Poll: Which abandoned Android phone features do you miss the most?
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This thread is just a reminder of how terrible phones have become.
Strangely it's usually only the cheap phones that include these premium features.
Strangely it's usually only the cheap phones that include these premium features.
Where they gimp the screen, CPU, RAM, etc and then point to their low sales to claim people dont want things like a removable battery, SD card, headphone jack, etc or else they'd be buying them more. I hate it so much.
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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.
Agreed, I opened this thread just to be sure the squeeze sensor was mentioned.
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Again, shitty phone. You’re supposed to actually push the button to unlock it. Don’t understand why your finger would be on the back of the phone when putting it in your pocket anyway.
This isn't a "shitty phone" thing. Every phone I've owned with a side-mounted fingerprint reader has unlocked via touch (not press). It's standard.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Yes it is. Once again, we were talking about on the back.
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I liked the notification LEDs that some of the nexus phones used to have, you could customize the color / flashing pattern per contact.
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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?
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Fuck, the freedom. Root & custom ROM, running your damn device that you paid money for the way you want to. Imagine that. I stopped after rooting your phone killed Snapchat (because 3 idiots use Snap Pay or whatever), killed your tap pay wallet, killed Pokémon Go, etc etc etc. Then they tried telling people oh bro, just hide your root bro Majisk hide root. Like I need one more thing to do.
If I need to hide it, and most of the benefits of rooting have gone away/are incorporated into smartphones & no longer needed...I'm just going to stop rooting.Then the microSD card expansion slot. Some try to say it's for waterproofing purposes, but they can use the same pop-out slot as the SIM card & it's nbd. Others say it's because the storage can sometimes be "unstable" & glitch, but over the years I've only had problems twice: just once with a Samsung, and then constantly with a shitty Motorola smartphone but that's on me because I bought a shitty Motorola smartphone. I think they killed it just because they could, because everybody else was killing it off & they knew they were going to get your money regardless. And then either pay a premium for extra on-board storage, or pay $10/mo for the rest of your life for "cloud" storage. Or both! Money, money, money, it's all about the money.
These guys got rid of everything that made an Android an Android, and if I've got problems with mid-tier phones, to spend $1K+ on a flagship Android. For crying out loud, I'm not spending $1K on an Android that doesn't even have microSD expansion, at that point you might as well buy an iPhone.
As someone who currently has a new phone with root and an sd-card slot, this was a fun read.
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killed Pokémon Go
I run CalyxOS and I tried again recently and it DOES work
How recently? In May Google changed everything about root detection so it may have changed again.
Plexus has a few people claiming it works from the last months though.
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My Motorola Moto Z had a shake shake flashlight feature. Not sure if this was Android or Motorola but it was very useful.
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My Motorola Moto Z had a shake shake flashlight feature. Not sure if this was Android or Motorola but it was very 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.
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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.
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I bought a modern off brand with an audio jack and micro SD, because why would I spend 3 times more for less features?
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I liked the notification LEDs that some of the nexus phones used to have, you could customize the color / flashing pattern per contact.
I use AODNotify, which lights up a ring around the front camera. It's pretty configurable, maybe check it out.
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What is a squeeze sensor? Isn't that just a button?
Yes, but no. Squeezing the whole phone is recognized as a gesture.
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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.
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What's wrong with the light sensor?
wrote last edited by [email protected]It's the under-screen fingerprint sensor. It's kind of flaky, and it shines the sensor area of the screen at what's gotta be greater than normal max screen brightness. It's blinding at night.
It's also much less reliable than the back reader in my old pixel 2, though it's gotten better with software updates. It was barely functional when the 6 first came out.
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Every damn feature.
But most? Removable flipping batteries. Having a bomb in your pocket computer that you can't remove, and shortens it's effective life without often complex surgery is absolutely criminal.
Removable D batteries have existed since 1898. It was a staples feature of machines. Nobody wanted, needed, or desired the tech brah "disruption" of gluing lithium bombs into phones.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I miss just being able to take it out and have no phone for however long I want. Didn't drain the battery, didn't worry about the phone.
It does compromise the waterproofing to open and close phones, even cases. But fuck you, let me make my own mistakes, your job is to engineer things to be better and fit my needs, not just give up and charge more and strip features and invade my privacy and spy on me with psyops and try to control my life. I'm a customer, not a user.
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My first phone could play terrestrial radio. I miss that.
There's an app iirc that lets you plug headphones in and it somehow uses them as an antenna..
Oh wait, no more headphone jack!
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The notification light for me was never all that useful, i have unique ringtones for everything but i do agree they are an awesome feature for folks in spaces where their phones need to be quiet
I liked them, if not just because there's no reason not to have it. It was always subtle and functional.
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This thread is just a reminder of how terrible phones have become.
Strangely it's usually only the cheap phones that include these premium features.
Of how spoiled capitalism has become.
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no but genuinely this. My phone has the same screen size as my nintendo switch, and I'm unironically supposed to fit that in my pocket and have it be comfortable
I'm always shocked at how big the Nintendo switch was, and yet had such a small screen. I remember the first time I wondered, and held my galaxy s9 plus up to the screen and was like "holy shit it's the same size - how is the switch so much bigger and looks so much worse?"
That being said, I do support the idea of multiple sizes of phones for people that want different things. Let there be iPhone 1 or 2 size phones for people that want something convenient and small, and give me a 10 incher because I like that and need it in my life
Also, well-balanced, front-facing stereo speakers for fucks sake. Stop doing this weird one-forwards one-out stuff, Samsung, it sounds like shit.
