everything except the SD card slot and the headphone jack lol
No removable battery.
Fixed battery and removal of headphone jack and SD card slots were 1000% anti-consumer practices designed to cost you more money and make your device lifespan as short as possible. I don't see the battery problem going away - why enable your phone to last twice or three times as long when they can just force you to have to buy a new device when the battery is shot? At least we got our card slots and jacks back (mostly).
I am also salty that phones USED to have IR blasters and they don't anymore. IR LEDs cost next to nothing, another feature that was amazing but thrown away to save 5c per unit.
battery
I don't think that this is a conspiracy by phone manufacturers to force purchases of phone hardware.
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All kinds of devices use fixed batteries these days, not just smartphones. It's cheaper, lighter, makes the device stronger, avoids them having to deal with "User X bought a counterfeit battery that then caught fire" -- that's a real issue for lithium batteries, unlike traditional alkaline/NiMH-type removeable batteries. Virtually the only device class I can think of where removable lithium batteries are the norm is high-end flashlights -- anything on !flashlight@lemmy.world probably supports removable 18650s or similar. I have gone out of my way to get a lot of devices that use AA batteries or maybe 18650s, but there are just tons of products, including in highly-competitive, low-barrier-to-entry industries like gamepads, where it'd be impossible to form a cartel to refuse to offer a device with removable batteries. And yet they've mostly moved to fixed batteries. There is no industry convention for removable, BMS-enabled, lithium batteries the way AA or the like were traditionally used in devices.
If there were a cartel driving this against consumer wishes as a whole, you would have just smartphones doing the fixed battery thing, not the consumer electronics industry as a whole.
If it were cartel-driven, I'd also expect to see, in a situation like that, manufacturers making hefty use of price discrimination -- like, think of how some laptop vendors charge a premium for devices with a lot of RAM when they have soldered RAM. But in the market today, the differences in battery size are minimal. Google makes a "large" version of the Pixel, and they barely bump the battery up, even with a slightly larger screen.
Instead, it was associated with the shift across consumer electronics to non-removable batteries with the move to lithium batteries, which is what you'd expect if sketchy batteries were a problem.
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Phones in particular have a space and weight premium, so compared to a lot of devices that aren't held in your hand, using removable NiMH batteries or the like is more of an issue.
- No good operating system preinstalled by default
- No headphone jack anymore
This plus no way to replace battery yourself or upgrade storage.
My fingerprint scanner was on the back, but now it's on the front, and can't identify me as regularly as it did before.
I've gotten used to the new location, but I can't forgive making it less accurate than it used to be.
My god, I upgraded from an S9 to an S22 and seeing the fingerprint scanner on the front baffled me. With a screen protector on I unlock it on the first try maybe 25% of the time
There's a setting you can turn on that increases the sensitivity, which should fix the issue. It works perfectly fine for me with a screen protector
the constant surveillance.
No fucking mini jack for headphones.
I don't need a headphone jack all the time, but I really do fucking want one when I need it. Dongles suck.
Touchscreen basically being unusable in any kind of rain no matter how light
I'm relatively content with my Pixel 4A running LineageOS (with root), but that's an experience that's really only suited to very technical users, in large part because some apps actively resist running in an environment the device owner actually controls.
My complaint is with the smartphone ecosystem as a whole: it's designed to empower the OS vendor and app developers over users. The entire tech world (outside Microsoft and maybe some corporate IT types) saw Microsoft Palladium as a nightmare scenario a couple decades ago. Now we've let Apple and Google do the same thing with barely a grumble out of the mainstream tech press.
Missing status LED. I'd like to deactivate the always on screen feature.
I remember using an app on my Samsung Galaxy Nexus where you could set every notification to a different color, for every app. Cost me like $2. Last phone that had a notification LED (dunno if it was the Note 4 or Note 8) had only some basic configuration and the app was no longer maintained. Now, I don't have the LED anymore. Sad.
Maybe if I could have always-on display, but only with a virtual notification LED, I'd be happy.
Least favorite things? Hmmm...
Things that I want on my phone:
-headphone Jack
-user replaceable battery
-micro SD
-good camera
I know the specs would be terrible nowadays, but in terms of physical features and overall design, I think phone design peaked around the Samsung S5.
How much Google controls the software experience and locks it down.
Currently I wish I could run a local HTML/CSS/JS App on my browser (like you can easily do in any desktop OS) but I can't.
UPDATE: I found a way!! I have to run a local HTTP server on my phone using an app like "Simple HTTP server", put my HTML/CSS/JS into a folder targeted by the server, and then go to http://127.0.0.1:8080/ in Chrome (it doesn't work in Firefox for some reason).
That it's 7 years old and I can't find a replacement that isn't a downgrade in functionality.
It's too big. I couldn't get a phone the same size as my old one without sacrificing the micro sd slot so I ended up with something bigger than ideal
I don't even want removable anything, I just want more small phones.
The last iPhone mini was a good size but I couldn't stand iOS. My Pixel6a is a little too big for my tastes.
My least favorite thing is it is getting old and I can't find a good equivalent to the Pixel 4a to replace it with. They are all too big, have no headphone jack, and are too expensive for what I get out of them.
The lack of basic things that used to be standard many years ago. Namely headphone jack and micro-SD card slot missing.
I want a physical keyboard again. I cam't type on these damn tochscreen buttona. They're too small and i canct tell which keya i'm toiching.
Ever since smartphones exploded the expectation to respond IMMEDIATELY is out of control. Anyone who gets my number I warn them they'll be left on read for days if not weeks at a time. If it's important I'll respond but otherwise it's whenever I get time to decompress and respond. I've got a buddy who I love we respond to each other every other week mostly. We will even have calls in between. People really get entitled to others time and it's insane.
I know someone's gonna say it but no the entitlement wasn't even remotely as bad with the older phones. Smartphones began putting pressure to respond because it was easier and then they introduced the "seen" option followed by the "typing" option.
Google cutting off customization and generally being annoying and creepy. I know I can install some other OS on it, but at the same time I don't want to deal with Google's "play protect" thing.
Google ~~cutting off customization and generally being annoying and creepy. I know I can install some other OS on it, but at the same time I don't want to deal with Google's "play protect" thing.~~
yes
The fact that I have to pay money for it. This thing should be paying me. Actually, everything should be. You there, reading this, fucking $50, now.
Other than that? It doesn't have a front-facing bottom speaker. Basically everything else is perfect.
A rare Lemmy thread that has more comments than kicks.
Stupid large dimensions, it simply doesn't fit in pockets anymore
The hardware fuse samsung put in that flips when you try to change roms and can never be replaced. Wtf kinda world are we living in :/.
Lots of people covered other things I dislike more, so I'll say the curved screen at edges. I liked it flat better. It also makes it so much harder to install the screen protector.
The bloatware. And custom Roms being dead for all except Pixel
The fact that it's got a dedicated hardware button that is locked to something useless/arbitrary (bixby...)
I don't own it like my computer, i'm forced to use the OS that google put, and i don't even have root access to it
The undocumented proprietary SoC and Modem. I want complete bit register level documentation of every piece of silicon used.
Battery life
Keeping too many things running in the background, making things laggy. (I do close out apps when I'm done using them, and I solve laggy times with the Optimize widget. I just wish it would automatically optimize)
Context: I have an iPhone 14 and I drive a 2012 Fit. The Fit first gen came with a USB port that connects to the stereo.
When I connect my phone to the stereo in my car, 4/5 times the iPhone will launch the Music app, and play the first track in my library. That’s been true for quite some time (since iPhone 7 at least.) I listen to podcasts on a non-Apple app, and I listen at 1.5x speed. Since the iPhone 12, when I disconnect the phone from the car or turn the car off, there’s a 9/10 chance Music will start playing, at 1.5x speed. This clearly has something to do with Core Audio and the old dock connection system in iOS, and it will almost certainly not be addressed because it’s only going to affect older cars that don’t have 3rd party CarPlay stereos installed, and Apple only cares about CarPlay now.
I just want micro SD and removable batteries again.
The camera bump.
Receiving calls and texts from people.
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