Poll: Which abandoned Android phone features do you miss the most?
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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. -
I used to be able to
unlockwake my phone and see what band was currently playing.OneUI fucked that up.
Edit: wake
wrote last edited by [email protected]Wait, can you not do that anymore?
Edit: I just checked. I'm on oneui 7.0 and it shows Spotify and the details of the song - even album art.
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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.
Again, we were talking about 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.
Yes, I was gonna say this one too but it was like 2010 on a phone that had a physical keyboard. You could set it to flash for notifications - yellow for missed calls, green for texts, blue for an app. A simpler time
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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...
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I really wish IR blasters would come back into style. They're not even expensive to manufacture, and they're small enough that they can be incorporated into any modern smartphone design pretty easily. And almost everybody with a smartphone has SOMETHING in their home that they control with an IR remote. There's basically no reason to have stopped including them.
Ah yes, let me just pull out my phone, unlock, open remote app, switch to 'my tv/air-conditioning manufacturer' profile and press off.
The IR experience on a phone is not convenient for day to day, especially when (love it or hate it) most things can be controlled over WiFi without needing line of sight. -
Wait, can you not do that anymore?
Edit: I just checked. I'm on oneui 7.0 and it shows Spotify and the details of the song - even album art.
wrote last edited by [email protected]It only shows the song name and has miniscule controls which is awful when occupied (read: driving).
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My HTC ChaCha had a full qwerty keyboard. Now I'm lucky if the on-screen one bothers to show up in some apps.
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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.
