this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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each new phone is more expensive, with less functionality.
hover on the touch screen? gone
iris scanner, gone
headphone jack? gone
air pressure sensor? gone
humidity sensor? gone
ir blaster, gone
meanwhile I get charged out the ass for storage space.
Why the fuck would I want a newer phone?
Don't forget the SD card slot missing, S20 was the last one that had it. I still don't know what to get after that, just because of the missing SD.
mine can take an sd card, but only if i take out one of my sim cards, of course
I got an A52 just for that reason. Still using it. I wanted a S20 but they were sold out and I was told they stopped making it.
That pisses me off the most
Internal storage on phones is over 200gb by now. I havent needed an SD for years. What the fuck do you store on your phone that could still need an SD? lmao
I have a young son and it was getting very irritating having to be selective recording my videos of him. I finally just paid $90 and added a 1TB premium sd card, and now I won't have to worry about it at all & download all the videos I want for us.
Upgrading the internal storage to 1TB on a new phone costs several hundred dollars.
Because I like to store stuff on my phone
4k video files will fill your phone up mighty quick. especially if you use it for youtube videos or similar. or film your family/pets a lot
I am 12 and this is deep, what a moronic take
llamma pr0n.
Record 1 minute video, how big is that file? 200 MB, 0.2 GB. 5 minutes and 1 GB is full. When something interesting happens, 5 minutes are recorded easy, obviously. 200 GB, nothing for apps, maps, downloads,... are enough to record 15 hours of video. Then that is it. How many moments can I capture with that? Enough for maybe 2 years? I don't throw my memories away when I get a new phone. Instead, I just buy a new SD every few years and compress the video files every once in a while.
Also removable batteries gone
Mine is actually very easily removable. The device overheats so much, that it's completely annihilated the glue, and now the back panel is only held down by the case c:
Be honest. You tried microwaving it, didn't you?
A very nice man on the internet told me it would charge it
Honestly, I may as well have
It should be back in 2027 in EU at least
That's supposed to be coming back by EU law in the next few years. So we have that at least.
Don't forget color changing led notification light. You could pay with your phone at old card readers using MST. Oh yeah, and the S9 had a blood pressure sensor.
Wait air pressure sensor and humidity sensor? Are you talking about their watches?
no, i am talking about phones. this stuff used to actually be in phones
Samsung Note 10 and others have a barometric sensor, though I'm not aware of any app using them. Which might explain their removal, sadly.
I have a barometric sensor in my phone?!
news to me too, and I'm replacing it on Monday lol.
I like using the app phyphox to look at all the different sensors on my phone
Oh boy this is a weird tool hahah, I love it!! Can't thank you enough for this recommendation, it always bummers me how wasted are most phones in terms of potential, when I used to fantasize about futuristic portable computers as a little boy I though that people would become a short of cyborg that would do "magic" with their computers. Turns out, phone became the "squary-glassy attention sink machine" xd
I was thinking on accessing the pressure sensor via termux and then export that data to a csv file with some python script! phybox looks ver interesting to gain control over my devices 😗
TIL I had a phone with barometric sensor.
Air pressure is (was?l in pretty much any phone.
They want to keep competing with and copying Apple/iphones, yet they keep forgetting about what makes Android phones so appealing to the people who select these phones over iphones.
At least Samsung has proper video out through the USB port. Unlike the trash that Pixels depend on, such as Chromecast. What kind of GPU doesn't have either HDMI or displayport (through USB-C like Apple, Samsung, OnePlus, Steamdeck, laptops, etc. ) out in this day and age?
Holding tight on to this Samsung Note 9 until it finally dies. Battery is still 'ok' for now, will last a full day.
Snapdragon, not that pos Exynos
Finger print reader on the back is the only way to do it. Wife has had several newer models with built in front side fingerprint reader and it has been ridiculously unreliable by comparison.
Iris Scan
Face Scan
Headphone jack
Micro-SD Card
USB-C
Wireless charging
NFC with payment support
And even the stupid pen thingy that I use maybe once a month.
Not 5G but the 4G LTE is usually more than fast enough even for streaming when using as a hotspot.
Pointless unintuitive feature that's replaced with simple press and hold.
Slow and unreliable compared to fingerprints. Anyone actually used it?
Who needs these things? Weather apps work just fine. Rather use the space for battery.
Unless you're looking to vandalize public tvs, just replace it with any number of wifi/bluetooth remotes.
Just saying there's a reason features get the axe. Headphone jack is the only one I can sort of agree with, but I still rarely ever need one anymore. Bluetooth is just so much better.
And one thing all this debloating has led towards is larger battery capacity, which most older phones are sorely lacking.
Unintuitive for you, perhaps. I found it more intuitive than the press and hold (until it became ubiquitous), since it made more sense for a preview. Press and hold, in my mind, is more for secondary menus and alternative options, like mass-selecting.
The air gestures were also nice if I had my hands full, since they worked without turning the screen on, and without touching it, although they leaned more heavily on the gimmick side of things.
Yes. I use it a lot when I have my phone on a stand, or when I have gloves on. Fingerprint readers don't work through gloves, for obvious reasons, and it's less effort than having to fumble around with my phone and my gloves, especially when I will be putting the glove back on afterwards.
Since my phone also has the fingerprint reader on the back, rather than the front, it also makes it much easier to unlock my phone without picking it up, which is nice when it's on its wireless charging pad, or I want to quickly check a notification or something, rather than needing to pick it up.
As for speed, I've not found it that much worse than the fingerprint, especially once the camera's fired up. The hard part tends to be aligning yourself just right, and that you need to tap a "confirm" button compared to the one-click that fingerprint does.
The space won't be used for battery. It's a small chip on the PCB, and Samsung would either keep it around for other sensors, or would leave that space blank. Having a tiny battery protrusion like that is silly anyway. Having a little dingle like that would just make the battery more likely to be damaged and erupt into a violent conflagration.
I personally found it handy, even if it was underutilised. Sometimes you want information from within the house, not outside of it, and if your phone can fetch that information and present it, you don't need to go and buy a separate hygrometer and air pressure sensor, and carry it around, or have to feed that information via an external service.
Assuming that your TV comes with support for those. If it doesn't, such as if it's an older television, then you would be out of luck.
Personally, I used mine a bunch back in the day, just because it was nice to be able to fire up the VCR, Amplifier, and TV all in one button, rather than a bundle of loose remotes, but that's more of a first world problem, and less of an issue these days, since television is on the decline.
More importantly, though, the phones aren't cheaper despite the loss of these features. The phones just get more expensive, even though they had fewer sensors and features like that.
Found the Samsung fuck boy
The point is that technology isn't supposed to get in the way of us doing things and that's exactly what removing features that are useful to people does.
Usually there is a compromise somewhere though. If they could just add all the features without any downsides, they surely would (and demand a premium for it). Granted, sometimes it is just cheaper to get rid of it (and thus make more profit), but sometimes its just a decision to cater to a minority or provide a benefit for the majority of users.
Counterpoint: phones like Redmi 9T have it all. Headphone jack, expandable storage, IR blaster, NFC... Also manages to have an "okay" battery capacity that's 6Ah.
The only problem is it costs too little so people don't consider it.
First, even for Xiaomi that phone is crap with a myriad of software related complaints alone. On the hardware front its cheap because cheap in gets cheap out. Underpowered even for 2021.
Oh I see. I just ...hadn't noticed. Probably because these people are overreacting. But sure, if you need to justify getting a new smartphone, you better spend loads of money to make sure it looks good on benchmarks.
Hadn't had a Samsung back then, but I would love to.
I'd love those.
It's still very useful, I used it regularly on my older phone.