I went through my late teens as the initial smart phone boom was happening. I had a Motorola q that could get TV channels and had a keyboard. I had the enV that flipped open. And many androids/blackberries that I loved for their unique form factor and functionality.
I have never balked at spending money on a phone and for a long time i felt locked into generic flagship devices. With the debut of folding screens I feel like my appetite for unique devices rekindled. I think the power of android lies in its diversity of implementation.
So what features and functionalities would you choose over the next flagship release?
A fucking headphone jack
How did we end up in a world where this is a niche feature. 😭😭
I feel like I wouldn’t mind the lack of headphone jack so much if they just gave us another USB-C port on the bottom instead so you can charge and listen to music without a dongle.
I’ve really tried hard with these usb-c headphones / adapters and they just don’t work very well for me. They function mostly, but much more often come unplugged or slightly ajar.
Because the audio jack is the perfect connector for its purpose: It’s omnidirectional, the connection is as wide as it comes, and it locks the plug. The point for using a USB-C connector would be that it’s more versatile as you can use it for data transfer and power as well.
I miss having a notification LED. It used to be super common to have a “breathing” effect with a given color when an app had sent a notification.
So a Snapchat for example would show the breathing as yellow, etc. Super convenient to check for messages without going and grabbing the phone.
I think the galaxy s9 was the last that had that for the galaxy seriesm. When I got my S20U I handed my s8plus? The flagship to my mum. I still miss the notification light and it’s such a shame that we can’t even use the AMOLED screen to emulate the notification light.
Headset jack and let me replace my damn battery. Also default option to uninstall non-OEM apps
You’re in luck for the battery thing. It’s basically going to be mandatory in the EU which should hopefully help push change everywhere
I really hate that it is becoming mandatory. I would have preferred the option to either have a reasonably priced service to replace the battery or have it user replaceable. Forcing one solution just seems not very consumer friendly.
I don’t like the compromises they have to make to make them easily replaceable and I never had a battery fail on me.
Well, what we’ve seen this far is not making it mandatory just means that the battery will not be user-replaceable on 99% of devices, because that’s the most profitable way of doing it even if it results in a lot of extra waste
An open bootloader and a removable battery.
A microsd card slot and a headphone jack
I want a phone with an ultrasonic fingerprint reader, those are apparently a niche feature nowadays. The optical readers are terrible by comparison.
Honestly, headphone jacks are number 1.
Then also, FM radios. Most Android phones had them up until a few years ago, when Apple stopped shipping iphones with the feature, to push more people onto iTunes. I’m not a huge radio listener. But having the functionality during an emergency is invaluable. There was a really bad storm in my country a few years ago. Me and my family had no power and no internet for nearly a week. I would listen to my battery powered radio to get weather updates and to find out what the situation was like elsewhere. I don’t understand why that same functionality can’t be implemented in phones.
Besides that, removable batteries, sim card and SD card slots.
Did those radios ever actually work well? I tried to use it once in an old phone but reception was just terrible and would cut out constantly while walking outside.
E-Ink would be nice, whether integrated as part of an OLED/LCD screen, or a separate module that goes over the top.
Most of the things that I use my phone for don’t generally need the full colour display (text isn’t that expensive to display), and I wouldn’t mind trading that for vastly better battery life that you can get from e-ink, but having the option to use both is probably the best way to go.
An IR transceiver wouldn’t go poorly either. It’s not something I use much, but it was handy to have when I did, whether to send things around, or to just use my phone as a remote for televisions and things.
Larger, swappable battery. Squeeze for assistant
+1 for the battery. I turned off squeeze for assistant when I had it, lol. It kept going off by accident.
sideloading is a requirement for me and unlockable bootloader, otherwise, some things like an IR blaster, headphone jack, removable battery (thx EU), RGB notification LED, front facing speakers would make a “good” phone become “great”
Man, I forgot all about notification LEDs. My list is practically identical to yours.
Add on an SD slot and you and I have an identical list.
Niche or not, I want an SD card slot that actually fucking works. Like, yes, I can move files to it, but I can’t actually install apps to it. There’s the "move to SD, but that doesn’t matter when the app files are still stored on the internal storage.
IR emitter . Super handy wen you use old stuf like me like VHS dvd combo crt ect .
Oh I forgot, a clamshell folding phone but with only one screen and the other side is a physical keyboard, like a mini-laptop.
Nobody seems really know how to do a folding screen well, so why have the screen fold at all?
Like the sidekick? Motorola really knew how to make phones back then!
Today my wish is for an internal pihole instance running on the device.
I want a Galaxy Fold style phone, but the external screen is eInk. Have it set to always show the book I am reading. This will let me read in bite sized pieces.
That would be awesome, although it might make the camera experience worse since you usually use the camera folded. I saw a prototype for a phone a while back that had a regular screen on one side and e-ink on the other, I always thought that was cool.
