Poll: Which abandoned Android phone features do you miss the most?
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Open bootloaders, ir blaster, 3.5mm jack, sd card slot, replaceable batteries. The list goes on.
Is any of that an android feature? It's mostly hardware, I think you can still get devices that have some combination of those (maybe not the IR blaser).
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The smaller size phones (I hate these Phablets,) 3.5mm jack and back finger print reader, (although my Pixel 4a5G has them, it will be the last,) replaceable batteries, and selfie camera that doesn't take up screen real estate.
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Everybody misses their IR blaster it seems. And why not? randomly turning off the neighbors TV is good wholesome fun.
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I miss controlling the volume on a per app basis. It gets unwieldy, but it was nice sometimes.
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The smaller size phones (I hate these Phablets,) 3.5mm jack and back finger print reader, (although my Pixel 4a5G has them, it will be the last,) replaceable batteries, and selfie camera that doesn't take up screen real estate.
Pixel 5 has a back fingerprint reader. Think it's the last Pixel with it.
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The physical fingerprint reader on the back of the phone.
Lots of android phones have a physical fingerprint reader
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This post did not contain any content.wrote last edited by [email protected]
Notification led that is separate from the display. Custom per-app colour and blink pattern.
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Is any of that an android feature? It's mostly hardware, I think you can still get devices that have some combination of those (maybe not the IR blaser).
Most manufacturers dropped all or most of those features.
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The smaller size phones (I hate these Phablets,) 3.5mm jack and back finger print reader, (although my Pixel 4a5G has them, it will be the last,) replaceable batteries, and selfie camera that doesn't take up screen real estate.
there's this awful venn diagram of circles with no overlap, where you cant get a smallish phone that gets updates. Even asking for it to be well made is a pipe dream.
Add onto the desire for an unlockable bootloader and your only options are the phones designed to be thrown into a river after the job is complete.
I wish those unihertz devices were serious whatsoever. They ship on old android versions and get maybe one update in their life cycle.
Android is such a clusterfuck of an OS too. kernel/driver space is an absolute mess so every OEM has to basically ship their own kernel. Qualcomm is the devil and hides everything behind NDA's so you can't really write an open OS from the ground up on any hardware that can do any real processing.
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Screens without holes in them.
I'm a Xperia weirdo because the one I have still rocks a 3.5mm jack, expandable storage and a camera outside the screen. Not only are some of those gone from this year's equivalent, but it is 1500 bucks now, which is absurd. I went to a phone search engine and looked up that exact feature set and it turns out there are exactly zero phones that include those now.
I genuinely don't understand why people think the way to compete with Samsung is doing a worse version of their exact product. It's so dumb. Or maybe it's true and it's the people who are dumb. Because everybody says these things, but people seem to buy candybars with puncholes and no physical headphne support or expandable storage or IR blasters.
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The physical fingerprint reader on the back of the phone.
Curiously, why on the back?
I always found that a worse location than phones that had it on the side (usually paired with the power button), as you can't unlock your phone if it's lying flat on a table without picking it up.
(Also the way I typically hold my phone, the usually top centre sensor is absolutely nowhere near where any of my fingers naturally sit, and requires awkward bending to reach it)
I know a lot of people like it, but I've never been able to figure out what it was about it.
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Open Bootloaders, 3.5mm jacks, SD Card readers.
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Everybody misses their IR blaster it seems. And why not? randomly turning off the neighbors TV is good wholesome fun.
...guilty! Gawd, I forgot about IR blasters. I loved that feature. -
Lots of android phones have a physical fingerprint reader
wrote last edited by [email protected]on the back of the phone.
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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.
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I'd forgotten all about the notification LED. I wonder, could you flash a small part of an OLED display to achieve something similar while still being low power?
I loved it. I set up all these different colors to tell me what the priority was for checking. SMS was green, email was yellow or something, and FB (so cool back then) was blue. I really miss that, could just glance at it and know if it was worth risking pulling out your phone in school
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The 3.5mm AUX jack.
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I know they dont all remove it, but man audio jack phones were awesome. My usbc adapter sucks and bluetooth is spotty and low res.
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This post did not contain any content.wrote last edited by [email protected]
Software festure, but I miss being able to turn on and off wifi and Bluetooth in the drop-down menu with one click. Latest android replaced it with another sub menu to select network or device, requiring another action to enable/disable.
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Capitalism breeds innovation
