out of my way to get a lot of devices that use AA batteries or maybe 18650s, but there are just tons of products, including in highly-competitive, low-barrier-to-entry industries like gamepads, where it’d be impossible to form a cartel to refuse to offer a device with removable batteries. And yet they’ve mostly moved to fixed batteries. There is no industry convention for removable, BMS-enabled, lithium batteries the way AA or the like were traditionally used in devices.
If there were a cartel driving this against consumer wishes as a whole, you would have just smartphones doing the fixed battery thing, not the consumer electronics industry as a whole.
If it were cartel-driven, I’d also expect to see, in a situation like that, manufacturers making hefty use of price discrimination – like, think of how some laptop vendors charge a premium for devices with a lot of RAM when they have soldered RAM. But in the market today, the differences in battery size are minimal. Google makes a “large” version of the Pixel, and they barely bump the battery up, even with a slightly larger screen.
Instead, it was associated with the shift across consumer electronics to non-removable batteries with the move to lithium batteries, which is what you’d expect if sketchy batteries were a problem.
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Phones in particular have a space and weight premium, so compared to a lot of devices that aren’t held in your hand, using removable NiMH batteries or the like is more of an issue.
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I was super stoked to find out my OnePlus Open has an IR blaster! I missed it on my old galaxy note 4. It is surprisingly convenient, and doubles as a fun way to mess with TVs in public spaces.
KATIE LEAVING ME ON READ WHEN I ASK FOR FEET PICS
Have you tried asking again? Or maybe she just wants you to send yours first
😱
Do we still say “name checks out” on Lemmy?
Be the continuation of a meme you want to see.
I’m relatively content with my Pixel 4A running LineageOS (with root), but that’s an experience that’s really only suited to very technical users, in large part because some apps actively resist running in an environment the device owner actually controls.
My complaint is with the smartphone ecosystem as a whole: it’s designed to empower the OS vendor and app developers over users. The entire tech world (outside Microsoft and maybe some corporate IT types) saw Microsoft Palladium as a nightmare scenario a couple decades ago. Now we’ve let Apple and Google do the same thing with barely a grumble out of the mainstream tech press.
The fact that I have to pay money for it. This thing should be paying me. Actually, everything should be. You there, reading this, fucking $50, now.
Other than that? It doesn’t have a front-facing bottom speaker. Basically everything else is perfect.
Sure, I’ll pay you 50$, but upon agreeing to do so - and by reading, replying, or not replying to this you thereby agree - you must give me triple the amount you have or will ask for, in euros, first.
Oh nooooo D:
I accidentally turn on the auto show keyboard when opening the app drawer and now I dont know how to turn it off again. On a Pixel 6 pro.
Might be a launcher setting, which one do you use? Stock Pixel Launcher?
Under screen fingerprint reader (pixel 7 pro) . It’s a downgrade from reader on the back of the phone (pixel 5). It’s slower, less accurate, and worst of all, at night it often results in being flashed with a bright light.
I thought it’d be more convenient having the reader on the front, so i can unlock the phone without lifting it, but most of the time it’s a nuisance because i doesn’t work as well.
Having the reader on the back was easily the best spot. The only thing I miss from my old phone.
The lack of a fucking headphone jack
That’s the exact reason I have only bought budget phones. That, and they actually have a sim/sd card slot.
I ‘downgraded’ this year and realized what an upgrade having one of those was. We cannot cede those things.
With the phone itself I miss a headphone jack (using an adapter USB c to 3.5"), no hardware keyboard, and no replaceable battery.
In general I don’t turn my phone off often enough, usually only once or twice a week I should turn it off more often.
It feels like the os I have wasn’t designed for my phone. Buttons aren’t scaled properly, system apps ask me for consent over “privacy concerns”, no easy control over simple features like wallpaper, sluggish/buggy animations. I have a Redmi
My least favorite thing is it is getting old and I can’t find a good equivalent to the Pixel 4a to replace it with. They are all too big, have no headphone jack, and are too expensive for what I get out of them.
Zenfone 9? Pixel 5a? About the only remotely close options I found out there. I went with the 5a, but it’s getting close to end of life, so I’m debating the slightly newer zenfone 9 now…
I did look at the Zenfone 9 actually and my biggest issue was the locked bootloader and no custom rom support. It may not be a total deal breaker, but it was enough to give me pause. The 5a would be great if it wasn’t nearly as old as the 4a. I would still be considering Pixels if they hadn’t ruined the “a” line.
Oh, I know what you’re talking about. I got a “new” phone a few months ago. Was thinking about either the pixel 4a or Samsung S10e, and went with the latter.
The cool thing is that both of these phones have LineageOS support. I didn’t try it yet, but LOS sounds pretty awesome, I hope that I won’t be disappointed.
LOS is fine, though I haven’t used it in a while. I may just try and get a new battery in my 4a as the screen is still perfect and all the ports work fine. Still after using this phone for four years, I’d love an upgrade.
Can’t listen to music while watching a video or listening to a podcast.
I feel you. Sometime i want to play white noise or lullaby to my baby on the speaker while listening to podcasts on the buds, but one pauses the other. It’s an unnecessary software limitation.
On a related note, it used to be possible to use a splitter to connect two sets of earbuds to watch a movie together on a plane. It’s not possible now with Bluetooth, you can output sound to only one device.
If you have an iOS device and AirPods you can actually do this.
On another related note, I wish I could use my earbuds to listen to two devices at the same time. Like my phone and my Steam Deck.
non-unlockable bootloader :(
(Samsung S10e, switching to Sony Xperia 6 soon…)
