I don’t understand how we’re still whining about notches. We got extra screen and people choose to focus of the notch even 5 years later? Talk about glass half empty mentality…
I’m whining cause I miss having bezels. Having a spot on the screen I can reliably touch that isn’t touchscreen was nice.
The notch is plain ugly and took away screen real estate for notifications and system icons. The pinprick ain’t too bad, don’t notice it much, but looks fuckbad on full-screen videos and games.
Last phone I owned genuinely did. It could only show like three notification icons before it was filled. The pin prick is better, but I want my bezels back.
I mean, yeah you can make all kinds of bad design choices. But a simple cutout like the Pixel works just fine – I even add a ring around it to see media/download progress, so it functions as a system icon itself.
User serviceability is intentionally not a focal point especially when it comes to anything a person has to use day to day. Any kind of tool or appliance- and especially electronic devices, forget about it. Luckily there are off the beaten path companies like framework and fairphone, but these are hard to market to regular joes and some are unavailable in a lot of regions.
Tech enthusiasts like presumably a lot of this comment section is are lucky there’s at least something out there.
Do you think that the sensors in flagship phones take up significant space in the phone or are significantly larger than the sensors in smaller or cheaper phones?
I might agree that a smaller phone can’t have like FIVE cameras, like some of the flagships, but they can certainly fit the same high-end sensors themselves.
I’m afraid I don’t know. Perhaps I assumed wrongly. But having taken apart a couple of phones and knowing how tightly packed everything is, I expect the sensors, lenses, processing chips and whatever else of better cameras would be harder to fit into whether phones. Besides, isn’t the high end nowadays often about the postprocessing taking advantage of the multiple cameras?
The sensors themselves are generally standardized sizes, and the top end ones aren’t much (if any) larger. They may have slightly larger supporting hardware to allow better electrical insulation to reduce sensor noise, but not significantly larger per sensor.
To the best of my knowledge, the post processing on flagship phones don’t use multiple photos from different cameras, they use machine learning / AI, which can run on lower-end phones too, it just takes a bit longer. Which imo is totally fine because it’s done by the photo app, not by the camera itself. The only thing that I’m not sure about is the “portrait mode” which seems to do a better job if I select portrait mode in the camera rather than apply a portrait effect in the photo app, so maybe it’s using multiple sensors; but I’ve never seen a phone that had a better than 5% success rate at producing a portrait photo that wasn’t absolute garbage, so that’s a feature I’d be happy to sacrifice.
I don’t need all the processing power, I don’t need all the memory. I need a good OLED screen at a size I can fit into my hand, all day battery, a good amount of storage, and a top of the line camera sensor and lens.
If this hasn’t been done already, being able to unlock the bootloader
Adding “AI” integrated into the OS with vague benefits even though the processing is done on the cloud (like Windows) just so the OEM can spy on you better
Forced volume limiters: The phone won’t let you stay at max volume for more than 5 minutes a day, even if connected to a BT device set at substantially under max volume
Making it take more clicks to disable Internet, Bluetooth, other connected features
DRM built into Android itself
Being able to sideload
Ads within the OS
All of these are already on their way to being implemented:
Already the case with the vast majority of phones
Pixels already have this. Samsung is focusing on this in 2024. Several Chinese OEMs already have some version of this.
This was an idea Google attempted to implement in Android 14. Seems like it didn’t go through that year, but there’s always this year.
Google already made it harder to do this in Android 12. Apple also does this with the toggles only disabling WiFi/BT until tomorrow. Other OEMs are good for now.
After widespread disdain for Google’s Web Environment Integrity BS, Google is quietly pivoting to this stupid change.
Google is now making it harder to do this on all Android phones. Now, you can only sideload apps targeting an Android version at most 8 behind the current one. This disables lots of little FOSS projects that were light on system resources.
Most Chinese OEMs already do this, although you can usually turn it off. Samsung used to do this, but backpedaled. Also bloatware exists.
I fucking hate the volume limiter. I’ll be listening to podcasts through the vehicle radio, and suddenly notice that ive been straining to hear it fornthe last 20 minutes. Sure enough, the damn limiter decided it was that time of day to protect my half-assed hearing.
Google was attempting to make it even worse, by having it always happen no matter what. The only way to restore the regular volume was to manually click OK on the nag screen and press the volume up button.
I don’t understand why everyone hates the notch, or especially the hole punch camera now. You could just disable the pixels next to the notch going back to a regular screen, and if you don’t it’s only extra screen space. Even more so with the hole punch. Why more screen bad?
Because front camera is not just a feature I’m forced to pay for, despite never using it once in my life, but now it also makes my experience shittier by adding a hole in my screen. I hate that.
I paid for an X size screen. I shouldn’t have to disable a chunk of it to watch a video without a hole in it. /s
Realistically, while I’d rather not have a hole punch, I don’t notice it and better than a giant top bezel that does nothinh. I just wish they still made phones small enough for one hand use.
It’s not like they can rid of the hardware that is inside of the notch. So either get more potential screen space, or just disable it and get the same as always. You’re not losing anything.
Right, the old way was have a bunch of dead space at each end of the phone (and sides too). This isn’t the loss of where the hole now is, this is the addition of screen around the hole that always was.
We had gotten rid of our TV remotes and when we had to upgrade our phones, we didn’t realize that feature was gone until we got home and tried to download the TV remote app we were using… which was unavailable on our phones. Because it lacked the hardware.
Not necessarily true. Sometimes a corporation is willing to continue with a bad choice in order to achieve some strange goal. Just look at Facebook absolutely going all in on Meta or Disney going ham on strange starwars choices.
OK but look at phone sales instead. Can anyone link the removal of any feature to a decline in sales? If these changes actually hurt these companies and were unpopular with users, the data would speak to that.
The companies are already well stablished by the time they do that kind of shit, so unless they absolutely fuck something up, nothing is going to hurt sales a lot, specially if other companies follow them afterwards. Things like the jack removal are negative changes and at the time it was truly unpopular, but it wasn’t something for which iPhone or Samsung fans would just switch over to a different brand when they could just buy some new fancy bluetooth earbuds.
Enshitification of stuff is always a gradual process, unless they are truly incompetent and absolute morons, you’ll never see a company fucking several aspects of their product at the same time because they know that by slowly introducing those changes, most people will eventually accept each and everyone of them.
The free market theory will never work in practice if that’s what your comment is trying to imply
I still break my phone after a few years and it loses usability at a point anyway. I’m still very bitter about the loss of aux, SD, batteries, etc. It didn’t happen all at once. They boiled the frog. We compromised.
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