Poll: Which abandoned Android phone features do you miss the most?
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Fair enough, though would you be happy if there were significant improvements made to usb-c port build quality?
Audio jack is still better, as someone else said in another comment: https://feddit.uk/post/33629763/19026566
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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).
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You know its a really easy to prove against, right? Just have some basic radio spectrograph to detect any signals coming from a turned off phone.
In reality, the correlation is phones continue to get thinner, making it near impossible to create a battery and battery connector small enough and still be resistant to a 200lb ape handling it.
You know its a really easy to prove against, right?
Why would I need to prove it? You didn't read any of the articles I linked to did you? The fact that they have the ability to do this is not even a question. The government admitted that it was able to do this all the way back in 2006.
Just have some basic radio spectrograph to detect any signals coming from a turned off phone.
The claim isn't that the FBI/NSA/CIA/ICE whoever is doing this constantly to everybody, it's that they have the capability to do this to anybody, which again isn't even a question. I'm not really worried about being spied on personally (yet) and even if I were I'd just leave my phone at home or put it in a Faraday bag, I'm not going to carry around a 'basic radio spectrograph' and whip it out every time I want to have a private conversation.
In reality, the correlation is phones continue to get thinner
Lol, that's like saying I lost weight because I bought smaller pants. Yeah, designers are able to make phones thinner when they are able to design around non-replaceable batteries. Was anyone asking for thinner phones? They had the ability to make thinner phones by disallowing replaceable batteries for a decade and did not.
Were consumers demanding that phone manufactures make phones worse by removing useful features like replaceable batteries or headphone jacks- or was these anti-features foisted upon us?
If it had been just some manufactures that switched, or if those manufacturers that did switch had offered the option of different models, some with replaceable batteries and some without, and then consumers chose the worse phones- I might not be as convinced.
As it is now with 99.9% of all phones you can buy not even giving you the option, I'm not buying it.
It's not like this is some crazy off the wall theory. I'm not saying the Earth is flat or we didn't land on the moon. We know that the government is using our cell phones to track us, we know they have the capabilities to do so. The only question is did governments (I guarantee it's not just the U.S) make deals with/ask/or put pressure on manufactures to incentivize the switch. That's not really far fetched at all.
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Stereo front facing speakers.
I have no idea why these terrible downward facing speakers took off, HTC had it nailed in 2012. RIP, king of smartphones. I'm glad to at least have 2 proper speakers on my Fold6 and 7, rather than an amplified earpiece speaker... But this is just not how sound works. I shouldn't have to cup my hand around the side to point the sound in the proper direction.
Probably because of edge-to-edge screens?
I had a Moto X Style and remember being quite fond of the speakers.
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You know its a really easy to prove against, right?
Why would I need to prove it? You didn't read any of the articles I linked to did you? The fact that they have the ability to do this is not even a question. The government admitted that it was able to do this all the way back in 2006.
Just have some basic radio spectrograph to detect any signals coming from a turned off phone.
The claim isn't that the FBI/NSA/CIA/ICE whoever is doing this constantly to everybody, it's that they have the capability to do this to anybody, which again isn't even a question. I'm not really worried about being spied on personally (yet) and even if I were I'd just leave my phone at home or put it in a Faraday bag, I'm not going to carry around a 'basic radio spectrograph' and whip it out every time I want to have a private conversation.
In reality, the correlation is phones continue to get thinner
Lol, that's like saying I lost weight because I bought smaller pants. Yeah, designers are able to make phones thinner when they are able to design around non-replaceable batteries. Was anyone asking for thinner phones? They had the ability to make thinner phones by disallowing replaceable batteries for a decade and did not.
Were consumers demanding that phone manufactures make phones worse by removing useful features like replaceable batteries or headphone jacks- or was these anti-features foisted upon us?
If it had been just some manufactures that switched, or if those manufacturers that did switch had offered the option of different models, some with replaceable batteries and some without, and then consumers chose the worse phones- I might not be as convinced.
As it is now with 99.9% of all phones you can buy not even giving you the option, I'm not buying it.
It's not like this is some crazy off the wall theory. I'm not saying the Earth is flat or we didn't land on the moon. We know that the government is using our cell phones to track us, we know they have the capabilities to do so. The only question is did governments (I guarantee it's not just the U.S) make deals with/ask/or put pressure on manufactures to incentivize the switch. That's not really far fetched at all.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Was anyone asking for thinner phones? They had the ability to make thinner phones by disallowing replaceable batteries for a decade and did not.
A. They did not have the ability because doing so would reduced battery capacity because the tech is battery still maturing.
B. Apparently people are asking because people are still buying. Just because me and you arent asking doesnt mean the greater market isnt.
As it is now with 99.9% of all phones you can buy not even giving you the option, I'm not buying it.
A. That would mean the entire world is in on the conspiracy.
B. I cant buy a small truck in america. Does that mean there is a grand conspiracy?
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• pressure sensitive pens on non-flagship models
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Was anyone asking for thinner phones? They had the ability to make thinner phones by disallowing replaceable batteries for a decade and did not.
A. They did not have the ability because doing so would reduced battery capacity because the tech is battery still maturing.
B. Apparently people are asking because people are still buying. Just because me and you arent asking doesnt mean the greater market isnt.
As it is now with 99.9% of all phones you can buy not even giving you the option, I'm not buying it.
A. That would mean the entire world is in on the conspiracy.
B. I cant buy a small truck in america. Does that mean there is a grand conspiracy?
A. They did not have the ability because doing so would reduced battery capacity because the tech is battery still maturing.
That makes zero sense. How the phone is connected to the battery has no bearing on capacity.
B. Apparently people are asking because people are still buying. Just because me and you arent asking doesnt mean the greater market isnt.
That's silly. They removed the ability, they didn't give people a choice. No one was asking, no one chose this.
A. That would mean the entire world is in on the conspiracy.
How would it mean that? The U.S. is a Huge market, China is a huge market It would only take one or two. Plus countries all around the world spy on their own citizens, so it 'benefits' their governments even if they weren't directly responsible. Did you know that in the U.S. Texas makes all of our school textbooks worse because it's easier just to print the stupid textbooks than print separate ones for just Texas because Texas is such a big market. This is not a conspiracy theory, you can look it up if you are interested.
B. I cant buy a small truck in america.
You can buy small trucks in America. What are you talking about?
Does that mean there is a grand conspiracy?
You are the one that keeps calling this a 'grand conspiracy'. There are only a handful of phone manufactures, it wouldn't be that difficult to get them all to agree to something, especially if they were rewarded in some way for it. Corporations only care about money.
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What phone is that?
Fairphone 6
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Stereo front facing speakers.
I have no idea why these terrible downward facing speakers took off, HTC had it nailed in 2012. RIP, king of smartphones. I'm glad to at least have 2 proper speakers on my Fold6 and 7, rather than an amplified earpiece speaker... But this is just not how sound works. I shouldn't have to cup my hand around the side to point the sound in the proper direction.
I used to care about front facing speakers but then I realized I hate the sound they make and if I am "listening" to something i will connect to Bluetooth
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I liked them, if not just because there's no reason not to have it. It was always subtle and functional.
Why can’t the camera “flash” be used for this? IOS has settings for it in accessibility features.
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Yeah, and unless it's only activating a few pixels at a time it's not the same.
wrote last edited by [email protected]This is more or less how oled works iirc
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This post did not contain any content.wrote last edited by [email protected]
Blackberry Priv form factor:
The keypad doubled kinda like a touch pad as well. I could use keyboard shortcuts, typed way faster tha touch. All that without compramising screen space.
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A. They did not have the ability because doing so would reduced battery capacity because the tech is battery still maturing.
That makes zero sense. How the phone is connected to the battery has no bearing on capacity.
B. Apparently people are asking because people are still buying. Just because me and you arent asking doesnt mean the greater market isnt.
That's silly. They removed the ability, they didn't give people a choice. No one was asking, no one chose this.
A. That would mean the entire world is in on the conspiracy.
How would it mean that? The U.S. is a Huge market, China is a huge market It would only take one or two. Plus countries all around the world spy on their own citizens, so it 'benefits' their governments even if they weren't directly responsible. Did you know that in the U.S. Texas makes all of our school textbooks worse because it's easier just to print the stupid textbooks than print separate ones for just Texas because Texas is such a big market. This is not a conspiracy theory, you can look it up if you are interested.
B. I cant buy a small truck in america.
You can buy small trucks in America. What are you talking about?
Does that mean there is a grand conspiracy?
You are the one that keeps calling this a 'grand conspiracy'. There are only a handful of phone manufactures, it wouldn't be that difficult to get them all to agree to something, especially if they were rewarded in some way for it. Corporations only care about money.
thinner phone requires a smaller battery. Smaller battery is smaller capacity.
That's silly. They removed the ability, they didn't give people a choice. No one was asking, no one chose this.
Noone asked for phones to copy the iphone... yet here we are.
Did you know that in the U.S. Texas makes all of our school textbooks worse because it's easier just to print the stupid textbooks than print separate ones for just Texas because Texas is such a big market. This is not a conspiracy theory, you can look it up if you are interested.
So close to getting it... smh
You can buy small trucks in America. What are you talking about?
You can? Show one new model that is the same size of a 1990 ford ranger.
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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).
wrote last edited by [email protected]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.
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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).
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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).
wrote last edited by [email protected]You make some valid points, but that kind of engineering costs money. Like I said in my other comment, I would genuinely like to see more progress made in that area. The OP7P's pop-up camera was a neat bit of engineering.
Don't conflate that with the actual anti-consumer bullshit, though. A notch/holepunch camera is not the hill to die on when your argument relates to that, it's not even close to the same thing.
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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.
Holy crap.
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I don't work for them, I just happen to like the idea that there is a phone company making smaller sized phones, phone with physical keyboards, etc.
IB4 the comments complaining about android versions and such. Yes, I get it. Some of them are still running android 11, yes that is a security risk. Could be though that the people that want a small form factor phone also don't want to do banking or other financially related things on it as well.
I feel like the two groups of people that just want to make phonecalls and texts, but who also just want a small phone, have a lot of overlap.
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Stereo front facing speakers.
I have no idea why these terrible downward facing speakers took off, HTC had it nailed in 2012. RIP, king of smartphones. I'm glad to at least have 2 proper speakers on my Fold6 and 7, rather than an amplified earpiece speaker... But this is just not how sound works. I shouldn't have to cup my hand around the side to point the sound in the proper direction.
wrote last edited by [email protected]The Nexus 6P's front-facing speakers were pretty sweet; that device was near-perfectly symmetrical when turned sideways for watching media/playing games, and your palm didn't cover the speakers.
My current Pixel 9 Pro XL has stereo speakers, but one of them is the downward-firing speaker on the bottom. Makes for an odd effect if it's covered.
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The phone has to have an ADC hardware to allow that.
So basically it just has to have a microphone? Essentially, it has to be TRRS?
