Open bootloaders, ir blaster, 3.5mm jack, sd card slot, replaceable batteries. The list goes on.
Don’t forget the notification light.
The most bullshit thing ever. I have a Moto 5g Ace, I was sad it didn’t have a light, used it for a couple years before putting LineageOS on it. Low and behold it actually has a notification light that was disabled in the stock ROM! WTF
Isn’t having an OLED display and using it as an “always on display” the replacement for this?
Yeah, and unless it’s only activating a few pixels at a time it’s not the same.
This is more or less how oled works iirc
It’s how it can work, which doesn’t necessarily mean the firmware is set up to use it that way.
yeah but not every device is oled.
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.
Why can’t the camera “flash” be used for this? IOS has settings for it in accessibility features.
You know? That’s a good question. I wouldn’t think it would be very hard to just do a minor redesign of the flash LED to do that.
The flash pattern and frequency were set different for email, sms and other. On mine at least. It was really handy not needing to turn the screen on at all.
Motorola G series has 3.5mm + SD card slot
Hmmm, that’s deffo a contender for my next device, we’ll see how many years i get out of my zf9 before getting one though lol
OnePlus make phones that still have many of those features
Some chinese phones still have ir blasters
my xiaomi has an ir blaster and i love it
I was pleasantly surprised when my OnePlus 13 had an IR blaster.
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).
Title says “android phone”, not just Android
Most manufacturers dropped all or most of those features.
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.
I’d pull it out of my pocket with my finger naturally on the back side and it would be unlocked by the time I viewed the screen.
Im not OP, bit i loved my old phone with a rear fingerprint scanner. It was perfectly positioned to unlock with my index finger AS I was pulling it out of my pocket. And you could scroll up/down with it.
I do not like the power button fingerprint reader.
- Cases need a notch to expose the power button.
- Can’t use the power button to lock the screen while fingerprint unlock is enabled, because it immediately unlocks itself with the fingerprint.
- Accidentally unlocks itself way often when putting it in my pocket than with the back reader.
The 2nd and even 3rd point is not automatically true for every phone and setting. I have a combined fingerprint reader and power button on my Fairphone 5, and the 2nd thing has always worked just fine.
It also has the option to only enable the fingerprint reader if the display is on, which addresses your 3rd point completely. It means you can pick the phone up, including having a finger in the reader, and it won’t turn on or unlock. You need to press down in the button to trigger the screen, then it can be unlocked. That also means that when locking it and turning off the screen actively by pressing the power button with the phone on, it never re-unlocks. To be honest this part wasn’t a problem before the setting became available, as the locking would disable the fingerprint reader anyway, but letting your grip go slightly could trigger re-unlock.
Only activating the fingerprint reader when the screen is on is a regression compared to the rear reader. It means I need to squeeze the phone to unlock it, vs just placing my finger in the right spot. It also negates the purported advantage from the comment above mine about being able to easily unlock the phone while lying on a table.
I’m not arguing that the power button reader doesn’t work for anyone. I’m saying that it is qualitatively worse UX for me in particular.
My eldest’s phone has this. Your second point is valid and a pain in the ass.
Cases need a notch to expose the power button
I don’t see why that’s a problem.
Can’t use the power button to lock the screen while fingerprint unlock is enabled, because it immediately unlocks itself with the fingerprint.
Sounds like you just had a shitty phone, that shouldn’t happen.
Accidentally unlocks itself way often when putting it in my pocket than with the back reader.
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.
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.
Yes it is. Once again, we were talking about on the back.
Again, we were talking about the back.
I hold my screen facing me so my hands are already resting on the back.
Lots of android phones have a physical fingerprint reader
on the back of the phone.
On the side isn’t good enough?
Their preference was the back. So no.
To me it sounded like the main distinction they were trying to make was a dedicated fingerprint reader button rather than an in-screen finger print reader. This is a common preference because the hardware scanner you can activate by touch without working about proper placement, whereas the in-screen readers you have to look at the screen and carefully put your finger just in the on-screen circle showing where you have to precisely place your finger
I just want the LG G5 back. It had a(n):
- Removable battery
- SD card slot
- Infrared blaster
- FM Radio
- 3.5mm jack
- Compass
- Barometer
- Gyro
- NFC
- Fingerprint reader
And a ton of other stuff. Truly the best android phone ever made
Closest I can find now is the Ulefone line (no removable battery) but I have no idea if they’re decent phones or not.
Samsung xcover 6 pro
Think I had a LG G3 I miss it. Wish they would of kept making phones.
Had one of those, but it eventually died. Great phone.
3.5mm jack, Compass, Barometer, Gyro
These things are still in most modern phones.–
You’d be surprised at how many phones don’t have enough accelerometers to know their full orientation in space. Compass, NFC, and barometer are also not givens.
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.
Strangely it’s usually only the cheap phones that include these premium features.
Where they gimp the screen, CPU, RAM, etc and then point to their low sales to claim people dont want things like a removable battery, SD card, headphone jack, etc or else they’d be buying them more. I hate it so much.
Yeah like improved cpu, GPU, and screen is expected so not even noteworthy. But everything else has felt like a regression in features.
Of how spoiled capitalism has become.
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.
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 don’t work for them, I just happen to like the idea that there is a phone company making smaller sized phones, phone with physical keyboards, etc.
IB4 the comments complaining about android versions and such. Yes, I get it. Some of them are still running android 11, yes that is a security risk. Could be though that the people that want a small form factor phone also don’t want to do banking or other financially related things on it as well.
I feel like the two groups of people that just want to make phonecalls and texts, but who also just want a small phone, have a lot of overlap.
They are most likely a circle lol.
I’ve have Samsung phones for a long time, and I’ve come to accept that I suck at typing with a virtual keyboard. So I think my next phone will be a Titan 2, or hopefully a Titan 2 slim since the 2 seems to be pretty big.
Pixel 5 has a back fingerprint reader. Think it’s the last Pixel with it.
I miss that.
My 5 died randomly one day. The 9 under screen sensor works nice, heard the 6-8? light sensors were bad.
What’s wrong with the light sensor?
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.
Only the optical sensors do this. The newer ultrasonic fingerprint sensors are more accurate and don’t require any light/brightness changes.
So I’ve heard! My 6 has the light, and while I’ve gotten accustomed to it, I’m not a fan.
at what’s gotta be greater than normal max screen brightness.
I love misplacing my finger and getting flash-banged by my phone! 😮💨
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.
Phablets, lmao. You invoke the ancient magicks.
I’m so far on the opposite side on this one though - I always have preferred large screen devices and today, I ADORE my folding pocket tablet most of all. 😍
I liked the little led light at the top that would blink for notification
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.
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.
There were several waterproof phones with removable batteries back in the S5 era
I miss just being able to take it out and have no phone for however long I want.
That’s the most telling thing about phones today, right? I have some older flip phones from 15 or so years ago. Removable battery, but even with the battery inserted for 8 years, I could turn one on right now and it would have whatever current state of charge is in the battery, only losing power from physics.
It’s obviously possible, as Samsung keeps making these XCover phones with a removable battery and a waterproof rating of IPX8 (SCUBA): https://www.phonescoop.com/phones/phone.php?p=7301
It’s because the U.S. Government can make it seem as if your phone is powered down, but it’s actually still on and spying on you, sending data to whatever alphabet agency wants it. Removing the battery is the only defense against that attack, so they ‘encouraged’ manufacturers to stop allowing it.
Sounds like a dumb conspiracy. Especially since Fairphone sells in the US.
More likely is that manufacturers want to make more money so they make their phones more difficult to repair so customers have to pay them to get a battery replaced.
I blame Apple
You can believe what you want. I didn’t hear it from a conspiracy theorist, I heard it from Edward Snowden, and this was actually old news when he mentioned it, but his revelation on national TV made it even more widely known. “Coincidentally” it was right around the time Snowden blew the whistle that Android manufacturers started switching over to non-replaceable batteries.
Yes Apple are greedy fucks and it’s obvious that forcing iPhone users to get their phones repaired by a ‘genius’ was a part of their strategy from the beginning. But Android manufacturers who didn’t have a repair store they could force their users to use and wouldn’t benefit from that were happy to continue letting users replace their own batteries, because it was a legitimate benefit for the consumer and way to differentiate themselves from Apple.
I’m sure that phone manufactures save a few pennies by forcing users to either buy a new phone or pay an expensive repair bill, but I’m pretty sure that isn’t the only reason it’s done.
Edit: Even if you ignore their ability to wiretap you when your phone is ‘powered off’, the fact remains that the government can and does track you by you cell phone and removing the battery is a great way to stop that.
Of course, it’s not the only way- If you feel like you don’t want to be tracked for any reason a Faraday bag is a decent option. It makes your phone less useful, but so would removing the battery.
Non replaceable batteries benefit android manufacturers as it simplifies manufacturing. And they dont care about repairs post warranty… thats just incentive to buy another one. You dont need a grand conspiracy to explain that.
Non replaceable batteries benefit android manufacturers as it simplifies manufacturing. And they dont care about repairs post warranty… thats just incentive to buy another one.
That was true from 2006-2016 as well, but most Android manufacturers still offered user replaceable batteries. If you believe that there is no correlation- that’s fine. I don’t buy it though, the timing is just too perfect for it to be a coincidence.
You know its a really easy to prove against, right? Just have some basic radio spectrograph to detect any signals coming from a turned off phone.
In reality, the correlation is phones continue to get thinner, making it near impossible to create a battery and battery connector small enough and still be resistant to a 200lb ape handling it.
That actually isn’t a way to prove anything, unfortunately.
A powered off or “powered off” phone wouldn’t need to transmit anything. It would be just waking one of the receivers periodically (or even the NFC could be hit by some radio energy as a trigger) to listen for the “secret” activation code. Listening for radio energy doesn’t generate any.
If the phone was “powered off” - tracing power draw between battery/phone would probably show something, but likely, the phone’s power draw while off is always constant if this were the case and it isn’t a new state the phone goes into.
Even if the phone was being used as an offline bug, the user would still not know because it can record audio/whatever and store it internally without ever transmitting. It’d likely be rigged up to just transmit the next time the user “turns it on” - so they’d be unaware, as the transmission would look like normal traffic.
The only case where it would be traceable from a radio perspective is if it were being used as an online bug, which means it would already have to have been put in the online bug state, which means someone has a reason to monitor you.
I mean shoot, if one really wants to go full tinfoil hat, recording audio to temporary storage at voice quality could go on for days with a phone “powered off” - periodically dumped to somewhere in flash. Hours of conversation could be fit in megabytes. The phone could just always be recording while turned off for every user, and when turned back on, that audio file is sent through the ML processor to convert to text, and then compress the text, further reducing the size. That data could be transmitted during normal usage as voice or compressed data, or just stored in the phone as compressed data for years.
Every phone could be doing this right now, and could have been doing this for a decade, although on-device text transcription is a relatively new feature.
Then, let us go next level: phone recycling/exchange processes also harvest IMEI+that compressed data before being shipped off for resale in the event it was never transmitted. Finally, we know why the NSA has the Utah data center.
I keep asking them to send me copies of recordings of old phone calls, but they never humor me.
DISCLAIMER: This is all non-serious but based on what is technically possible right now.
You know its a really easy to prove against, right?
Why would I need to prove it? You didn’t read any of the articles I linked to did you? The fact that they have the ability to do this is not even a question. The government admitted that it was able to do this all the way back in 2006.
Just have some basic radio spectrograph to detect any signals coming from a turned off phone.
The claim isn’t that the FBI/NSA/CIA/ICE whoever is doing this constantly to everybody, it’s that they have the capability to do this to anybody, which again isn’t even a question. I’m not really worried about being spied on personally (yet) and even if I were I’d just leave my phone at home or put it in a Faraday bag, I’m not going to carry around a ‘basic radio spectrograph’ and whip it out every time I want to have a private conversation.
In reality, the correlation is phones continue to get thinner
Lol, that’s like saying I lost weight because I bought smaller pants. Yeah, designers are able to make phones thinner when they are able to design around non-replaceable batteries. Was anyone asking for thinner phones? They had the ability to make thinner phones by disallowing replaceable batteries for a decade and did not.
Were consumers demanding that phone manufactures make phones worse by removing useful features like replaceable batteries or headphone jacks- or was these anti-features foisted upon us?
If it had been just some manufactures that switched, or if those manufacturers that did switch had offered the option of different models, some with replaceable batteries and some without, and then consumers chose the worse phones- I might not be as convinced.
As it is now with 99.9% of all phones you can buy not even giving you the option, I’m not buying it.
It’s not like this is some crazy off the wall theory. I’m not saying the Earth is flat or we didn’t land on the moon. We know that the government is using our cell phones to track us, we know they have the capabilities to do so. The only question is did governments (I guarantee it’s not just the U.S) make deals with/ask/or put pressure on manufactures to incentivize the switch. That’s not really far fetched at all.
- Headphone jack.
- Removable batteries.
- Sidekick/Palmtop form factor with the full width keyboard.
- MicroSD Card slot, and OS support for executing software and accessing data on the card.
I liked the notification LEDs that some of the nexus phones used to have, you could customize the color / flashing pattern per contact.
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
I had a phone with this and I loved the hell out of it. Could tell at a glace if a notification was for an email, text, or voice call without opening the phone. Could also set a custom color for, say, a text from my wife.
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
The trackball that had the customizable notification LED under it on the Nexus One was so damned cool. Since it was raised up and I had work emails, texts, personal emails, and GTalk all on distinct colors, I could tell from across the room whether it was worth even grabbing my phone.
Nothing has these ‘glyph’ lights, but software support for them seems to be pretty limited (not that I’ve looked too deep, all these modern phones are just boring). I hope they can come up with more controls for them, hardware seems to support quite complex patterns.
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Unimpeded root. You can still get it on maybe a handful of phones but apps are getting harder and harder to run with it enabled.
no headphone jack is shitty but god i fucking loathe typing on a touchscreen keyboard
Fuck, the freedom. Root & custom ROM, running your damn device that you paid money for the way you want to. Imagine that. I stopped after rooting your phone killed Snapchat (because 3 idiots use Snap Pay or whatever), killed your tap pay wallet, killed Pokémon Go, etc etc etc. Then they tried telling people oh bro, just hide your root bro Majisk hide root. Like I need one more thing to do. 🙄 If I need to hide it, and most of the benefits of rooting have gone away/are incorporated into smartphones & no longer needed…I’m just going to stop rooting.
Then the microSD card expansion slot. Some try to say it’s for waterproofing purposes, but they can use the same pop-out slot as the SIM card & it’s nbd. Others say it’s because the storage can sometimes be “unstable” & glitch, but over the years I’ve only had problems twice: just once with a Samsung, and then constantly with a shitty Motorola smartphone but that’s on me because I bought a shitty Motorola smartphone. I think they killed it just because they could, because everybody else was killing it off & they knew they were going to get your money regardless. And then either pay a premium for extra on-board storage, or pay $10/mo for the rest of your life for “cloud” storage. Or both! Money, money, money, it’s all about the money.
These guys got rid of everything that made an Android an Android, and if I’ve got problems with mid-tier phones, to spend $1K+ on a flagship Android. For crying out loud, I’m not spending $1K on an Android that doesn’t even have microSD expansion, at that point you might as well buy an iPhone.
As someone who currently has a new phone with root and an sd-card slot, this was a fun read.
What phone is that?
Fairphone 6
killed Pokémon Go
I run CalyxOS and I tried again recently and it DOES work
How recently? In May Google changed everything about root detection so it may have changed again.
Plexus has a few people claiming it works from the last months though.
I was playing today
Control over it.
Replaceable battery. No contest.
The core apps (like messaging, and calendar) being free software and open source.
