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
Swappable batteries in mobile phones.
It will most likely come back due to EU legislation.
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
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....
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.
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.
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
Privacy.
Have you tried not shitting with the door open?
That’s funny. Every time somebody says “If you have nothing to hide, what are you worried about,” I reply, “Do you shit with the door open?”
But now the door isn’t just open. It feels like Uncle Sam is pissing between your legs.
Physical buttons in cars
Repairable phones
Repairable laptops
Resoleable shoes
Hand-crank drills (for those quick and easy projects where dealing with batteries or cords isn't worth it)
External frames on hiking packs
Actually tough jeans that need to be broken in and last a while
Headphone jack
Headphone jack, bigger batteries, front facing speakers, SD card slot, IR blaster, magnetic field to let you use your credit cards at check out from your phone (MST) - THROUGH THE ACTUAL CARD READER SO THEY DIDN'T NEED GOOGLE/APPLE/SAMSUNG WALLET WHATEVER THE FUCK. I also agree that I miss the light too lol
That said, here's what I can't stand in newer phones: camera bumps. Unless you're a droid x or Nexus get that rocking on any flat service while I'm trying to type shit outta here. I don't give a shit about my cameras but if they need to be that fat and advanced, just make the rest of the phone that fat and give me the extra battery instead of making a tiny stovetop in the corner. Fuckin weird and dumb. Also camera cutouts in the screen, put that shit under the screen or set it next to a front facing speaker on the bezel. Also bezel-less phones, I know we're trying to fill our phones with screens but my fat palms don't care about that when I'm accidentally touching everything on the side while holding it
My personal pet peeve is pre-installed, un-removable software and apps. My current mobile phone for example has apps that link to twitter, facebook, amazon etc. none of which I will ever use, but you can somehow not delete them. Why do I need to have that virtual junk in my phone?
By far replaceable batteries. You used to be able to purchase physically larger and higher capacity batteries to get insane battery life, but because they would include a larger rear plastic for the phone it would still look normal. Now we have to waste space and lose efficiency with external power banks.
Physical buttons in cars for radio and environment settings.
There used to be a time when I could have my hand on the gear shifter and just reach out with my fingers to change radio stations or adjust the heat or a/c without needing to look down at all.
Now with modern touchscreens in cars, you can't do any of that. I have gotten used to playing with the radio via the steering wheel buttons, but anything else requires hunting around, looking for the correct spot to touch the screen.
And yet they say, "don't take your eyes off the road!"
IR blaster for smartphones. I still have one on mine and I can use it for tons of stuff, not just as a TV remote.
I even worked for a company who made lots of IR based products (taps/faucets, accessibility stuff) and it was amazing how many people had to buy the dedicated remotes for these products for extra money.
When I asked them if their phone has an IR blaster, so they could just download a free app and use it instead. "I have an iPhone" was the most common answer.
Pretty much everything the Galaxy S5 had
I currently use a FP3 which has 4 out of the 6 features above, which I feel is the best we'll get right now.
Admittedly the Heart rate monitor is more of a gimmick nowadays, especially that it's standard and automatic on most smartwatches and sports watches. Back then when stuff like the Sony Ericsson LiveView and LG W100 watches were popular, they did not have heart rate sensing built in
Kinda surprised that no one has mentioned the FM tuner. For reasons I never really understood, a lot of companies continued to build the hardware into phones but then wall it off with firmware.
My first MP3 player had one, my TV had one, there were even watches and lots of other devices that had one. People still listen to radio, so why don't they give us a tuner?
Mostly because they needed a wired headset to act as the FM antenna since it needs a decent length to capture FM compared to the much higher UHF and GHz frequencies that the mobile network uses.
In smartphones
In PCs
Everything. We're down to barebones and marketing now focus solely on camera software updates or phone materials ("now with titanium!" How fucking sad is that?) And they are all selling the same phone.
Some of the most important loses...
Swappable batteries changed travel for me. Always having two extra charged batteries in my backpack, that you could swap top 100% in 20 seconds, made me ONLY use my phone as a free and completely useful tool without any planning or restrictions on my use. Otherwise, you can't take too many pictures or videos, stream music or video or make video calls too long or you might be fucked when you need phone, GPS, payment or to get a rideshare to where you're staying.
Audio jack similarly meant freedom. Bluetooth headphones out of battery, broken or one earbud lost? Have a pair of wired in the backpack always add backup. Also better audio quality through wired with DAC on certain models and less daily device load to charge/babysit
secondary screens LG V10 had a bar on top, they also had the T shaped dual screen phone and the secondary screen phone case. There was just creativity and attempts at innovation.
microSD expandable memory, again less and less available and this was about freedom - fuck your cloud storage add its data leaks, corruption and redaction. I own my data, you don't control it.
The audio port for headphones and headsets. Replaceable batteries. Extendable storage. Fuckers charge 100x more for every little upgrade now.
The notification light would also let you know what type of notification it was by colour on my old Samsung Note.
I loved the notification light, I had mine programmed to have different colors correspond to different types of notifications and it would buzz at me in response to being picked up as well if I'd missed a call or text.
I forget which Samsung galaxy model it was, maybe S6, but it had a universal IR blaster built into the phone which was super convenient for controlling all of my devices. I did however often abuse the shit out of it by flipping the channels on bar tvs or turning off the stereo receiver and nobody was ever suspecting it was me on my phone. I guess that's probably why they removed it lol, but it was fun while it lasted.
Most features that smart phones had. Most prodomimantly the micro SD card slot, headphone jack and IR blaster.
Not a feature but I do miss phones having side bezels. You could firmly hold your phone and not disturb the content on your phone. I can barely use youtube now because i keep touching my screen apparently
A real keyboard and general tactile-oriented inputs. Touchscreens are okay as a supplement like in the DS or Samsung devices that have a pen, but touch-centered everything has never stopped being a frustrating user experience. Even worse is the way companies have embraced it for business use as well. Heavy industrial machinery should not come equipped with unintuitive little interfaces that are clearly an afterthought at best.
The other thing is the general desktop metaphors, and file/folder structure. The way that Android, and so many apps, hide the file system from the end user just leads to more confusion when the user needs to use a file manager to track down where those apps have actually stored data only to (maybe) find them in the most pointlessly obscure locations.
Headphone jack.
Rootable modable phones, with a 3.5mm headphone jack, SD card slot, and an ultrasonic fingerprint reader cherry on top. Maybe some heart rate monitor sprinkles if you are so inclined. My S10 that I still use checks all of the boxes minus root. It feels like I have a sundae with all the high quality toppings I could want... but no proper ice cream. And I want the whole custom sundae, which these days seems impossible to find.
Tactile buttons, all my homies hate cap-sense
Physical keyboards.
I loathe typing on my phone. My texts are unreadable a vast majority of the time
Simplicity.
iPhones are far too big and have too many huge cameras for me. Everything requires a subscription or some login to do anything. Applications and operating systems are updated at the whims of CEOs while the job of UX designers is de-prioritized. Software updates keep breaking established workflows. I can no longer rely on devices or apps to maintain a consistent experience from one year to the next. It's just been years and years and years of disappointment and stress as technology changes for the worse.
All this is pushing me towards a more unplugged lifestyle. Which is a bit ironic given how it adds more complexity with the need to own and travel with more things. A bag of five 'things' that always work regardless of network connection is better than a little tablet that could crash or die or be updated at any moment and having a significant impact on your lifestyle.
There's just no fucking zen anymore. I feel like I'm living inside a simulation built by the same people who brought us Windows 95.
I too miss the LED notification light. If you have an amoled display, check this out:
My Sony Xperia 10iii still has that light as well as a heaphone jack, SD card slot that can be removed by hand (no ejector tool needed) and full waterproofing. These are literally all the features missing on newer phones. Plus it has a genuine 3 cameras: wide, ultrawide and telephoto - no fake "macro" BS here.
Best of all it's successor the Xperia 10v can be bought on the UK Sony site for just GBP299! Incredible price. But alas I don't live there but if one had a friend there you could have them order it send it to you via courier.
Real buttons that you can feel. Hence could use them without looking at the screen.
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