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
3.5mm headphone jack
There are often enterprise versions that still have it. Like the S10E for example.
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.
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
I’ve had an S10E for a while and didn’t even know the headphone jacks are no longer the norm!
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.
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.
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.
Not sure what brand you have but mine you can turn off the functions on the buttons in the app.
You can turn off the touch controls on Samsung Galaxy Bud Pros, maybe the other galaxy bud models too
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.
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.
Here’s the crazy thing tho… You could just not use it and choose to use blue tooth still.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Swappable batteries in mobile phones.
Sure, but the Fairphone 5 is €700 and, ease of repair aside, you can get a better phone for less than half the price. Repairability doesn’t mean much when buying a cheaper (and otherwise better) phone and fully replacing it ends up being, well, cheaper.
Not really. EU legislation is about the right to repair, not about swappable batteries on the run
How does one safely repair a lithium-ion battery without just swapping it for a working one?
Maybe, but swappable =/= replaceable, in my opinion. I could be wrong, but I’m not sure that EU legislation says that phone batteries should be swappable, only replaceable
“ Portable batteries incorporated in appliances shall be readily removable and replaceable by the end-user or by independent operators during the lifetime of the appliance, if the batteries have a shorter lifetime than the appliance, or at the latest at the end of the lifetime of the appliance. A battery is readily replaceable where, after its removal from an appliance, it can be substituted by a similar battery, without affecting the functioning or the performance of that appliance.”
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A52020PC0798&qid=1703805580803
So we see here that batteries must be replaceable without affecting the function of the device. Yet waterproofing is important. What seems more likely to me is that batteries need to be replaceable without opening the entire device and therefore destroying liquid protections as per the proposed law. Easiest way to do that would be something similar to a SIM card tray where a hidden button is pressed to release the battery to swap it. The designers would have to go out of their way to make this process difficult, which the EU also doesn’t want, to avoid making them swappable. And that feature is attractive. Knowing Apple though, it’ll be harder on the base models or batteries will cost too much.
I see this get talked about a lot.
Almost all my inside phone batteries I’ve had in cheaper knockoff phones have been replaceable. It’s not as easy as pulling the back cover off and instantly swapping it, but it’s not THAT much harder. It’s doesn’t exactly require microsoldering. Which is the reason why I know my last three have been replaceable despite being in-house.
Manufacturers really just need to make better and more secure charge ports. Having to resolder my last two blu phones and a Samsung because the charge ports go bad is just annoying.
Never had issues with a battery in all my years of using smartphones though.
The Nexus One had so many features I miss:
Trackball for scrolling
Notification light built into the trackball with customizable colors depending on the app
Back plate came off, replaceable battery
Small and a one handed wonder, the trackball kept my fingers off the screen
It was a replacement for my jail broken iPhone OG, such a better interface for me than the iPhones and it had very basic multitasking when the other guys could only do one app at a time
Edit: Formatting
For real, you sold me on that trackball. That sounds like the coolest feature a phone could have, right down to the multi-color led built in beneath it. I really really hope we see a return to something like that! Touch screens are very useful and have their place but physical buttons/controls are usually preferred when done properly. Here’s a pic of the Nexus 1, that trackball indeed appears to be cool as fuck:
Oh hey, it’s my 2nd smartphone ever. How nostalgic! This phone was built like an absolute tank. It really was a great little phone.
That said, the problem with physical controls is that you either need a larger device or smaller screen to accommodate them. For most people, the tradeoff just isn’t worth it.
For a while, I bemoaned the loss of the physical button bar. Having four (!) indicator lights was really useful to boot. Now I happily use gestures with no looking back.
Would be nice to still see some phones offer this for those who want them, though.
For me it’s this (the color coded notification LED on phones) and while on the topic of phones I used to have a xiaomi phone several years ago that had an infrared face unlock feature so you could use face unlock in complete darkness. Haven’t had a phone with that before or after. It was awesome.
I miss how gadgets used to be nifty and little. Every time I get a new phone now I have to stretch my fingers more and more just to hold it.
