For me it’s the notification light you used to find on older phones, was particularly good to know if your phone was charged without picking it up

17 points

ITT are many middle aged nerds

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186 points

3.5mm headphone jack

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3 points

People keep going on about that and I get it from the point of not having to charge headphones all the time. But to me that is a very mild inconvenience compared to having to deal with those fucking cables all the time. I hate cables so damn much.

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6 points

Oh, my problem isn’t with charging them. They actually hold a charge for a super long time.

I’d like bluetooth earbuds a lot more if I could find some that aren’t “smart.” If I put on a beanie, I bump them. If I remove one earbud to converse, I bump it. I’ve not once intentionally used a gesture-based control on an earbud for anything else other than undoing the situation I’ve caused by bumping them. Otherwise, I control everything with my phone. If I’m working out, I just select my playlist, mute notifications, and I don’t have to touch anything after that. Gesture-based earbuds are not for me.

I really don’t think there are dumb bluetooth earbuds, though. At least, I haven’t been able to find any.

And I don’t mind cables as much as you do. I think my favorite earbuds would be those that are connected to each other by a cable, but again – only if they were not smart.

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1 point

This might sound crazy but apple earbuds would be good for you. I actually like having pause and skip buttons, and apparently these do have controls when you touch them, but that’s never worked for me. I think it’s intentionally broken on android which in your case makes them good.

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4 points

You can turn off the touch controls on Samsung Galaxy Bud Pros, maybe the other galaxy bud models too

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1 point

Not sure what brand you have but mine you can turn off the functions on the buttons in the app.

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9 points

Here’s the crazy thing tho… You could just not use it and choose to use blue tooth still.

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1 point

I’m not saying there shouldn’t be a port, just saying that I really don’t see the value.

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1 point

It’s more than just having to charge them I wouldn’t even really consider that much of a downside with how long they last. I haven’t yet ran out of charge before I was ready to take mine out. The actual downsides are- Wireless earbuds are expensive. The batteries in them wear out over time and you have to buy all new ones which is wasteful. Bluetooth adds a noticeable delay that sucks when watching video. My car doesn’t have bluetooth so I need a headphone jack for AUX. I have both and like wireless ones when I’m on the go but if I’m stationary wired don’t cause any problems.

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3 points

For me I’m just very attached to my earphones. I had tried out different earphones for a long time when I was younger before I discovered these and I’ve been using them for over 8 years now. I don’t really want to switch to a different pair of earphones.

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1 point

Get a dongle. Get several. Stick them on the ends of all your headphones and aux cables and forget that you don’t have a headphone jack on your phone.

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11 points

I do have one. That’s how I listen to music in my old ass car XD

But still I wish they’d just never removed something that was so useful and immediately accessible to everyone

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5 points
*

I have like 5. It still doesn’t make it less inconvenient. I use my earphones for my laptop for work and my phone when I’m commuting so I have to attach the dongle, plug it into my phone, get to work, unplug the dongle plug it in the laptop and do the whole process again when I go home and repeat every day. It’s a pain. Not to mention the occasional times where you want to charge your phone while you’re listening to music.

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2 points

Oh that charging thing is a major pain when we have to take a roadtrip. Whoever came up with the cloaca design for phones really did not think things through.

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15 points

There are often enterprise versions that still have it. Like the S10E for example.

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16 points

Yes, and I’m thinking my next phone will be one of those.

I have a much better time with wired earbuds than with bluetooth.

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12 points

Forgot my bluetooth headphones the other day on a long trip and the 3.5mm jack saved my rear end.

Just needed to stop at a shop briefly for some cheap plug-in buds and I was no longer listening to babies screaming on the journey. As a bonus, it also didn’t interfere with me charging my phone

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0 points

Not really, it’s mostly only budget phones that have it nowadays. The S10E(which stands for ‘essential’ btw, not ‘enterprise’) is almost 5 years old, not exactly representative of the modern phone market.

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1 point

To be fair, on the modern phone market it doesn’t really matter whether you spend 300 or 1000. They’re all decent ish

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4 points

I’ve had an S10E for a while and didn’t even know the headphone jacks are no longer the norm!

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2 points

Clinging to my S9+ so hard.

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1 point

My Note 9 still has it!

WAVES OLD MAN CANE AROUND THREATENINGLY

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0 points

First smartphone I had is still my favorite. Motorola Droid. I still have it!

The battery life is hell, though

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12 points

This going away has just make the Tiktok tide that much more horrendous. I work in a school. The hallways are nothing but that horrid shit blasting out of hundreds of bad speakers.

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0 points

My condolences. I stress out the moment a child thrusts a phone in front of me to watch a “funny” video

I can only imagine the hellscape that is your school

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2 points

You don’t think it’d still be the same even with the headphone jack still there? Wireless headphones and converters for wired headphones do exist, they just don’t care.

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2 points

The newest Asus zenfone is still rocking it!

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1 point

HTC just came out with a phone that has a headphone jack AND expandable memory. I hope they go for a gen 2 in the near future since it had some kinks to work out, such as a curved glass screen, becase then it would be just about everything I could ask for in a phone.

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10 points

Aren’t notification LEDs somewhat obsolete now that we have always on displays? One advantage could be that they are less power hungry than keeping the screen / touch panel alive all the time. But in theory one could just create a permanent “notification LED” with an always on display, then it’s the same thing from a user’s perspective.

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216 points

Absolutely the damn LED. I would love to trade the stupid never-being-used selfie-cam for a damn 5 cent LED.

And swappable batteries. And a headphone-jack. And root by default (imagine you winpc came with no admin-pwd. Lol)… And…

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66 points

I used to love customising the notification colour on my old phones, so good.

I miss my headphone jack so damn much, I’m over Bluetooth earbuds breaking constantly and being so damn expensive and low quality.

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2 points

I used to have a similar problem - even if well reviewed, budget and midrange bluetooth earbuds would not last while budget-midrange wired earphones would last forever.

Think it’s just build quality for bluetooth buds. I got a set of Galaxy buds, 1st gen, roughly 3+ years and still running strong to this day. Was not cheap though.

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3 points

I’ve been through two pairs of Sennheiser’s wireless buds, and I’m just over it.

The only thing that might bring me back is the ANC, but even then I get significantly better ANC from my over ears, so probably not.

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3 points

U could try a usb to jack converter. Looks stupid but at least there’s a jack. Quality sucks anyway as they all use cheap dacs now 😩

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2 points

I’ve got a suprisingly good pair of USB C earbuds that I found in my mailbox at the moment, but yeah at some point I’ll probably get a DAC

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2 points
*

usb to jack converter

All Most of the ones you can get nowadays actually have a sound chip inside the cable (in the flat part behind the USB-C). So they’re pretty much a USB-C soundcard with just a headphone out. So it’s worth shopping around to find one that has a good soundcard built in.

A good alternative is getting a decent portable Bluetooth audio receiver to plug your regular headphones into. Can get a better headphone amp that way.

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18 points

Then buy phones with headphone jacks. Mine has one, I dont buy ones without it.

If it matters for you to have it, dont buy phones that cut it. If models with it keep selling, theyre less likely to ditch it.

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3 points

I’d rather just buy a DAP than randomly replace a perfectly good phone with one that sucks in comparison.

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48 points

What I don’t understand is why the notification LED was removed in the first place? It can easily be put under the screen.
The LED was so helpful, and it’s so annoying when I don’t see an important message for hours, because I haven’t used my phone.

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39 points
*

I’m guessing… they don’t want us deciding whether to engage with our phones, they want us looking at them more. If that means less convenience for us we can get fucked

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19 points

I think you may have a point, It’s kind of weird how the first 10 years of smartphones, was an ever higher climb for better phones, driven by competition.
But now that everybody are dependent on the phones, they all agree on taking useful features away???

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4 points

Fuck. You’re probably right. It’s all about nudging us towards the behavior they want.

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3 points
*

It’s probably also a little safer with only system apis accessing system hardware. If you look at how the camera assembly is one piece and apps basically access the whole thing securely.

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4 points

Because if you can read an LED notification system you have no purpose to pick up the cellphone.

Cellphones are not designed FOR YOU. They are designed by marketeers for you to use.

Once you realize this, all the anti-consumer shit makes sense.

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23 points

I used to have a custom ROM that would allow me to change the color based on which app had the most recent notification: FB was Blue, SMS was Green. Let me be prepared ahead of time if it was going to be important or not.

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1 point

Ironically I was grateful for a custom rom to turn off the light. It was useful but I hated it at night because at least on my phone it was stupidly bright

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19 points

I used to have a custom ROM that would allow me to change the color based on which app had the most recent notification

Even more than that, in early versions of Android this setting was baked in. I had colors set based on text messages, emails, etc. I think around 2.x was when the option was removed.

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20 points
*

Nowadays most phones have OLED screens, which can easily replicate the function of the notification LED with the “always on” feature.

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3 points

I really can’t. I did it all. It just doesn’t come near the tiny lil LED shining bright.

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18 points

Yet there are often warnings that even with OLED AOD eats a lot of battery, not so with a notification LED.
The absolute newest OLED that can do 1Hz refresh are better. But that doesn’t change that the removal of the notification LED was detrimental to the functionality of the smartphone.

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1 point

And yet they don’t

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Oh, in some cases the notification LED is physically there, but is disabled in software. At least I know that was the case with a bunch of Motorola phones, including my Moto G5s Plus.

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4 points

I’m pretty sure mine has a tiny LED under the screen, that only shows very shortly on reboot. But as you say, it’s disabled for some weird reason.

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3 points

I have no effing clue. Maybe to get us to actually look at the damn phone more often? Because of the people who’re drowning in spam? Makes not THAT much sense. Probably to save a cent in circuit-design, because only the nerds were using the stupid LED? I really would like to know too.

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0 points

I also just don’t understand why apple didn’t put one in the dynamic island, could have worked really well

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1 point

Not sure but you can have the back camera led flash when you get a notification at least.

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4 points

I got all three on my XCover 6 Pro

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1 point

But probably no easy root? That is imperative for me. I don’t buy gadget i wouldn’t own.

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1 point

I have no idea honestly. It’s quite esoteric device so probably not.

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1 point

I had an XCover 4 and hated the specs and the Samsung aspect. Too much bloat for my tastes.

I’m glad there are others still buying these phones though, and the “Pro” makes it sound like it has modern specs!

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3 points

It’s very much a mid-range device but so was the price. It was still an easy decision since it is literally the only modern smartphone in existence that matched my minimum requirements. I’m coming from LG V20 so I still had to let go of FM-radio, optical image stabilization, IR blaster and the hi-fi DAC.

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1 point
*
Deleted by creator
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1 point

Root by default is an awful idea.

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1 point
*

Of course not by default, that’d be dumb. Every app that wants it pops up a Y/N-dialogue. That’s how I want it. It’s my phone, goddamit. I might’ve phrased that a bit misleading :-)

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-23 points

If anything, this thread kind of shows how much people fail to get informed about their smartphone before they buy one.

Literally every single one of these features is available on the market. Most of those phones are actually the quality stuff, like the German produced Gigaset/Volla, or the Dutch (assembled?) Fairphone. But no, you have to go out of your way to get the bottom of the barrel Iphone and Samsung made in China.

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0 points

People gotta have their blue bubbles you know.

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-11 points

are you calling being informed about smartphones redpill?

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4 points

Wtf are you on about? Lols

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2 points

Is this the thread to troll? I don’t know if people are that invested in lost features that theyd get baited, but get that gator!

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-2 points

I cant really do anything to such fragility. Let em break!

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