- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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Here’s my dilemma:
- Been without cell service since the pandemic (eventually stopped using the smart phone altogether)
- All my digital needs are satisfied, devices and functionality in every room for every purpose I need
- Have multiple forms of solid and satisfactory communication channels (don’t need a cell number)
I’ve thought about buying a model I could jailbreak, but again it’s just to use a system that’s abusive. “Download our app!”, “Use our digital coupons!”, “Link your phone number!”, “Scan our code!”, “Let us track your location for your convenience!”.
I’m really a niche subgroup though, I already need other devices while at work that a phone wouldn’t suffice for. I kinda see more people going this route though. If your transportation has a computer, then what’s the endpoint in carrying a phone? If your job requires digital devices, the phone is basically reduced to a large brick of a communication device. I see more and more equipment being specialized and having added communication aspects for more complicated machinery, cell phones are not going to keep up with it in a general sense.
tldr: cell phones are just a fad with an abusive system that will die out one day and be remembered like rotary phones. They’re generally subpar for any specific task and are only a place holder till we figure out better systems.
I don’t want a small phone or a slide out keyboards.
I want :
Replaceable battery.
Non glass back.
3.5 jack.Galaxy Xcover series.
3.5 jack.
They exist, but it’ll constrain your phone choices a lot.
I’d just get a USB-C-to-1/8"-TRS adapter. If you want to charge while playing, you can get one with passthrough.
Without passthrough:
https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Adapter-Female-Samsung-Devices/dp/B08Z3B5QL3
or with passthrough:
https://www.amazon.com/ZOOAUX-Headphone-Charging-Earphones-Compatible/dp/B094Z6149B
Can probably just leave the thing plugged into your headphones.
Yeah I get they exist, but I will lose that in a day
Just leave it plugged into the headphones, don’t even take it off. I mean, I have 1/4 inch audio hardware, and I’ve got 1/8 inch headphones that have a 1/8 inch to 1/4 inch adaptor that just lives on the end.
I totally understand people who want to use wired, TRS headphones. They’re inexpensive, widespread, aren’t going to become e-waste when their battery dies, aren’t going to become obsolete when radio protocols move on, are lightweight, don’t suffer from radio interference etc. I have a bunch of TRS headphones and like them. Only downside is that they need some power source if you want to do ANC, but it’s not like one has to have ANC.
But…I think that a lot of people are treating it as a “we live in a Bluetooth world or a wired headphones world, and which we do depends on whether there’s a TRS jack on the phone itself”.
I’d also add that if you have a USB-to-TRS device acting as your DAC, you can swap in others, aren’t stuck with the on-phone DAC. I had a phone that had an extremely obnoxious tendency to, when charging in the car, play noise back through the headphones jack (and thus to my car’s aux jack and through the speakers). Was fine on Bluetooth. Problem was that the manufacturer had failed to stick the proper filtering circuitry in the power supply for the DAC and was spewing noise from USB power into the audio output, probably because you couldn’t see a problem when the phone was running on battery and filtering circuitry for the DAC uses up space in the cramped confines of the phone. (In practice, USB power can be amazingly dirty – I was astonished watching some people with oscilloscopes look at the power lines on USB.) Anyway, the noise was appalling. If you use the built-in DAC, you can’t really change the thing out. With an external DAC, you can stick a reasonable one in.
I don’t know how the ones I linked to above perform. But I’m confident that if they are a problem, there are other DACs out there. Whereas with a built-in jack, you get the DAC that the phone manufacturer provides, and clearly some are willing to ship their phones with an inadequate DAC.
I’d kind of like to see someone set up a rig with intentionally-dirty USB power and a bunch of USB audio interfaces and USB-powered devices with an audio output and then see how much noise leaks through into the DAC’s output.
EDIT: I also had a (purely analog) audio mixer at one point that used USB power and also leaked audible – not as bad as my phone in the car – noise from the USB power source into the audio. Solved that by moving it from my computer’s USB output to a dedicated USB charger. I’m sure that there’s still leakage and if I were doing pro audio work with that hardware, I’d still be looking at it, but at least it isn’t easily-perceptible to me any more.
I also had an inexpensive USB audio interface that leaked a little audible noise into its output, one of these:
It wasn’t terrible — I used the thing for years — and on that, moving the USB cable around would adjust how much audible noise was making it out the DAC’s output, so it was definitely unfiltered noise coming in from USB power.
I think that it might be underappreciated how bad the DAC situation in home electronics is. I haven’t seen people trying to measure and quantify it. I have seen lots of people going to great lengths to measure frequency response on headphones, whether or not a digital data cable has (probably completely unnecessary) shielding, and worry about the encoding of their music and sometimes even its encoding for wireless transmission to headphones over Bluetooth. But “how much junk from the power source is leaking into the DAC’s output” seems to be a curiously un-measured area.
3.5 jack is easy, most budget phones have them (along with a MicroSD card slot)
The replaceable battery? That’s gonna be hard to find. There the obvious Fairphone, but its very costly for its specs and is only made for EU, and even if someone from the US imports it, the only US carrier allowing it is Tmobile.
Samsung Galaxy XCover series have IP67 Water resistance, headphone jack, and MicroSD card slot, and the replaceable battery, but its specs are not that good for its cost (as reported by various Reddit users).
I wouldn’t trust the water resistance tho. One drop into a puddle and the back comes off exposing the internals.
The xcovers backs usually stay on when you drop them and the back only really holds the battery in. The internals are protected by another layer of plastic.
As you say the specs do suck though.
Even for the government you need apps nowadays. Yes you can try doing things in person but wait times aren’t reasonable. I’ve been trying to get a dumb phone for myself but still find I need a smartphone for specific apps a couple of times a month…
i have a 6a and i think its about the optimal size. not too small, not too big.
by the way, my first post on here… how is this different to reddit?
Why can’t we have both? I want a bigger phone. Bigger than what I have now, and many people would consider this to be a fairly large phone.
But I don’t want to stop people who want smaller phones from having those, too.
I’d like to see more options out there. But there are reasons it could be difficult. I’ve been a software dev for 25 years and we’ve had take our software from local installs to web services, then mobile web services or responsive interfaces for all screen sizes. Then mobile APPs came along… and we do have to decide which devices and screen sizes we’re going to support. It’s hard to justify spending 20% more time so that you can support 2% more people. And for my app anyway that’s how many tablet users we have. 2%. So we’ve never done tablets, period. If we had to support some phones that were 3x the size of others, that would be kinda hard too, and we’ll always choose to spend the bulk of our time where the bulk of our users are.
Just a real answer. Supporting different screen sizes isn’t free.
Right? Everybody has different size hands, my hands are on the larger side and these bigger phones of today are actually pretty comfortable to me
I am a very average-sized woman with average-sized hands, and big phones would have been unusable for me. Seems like they’re all for big men’s palms.
I have fairly small hands, but still prefer a larger phone. More content on the screen and space for battery.
HOWEVER, I’d take both. A small phone would be a good secondary device. I want something modern the size of my Samsung Galaxy Ace (GT-S5830i). The back also has a really nice texture.
Oh, yeah, it also has a headphone jack, MicroSD card slot and quickly swappable battery which I should probably replace because it seems it has slightly increased its capacity… volumetric capacity.But I also prefer a bit more thickness so it doesn’t feel like a fragile, slippery sheet of glass (rugged phones are good for that).
You can already get big phones though.
Not big enough.
They’re saying the smartphone market is too homogenous and there should be more options so that people actually have a choice in the device they buy.
Yeah, but most cries (including this article) aren’t “We want both” but “We want small instead”. The article goes out of its way to ridicule “huge” phones.
The battle cry seems to be demanding it their way instead of variety.
Yep, got big hands myself and own an S21+, and the keys on the keyboard are still too fucking small. Sick of correcting nytypos after 10 years, so finally not giving a fuck.
Ironically, i typed this entire comment without a typo, gotta love how that works.
Edit: oh wit, found onr. Guess y’all just gotta deal with ut.
If you’re not using Swype or whatever it’s called on gboard give it a shot. I have dumb fingers and I can text in my work gloves.
Oh yeah buddy, been using swiftkey for idk 6 years but I’m not in the habit of using it most of the time because half the words I swipe come out the wrong word 😄
It has to learn from your “style”. I’m using… something, can’t be bothered to check, but because I don’t let it phone home I’ve had to adjust my “style” to it’s default behavior. Wasn’t too bad learning it.
Why is the article using diagonal screen size as their measurement for phone size? In that case you could have a phone the exact same size get “bigger” just because bezel sizes have shrunk over the years.
They specifically call out the iPhone SE as a “small phone” that they seem to want. But the newest iPhone, the iPhone 16 is only 6% bigger in width and height. Fractions of an inch larger. I can totally understand why somebody would want a phone with smaller overall dimensions, but why on earth would your metric for an ideal phone be a smaller screen?
Probably for similar reasons we can’t go back to small cars: People are getting older and can’t handle them.
ETA: Old people need giant text so they can read things. Big screens show more big text. They also don’t want to drop down into a small car, so they buy SUVs and trucks. So they make SUVs and trucks and great big screens for the old people who are most of the population.
Source: I am an old person. Except I drive a small car because it’s fun
If they’re going to make only bog phones they could at least bring back all the hardware features they’ve removed over the years.
I do, I bought smallest phone available from known company. But most of those companies just decided you need huge phone that can’t fit everywhere, removed sdcard slot, removed headphone jack. Last time I remember nobody asked them to remove those features. I think it is the same enshittification like with everything, they no longer make cheap houses, smaller cheaper cars, actual budget gpus etc, etc. Feels like every company targets top 20% and the rest - gtfo and be damned.
Too small, can’t phone
Ummm we did? My pixel 9 pro is noticably smaller than my pixel 6 pro, much to my delight. Maybe stop buying the XL tablet phones and you’ll find they’re actually a reasonable size again. So many people in the comments rallying against an issue that isn’t even there. You’re just being told this is an issue. Do you even check for yourselves?
The “small” P9P is considerably larger than the iPhone 12/13 mini, which is the size OP wants. My mother-in-law has an iPhone 13 mini and it’s very small, but nearly as fully-featured as the standard iPhone 13, which is where other manufacturers keep missing the mark.
this right here is the issue, people don’t even remember the size smartphone used to be. I’ve got a phone that’s one of the smallest available that still have decent hardware. the screen is still 6.1 inch. your example of a reasonable size is 6.3 inches.
what op and I are actually looking for is something around 5 - 5.3 inches instead, like smartphone used to be. For that size, all that is available today is no-name chinese phones with shit hardware and no support. the big brands are busy selling 6.2 inches as “compact” where it used to be considered phablet size
Because small phones have a small viewing area, which is a pain in the ass to see, especially as you get older. Which is why I prefer foldables. The more screen real-estate I can fit in my pocket, the better.
I believe I saw where you hear that people want small phones, they make them, and then they sell poorly. So, to the company at least, it doesn’t look like people want the smaller devices.
Now, I saw some comments in here about the smaller devices usually being less robust than their normal/pro counterparts, and that could also be a major reason small phones don’t sell.
How many times is this going to be regurgitated? The question has been well and truly answered.
We don’t buy them.
How many times is this going to be regurgitated?
OP is an iPhone user. They’re very used to their tiny phones and they love them and simply can’t understand why everyone wants a large phone.
It’s a blind take. If iPhone 16 Pro Max sold less than iPhoneSE, then they would still sell the latter.
But there is no comparison.
removed by mod
They don’t care about “you”. They care about their “consumers” (as in, you in bulk), who don’t buy them.
It’s capitalism; simple as that.
But I want mine to have a goatee, why doesn’t apple give iPhone a goatee?
Not to mention: the old people (the ones with money) can’t see them.
That, and small phones on the Android side are often nerfed beyond reason, like a bottom-of-the-barrel Mediatek SoC with low RAM and shit storage option instead of the bigger model’s Snapdragon and quality storage, or shit cameras, or garbage screen resolution, etc etc.
There is something to be said about the larger variant having more room for better cameras, but outside of that, the nerfing feels almost intentional.
Small size means a smaller battery. If they make the phone’s processor too powerful, the battery will run out in less than a day, and then everyone will be mad about that. There’s also less surface to dissipate heat.
Making things smaller is harder and more expensive, but people who want small phones don’t want to pay more than large phones.
people spend a third of their lives on those things. And while cumbersome, a big screen simply is better for media consumption
only way I see smaller phones make a comeback is if we change our habits or if a new technology comes along
I would rather spend this time on a device with a 15’ screen and a comfortable keyboard. A phone is just that - a secondary device. That needs to be comfortable to hold and type on with one hand while the other holds onto the subway railing.
A phone is just that - a secondary device
I don’t know. more than 60% of Internet traffic comes from mobile devices, and it keeps increasing
new technology comes along
I believe the RAZR foldables allow you to do almost anything on the front screen, and in the latest iterations the front screen is larger than Samsung’s.
A bigger screen is better for text consumption, too. Perhaps especially for that. If you don’t know why, just wait ;D
Seriously as a person getting on in years I always bump up the font size. And if you do this on a mini phone, you run out of usable space immediately.
I wish there were small phone options, too, but I can see why big is the default.
