Poll: Which abandoned Android phone features do you miss the most?
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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.
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It only shows the song name and has miniscule controls which is awful when occupied (read: driving).
But you shouldn’t be using it when driving.
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I use AODNotify, which lights up a ring around the front camera. It's pretty configurable, maybe check it out.
Thanks!
Playing around with it right now -
But you shouldn’t be using it when driving.
Wow, so you understand the issue, then.
I should be able to see who is playing at a glance on screen-wake without having to mess with it.
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Wish it was ranked choice voting. For me the list is: removable battery, expandable storage, ir blaster, headphone jack. I think repairablity is the most important and i never use the headphone jack but do use ir sometimes so thats the only reason its last. On phones with oled screens notification light is a software feature and fm requires the headphone jack.
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Wow, so you understand the issue, then.
I should be able to see who is playing at a glance on screen-wake without having to mess with it.
My bad. I assumed most people use Android Auto.
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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...
Let me guess a Sony smartphone?
