What are some tech products that you want that you can't seem to find?
Stuff like a pretty case with slots for optical drives, a laptop with a shitton of ports and all-day battery life or anything else that seems to go against the trends.
This thread is for complaining about how you can't find it and (maybe) finding it thanks to someone else.
I want a Japanese ketai phone with android 10+, easily rootable, AND HAS A DAMN TOUCH CRUISER. They day Sharp decided to stop making flip phones with touch cruiser is the day innovation truly died.
Or an e-ink flip phone, that would be pretty cool.
A IP68 e-ink Linux phone with both wireless charging and induction charging (to charge other devices), no cameras at all, solar panel on the back, usb-4 and headphone jack, 1TB storage , 15'000 mAh battery, two separate WiFi cards (to allow simultaneous hotspot and client use), and finally a radio transiever for both short range comms and long range AM and FM radio.
Technically possible with current technology, but as far as I can tell, completely unavailable in the consumer market.
Price, size and weight are irrelevant for all usecasses of such a product, as far as I'm concerned.
I want physical media that is not sold on optical disks. Sell me content on SD cards for example.
Camera-less small phone with a keyboard and an IR blaster
Ahh, the olβ breaker breaker
Only $28.00 on Amazon!
A small android smartphone with good software support
Folding screen eReader....it would be extremely niche, but I want it
Recently heard about RePebble, so my complaining about smart watches may have to end
Holy shit. Thank you for bringing pebble to my attention.
No problem, have been on the search for a good replacement for a few years.... Ever since destroying mine on a door frame when carrying a heavy box
I miss my pebble time
How low-tech is still tech?
I want a device that can be armed and if moved without being disarmed (optional passcode) will set off an alarm.
This is both for my laptop when working in public spaces and for my cooler/food bag when camping.
They have these for bikes, I've not looked too far into it, but maybe that would work?
Knog does these for bikes.
Little retro games handheld with a clamshell oled display
Just wait for Anbernic Rg45XXV, which should be a few months away given the rate they put out devices.
The catch: it still uses H700 chipset
Is a truck tech? Fuck it I'm calling a pickup truck tech.
I just want a pickup the size of a 90s ford ranger that's a hybrid. Since I'm making it a unicorn, lets go 4wd
Lol, I'm gonna say no as I posted in a technology news community in response to news about Tesla trucks not being tech news just by virtue of being Tesla or musk related. OP was not happy.
I'd like that but full electric, minimum 500km in the "tank" I had an all electric vehicle and LOVED everything about it, except the range. Then eventually I needed a truck for my job (but I did cram my Kia Soul to the brim for the 3 years I had it.)
I'd buy a hybrid though, if that's what was available.
Diesel too?
Nah, I don't need diesel. Lets be honest at hybrid it'll do the job just fine as is.
Basically I want the kind of pickup truck that I can toss a few 2x4s in the back and go, doesn't have to be big, doesn't need a lot of hauling power. Which is the opposite of the way trucks are going nowadays, which are big as fuck and made to tow the fucking world with the shortest damn truck bed that I've watched people struggle to get a tv into because the bed is too short.
A phone that runs Linux, has decent battery life, and doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
I've got one, but does it have to sell outside the EU too?
The reason this doesn't work is because Android and iOS limit the crap out of app functionality to allow for battery optimization. On Linux, users (and apps) do whatever the crap they feel like (and that's a good thing, until you talk about battery).
Water bottle that auto seals and is easy to clean.
A media player that isn't just a modified android tablet in a box with an HDMI output. (And loaded with spyware). And doesn't require an always-on internet connection.
Pc with an asrock mobo
What about an Android tablet running a custom ROM without GApps flashed, and an adapter for HDMI? There's a handful of widely sold tablets that also have a decent development scene and are cheap second hand. Check XDA forums for various models before deciding which one to get
A Steam Deck with stock pricing in Mexico.
Fractal Design's Pop cases have a 5.25" bay. It's hidden behind a pop-off panel at the bottom, in the power supply basement.
I'll join the ranks asking for a perfect phone.
Mine would have:
Global Xperias (Xperia 1 VI [XQ-EC72]) fits most of this.
Payment with NFC without google play services.
Only thing I could figure out (except maybe looking into Chinese payments systems which... No. Just no) is Garmin Pay.
Once set up, works with the smartwatch and does not use the phone, or the internet, at all.
I know it's not exactly what you asked, but its what I managed to do. Garmin watches also work pretty great with Gadgetbridge :-)
but that depends on the vendor. highest chance to do it is with Monero, even considering that basically no one knows it
Excuse me, waitress... I'll have what SHE'S having.
I'd like to add some strength too. I don't give a shit about the latest AI fuzzy on any phone, but if it would please last at least a year without cracking the screen or the back that would be amazing. And a record for me. Doesn't have to be razor thin either. Just make it beefy.
Cheap large e-ink android screen. Doesn't need to do anything other than be a consistent, always on display with a long battery life.
They look neat, but way too powerful and expensive, and not big enough. I want a whiteboard size e-ink display with a processor like a potato for like <100 USD
As someone who's been wanting a boox tablet for a while I don't think they fit "cheap"
what's "large" and what's "cheap"?
Rootable Android (or Linux) based "mp3 player". Basically an iPod touch. No cell radio.
I'd really love to find a new radio for my car that: 1) can serve as a monitor for my back-up camera, and 2) isn't a fucking touch screen.
There are models that are one or the other, but I haven't found anything that's both. The closest I've found is a compromise - a touchscreen that also has a few tactile controls. But I don't want to have to rely on any touch screen when I'm driving. I simply don't feel compelled enough to spend $400+ for a frustrating half-measure.
My nissan rogue (2014-2016ish) has this
I settled on a SPH-10BT a few years ago. It didn't have backup camera support though IIRC there is a radar add-on, but don't know how available it is anymore.
It seems insane to me, especially with the prevalence of Apple/Android Auto, that no car company is willing to have the phone be the supplemental screen in the car.
That there's no built-in phone mounts in cars still bugs me. Put wireless charging on a spot on the dash, NFC/Bluetooth to get it to automatically snap into car mode. Don't have to develop an in-house UI that everyone hates and can focus on making a car.
Phones with smaller screens
I need an ecmascript library that demuxes mpeg when fed individual frames. Every lib just wants to take in a whole file or URL to a stream. I need to filter the websocket sending the data so I need to feed individual frames to the lib. I'm only finding commonjs libs that do this
As I'm getting more and more into keyboards, I've realised I dont want a laptop anymore.
I want a powerful phone (16GB RAM, 8-cores) that I can:
That is, I can come home from work, slide my phone into a USB-C dock and start typing away on my Linux desktop with my fancy keyboard
I haven't used a laptop for many years now, I mostly code from an android tablet, into a remote machine. You can find ones with great battery life and keyboards.
Donβt quote me on this but Iβm quite sure you can run Linux on Samsung phones with termux/prootdistro
Edit: I specifically mentioned Samsung because of their Dex mode but it seems plenty of other phones also allow video out via usb these days. I canβt say for sure they work well with Linux but I do know itβs doable on Samsung.
I remember the Ubuntu Touch had a feature like that that kinda worked, but they never fully commited to it.
As for doing it through Termux, I'm not convinced that X11 works terribly well in Android for it to reliably extend a display to another screen. I've never tried though, so I could be we way off
A high-quality laptop without any branding.
I'm currently using a 9-year-old, woefully underpowered laptop made by Xiaomi. Full aluminium unibody, and NO logo. Not printed on, not etched in, not glistening only in the right light. NO LOGO.
I'm not a billboard. I'm not responsible for your brand recognition. Ironically though, far more people have come up to me and asked "hey, what laptop is that" than ever would have cared if there was a logo on it.
It also just looks and feels fantastic, all-aluminium-no-logo just looks so sleek.
So yeah. I will not be upgrading until I find another laptop of the same build quality, with no logo. Tuxedo has that option for most of their laptops, but for some reason not for their only current full-aluminium body -.-
Oh, and don't come at me with stickers.
I'll extend that to every product as well. I hate branding specially in clothing.
Oh, and donβt come at me with stickers.
Well then. Maybe you could wrap your heart in duc-ta-a-ape! runs away sobbing
Fully agree with the sentiment, and at the same time I think it's a lost battle. Even more so with more niche tech like cameras (where one is usually invested into an ecosystem instead of having just one piece of gear that can be sold on its own 5 years in - like a laptop).
A proper non-Apple Macbook Air equivalent. Because imo for the average user that just browses the internet and does some light office work it seems perfect. And with that I mean:
Tbh i thought we would get it with Intels lunar lake processors, but so far no luck.
Good luck finding anything fanless without being SOC. Though it looks like a Framework would make you happy: https://frame.work/
Honestly this sounds like a Chromebook to me.
Haven't looked at Chromebooks in a while, but you are right that the use case would be similar.
However I was under the impression that they are mostly competing at a lower price point. So I assume you wouldn't find nice build quality or screens.
Beyond that I am not really familiar with how chromeOS stacks up nowadays or if it would be trivial to install Linux/windows on them. Especially if they still have EOL dates after which they aren't updated with software anymore.
A quick search tells me that Google seems to work on a laptop and plans to merge (?) android and chromeOS more.
So overall again products that share some aspects of what the MacBook Air makes attractive, but doesn't offer the full package.
Dell XPS 13 Snapdragon seems like it's trying to compete with the Air.
Sadly doesn't seem to be fanless, which imo is a really nice feature when you dont care about high performance. Not sure if in the real world you can find good deals on the snapdragon laptops, but list price is also quite high and that keyboard with touch function keys doesn't seem great either.
So in my book that's still no match for what a macbook air m1/2 offers, which by now are a few years old and can be found for decent prices. They might be aiming at the same market, but aren't equal.
3:2 sounds horrible. Whatβs the application when most videos are 16:9?
As someone else already answered it is of course not ideal for movie consumption, since it gives you black bars top/bottom, but for productivity it is really nice. Everything from writing, spreadsheets or reading on the Internet benefits from it. Reading long horizontal sentences isn't that comfortable and often times task bars at the top and/or bottom take away some extra space. So a typical 16:9 display ends up offering very little useful working space. The taller aspect ratio isn't a massive shift, but a nice quality of life improvement.
It also means that you have slightly more space for the keyboard or a larger track pad.
If you are ever in a retail shop that carries Microsoft 's surface laptops you could check them out, as they are one of the few laptops that use a 3:2 aspect ratio display.
A laptop with trackpad buttons
Lenovo is the only one I can find, and they're above the pad for the nub
Magnetic audio cable break-aways
A smaller phone with flagship-level cameras and a headphone jack. I know Iβll have to charge it more often or itβll be thicker. Iβm willing to make that trade-off.
And not a slimmer phone. Make it as thick as a wallet full of business cards. I donβt give a shit. I use my phone for reading text, listening to music, and taking pictures. Just make the fucking camera top of the line and let me use my good headphones. If itβs several millimeters thicker, so be it.
rip Asus Zenfone line :( It was almost exactly what you wanted.
Perhaps an Xperia 5 V? Depends on where you are, and just keep in mind no telephoto but it has a pixel-binned 2x (48mm) zoom :)
A Linux phone with colour e-ink screen and writing capabilities like the reMarkable.
I've realized that for a lot of things that a phone does, e-ink is too slow to refresh. Even web browsing becomes painful to navigate sometimes. Maybe a dual-screen approach would work with e-ink on one side and a regular screen on the other?
I'm reminded of something I saw recently where a guy had a mini old screen for typing, but an e-ink main screen. It was a DIY cyberdeck, and weird enough that I don't think it's useful for you or OP, but I figured you'd find it interesting to hear that your suggestion seems to be on the right track
Yeah, maybe, not a bad idea. I'd be happy to use my phone less, though. Call, messaging app, note taking, and maps is all I need. I can leave browsing for when on the PC.
A power efficient e-ink laptop.
A laptop with a colossal battery life, I don't care how chonky it is.
A smart watch that can do much more than the simple crap they do now. Larger is fine, maybe a smart bracer.
Multitools that are specifically designed for trades. It's not tech, I would just love to have a multitool with specific tools for welding.
Some kind of wrist device where I can copy a file from one electronic device and paste it onto another device with hand gestures.
A Clockwork uConsole device that's a bit more powerful and can use m.2. Those things are neat little kits, but they're alway always always sold out of the good version. I wouldn't mind a laptop in this format.
why not use a tablet you might ask? i love the handling of a solid, non-detachable keyboard.
I have a GPD laptop with a tiny screen, itβs good enough to run most games. I changed the no name NVMe to a Samsung and itβs way more reliable and faster. Also runs Linux now. Built in game controller works well for most games (shows up as Xbox controller or a mouse using a switch).
last i looked at them (some time ago now) they either:
i should probably have a look at their models again in the near future, thanks for reminding me. are you happy with yours (and willing to share which model you use)
Direct replacement for the wonderful Facebook PortalTV unit. Its digital pan and zoom tomorrow a speaker is excellent. It could start and end calls completely hands-free before meta killed the service to which voice control was tethered. It sits on top of the TV, it does its job, and does it well.
Now that it's abandonware by Facebook, I need something else before its hardware dies. I have 4 of these in the field and some of them are with remote geriatrics who have no tech support, and it has to work.
I'm gonna miss it.
My unicorn phone would be one that is both small enough to use with one hand (currently have a Zenfone 10 largely for this reason) and has a secondary camera lens that's a telephoto rather than an ultra ultra wide.
It bugs me that phones with a long lens are so comparatively rare, it's always just wide (verging on ultrawide) as default and when a second lens is added it's even wider again because people love distortions or taking photos in tiny rooms or something. Sometimes I just want to take a photo of something further away than a few metres and actually have it visible without zooming in, I'd even take a normal lens FoV as an improvement over ultrawide. Those phones that do have one tend to have it as a third lens and also tend to be huge, so get disqualified by the 'usable with one hand' criteria even before I reach the massively expensive part.
I'd also like an Instax back for the Hasselblad V series that was cheap enough that I could actually justify the cost of buying (say ~$200 AUD or less) though I will admit that's a pretty niche thing to be after.
I'd like some PC support for HDMI CEC
My use case is a bit niche, my PC is hooked up to my TV and AV receiver.
My tv, av receiver, and even certain game consoles all talk to each other well enough through CEC controls that I can do a lot from a single remote, and not even a fancy pants universal remote, just the one that came out of the box with my tv. It was a little mind-blowing when I realized I can more or less navigate the menus on my PS4 with my TV remote. The TV remote turns up the volume on the AV receiver, most of the inputs on the receiver, depending on what's hooked up to them, will come up on my TVs input menu, the TV will wake up the PlayStation when I go to that input, etc.
I'm aware that CEC is a bit of a mess with how different companies implement it, but personally I've been lucky and a lot of it has worked pretty much out of the box for me.
Mostly I just want the volume controls on my keyboard to control the volume on my AV receiver.
I recently got a pulse eight dongle that I think in theory will let me do that, but it's not exactly the most intuitive thing to configure.
A modern, power-efficient replacement motherboard for the Thinkpad X220/230
Would be absolutely fine if it were just a low-profile SBC that sat in the SATA compartment with some barebones connections out to the ports, keyboard, display, speakers, and battery. It can't be that crazy of a product. There's already million super-niche SBCs out there, literally the only hurdles would be interfacing with the proprietary keyboard (a solved problem) and the battery.
Google stopped making Chromecasts to push their stupid Google TV box, and secondhand ones are $150
So... That
So like, fuck walmart, but I believe their private label sells pretty much the exact same thing as the most recent chromecasts running android
A low power 17 inch or larger laptop in a sub $1K price point. I have big hands (and crap vision) and I use the fuck out of numpad, but i really dont need a gaming GPU or a higher end cpu in a laptop.
If you don't need much power, you could probably look for something used and get a good deal on a 17" laptop.
the battery thing is real. I basically can not find a laptop with weak/low power cpu and igpu, but a huge battery. I get that we can not do more than 99whr, but for weak stuff, I can not find anything above 50 practically.
well, if you carry around a bag anyways a battery bank could alleviate that
yes, but that is a separate investment
A phone with a 5-5.5" screen. I'd be fine with a midrange chipset and camera. The Zenfone 10 was the last one that even came closer but they would only support it for two years and locked the bootloader (and lied about the unlock service eventually coming back online).
A cheap ARM laptop.
Pinebooks have been sold out for ages, and then itβs a massive leap up to MNT Reform or Copilot+.
I just started watching eBay for used Pinebooks, but nothing has popped yet.
Edit: Actually, there are some decent options for Snapdragon 7/8 refurbs on Amazon. Mass market brands can be so hit or miss by model, so thisβll take some research, but it looks like there are 20-30 results to consider.
This is adjacent, but it's worth pointing out that framework has recently started selling risc-v motherboards for their laptops for adventurous folks.
A 3.5mm-to-Bluetooth adapter that can do simultaneous headphones + mic. I have a device with no Bluetooth, only a 3.5mm TRRS jack (headphones+mic). I want to connect it to a wireless Bluetooth headset but the only adapters I can find won't do both at the same time, only one or the other.
On top of that, it'd be nice for the Bluetooth spec to roll out a higher bitrate version of HFP, as it's common 16 kHz monaural configuration is awful when listening to multimedia while on video calls, like for remote watch parties or just listening to music or playing video games while hanging out on discord. I ended up just buying a USB to TRRS adapter with pass through Power Delivery in order to use my Android device with proper AV quality.
dick sucking robot
A device I'd really like to have would be something like a phone but would replace the need for having any cloud services. Imagine if it had a really large drive where you could just keep all your media, and if it had an API that's something along the lines of NextCloud where it could expose calendar, contacts, email, music streaming, photo gallery, video streaming, etc. that your other devices could connect to.
Since you carry your phone around everywhere anyways, there would no longer be any need to have cloud services because their whole raison d'etre is to act as a central server that allows you to sync data across different devices. If you just carry the server on you, that problem goes away entirely.
You could also have a dock with a backup drive where it would just automatically sync when you plug it in at the end of the day. This way if the drive died on it, you'd always have a backup ready that you could swap in.
Another neat thing you could do would be to have a dock in a shape of a laptop with a big screen, keyboard, maybe faster CPU, more RAM, a good video card. This way you wouldn't need a separate laptop, you could just plug your phone in the dock and voila.
This approach would result in way better privacy because all your data would always be on you as opposed to some server somewhere. It would also be way more reliable since you wouldn't have to worry about network connectivity. You'd still need some external services like a mail server, but these would just be endpoints you use for communication.
There are plenty of portable second screens for laptops now. But it seems weird you can't just hardwire a second laptop without having to resort to internet based screen sharing solutions.
if you're saying what i think you're saying you may be interested in something like a nexdock
Basically a laptop with no internals that acts as an external monitor, battery bank and peripherals for another device
some cheap all-in-ones i've worked on have hdmi in and out.
one of 'em i have here is an old atom celeron dell aio with 1600x900 native screen but on its hdmi input, it'll run at 1920x1080. and yea, running that instead of its true native res sucks about as bad as you think it would--but it is still 'usable'. the real sucky bit, though, is the pc has to be on in order to switch it to hdmi in.
a lenovo aio that went through here a couple years ago had to be rebooted to switch it from hdmi input mode (acting as a standalone monitor) back to pc.
A phone with the charging port on the upper side instead of the bottom. This makes using the phone easier when it is being charged. Also, recessed camera lenses. Why do they have to stick out? When placing the phone on a surface, the camera lens cover will get scratches over time. If the phone was just one milimeter thicker, the cameras on the back wouldn't stick out and one wouldn't need a phone case, that adds to thickness anyway. It also would be nice if phone manufacturors would still have smaller screen sizes (max. 6") in their portfolio, as it is inconvenient to carry a larger phone in a pocket.
Gimme a thicker phone for more battery life and thermal performance, and I'll slap a cover on anyway because I like my hardware to be able to last. But alas, thinner is better apparently, even if it comes with a horrendous bump
Almost everyone had their phones in cases before phones had camera bumps. Phones have camera bumps because they realized they might as well use the extra thickness for more camera hardware.
Right angle charging cord helps #1.
A phone with the charging port on the upper side instead of the bottom
Why don't you simply allow your phone to rotate 180Β° by sensor? Granted, the camera and speakers might be at odd positions but that's still closer to your goal right?
This is and was the current workaround. On my old phone I had to install an app for that because they decided that there is an up and down which didn't allow for a 180Β° rotation.
When held upside down the buttons on the side are misaligned to where the fingers and the thumb are placed. Thus, the volume up-and-down buttons are swapped, which is rather unintuitive.
Before a smartphone holder for my car was handed down to me (I never bothered to buy one for myself) I placed my phone inside the cup holder located at where the shifter is. When the phone needed to be charged, it was not possible to have the phone oriented in the "normal" direction, as the phone would have stood on the charging cable resulting in damaging of the cable. For that reason I made use of the app that allowed me to rotate the phone, so that the charging port would have been on the upper side.
A low power laptop with a massive battery that lasts a week.
A small portable pen plotter or printer that isn't thermal (thermal print fades)
My wife has a circuit machine thatβs super tiny, she can put a pen and use it as a plotter.
A standalone remote or phone app that connects to my car's entertainment system that can control the satellite radio without the need for a passenger to have to lean way forward to use the touchscreen all the time. I miss the days of screen controls next to the cup holders instead of everything going through the touch screen.
You can easily get a case with an optical drive slot if you just get an older case. You can fit an older case with more modern components just fine. My current PC case is from 2017 and has an optical drive slot (which is fitted with an optical driveβthough I'm afraid I've not used it in years...)
As for laptops with ports, they're out there but you may have to either get an older one or pay more money annoyingly. I wish it was standard for laptops to have ethernet ports. My modern, fairly mainstream trend-following laptop has all the other ports I need (USB obviously, HDMI, and 3.5mm headphone jack).
Toilet that posts updates to Facebook
Remember when MP3 players were a thing? Well I still listen to mp3 files, but I can't put them on my smartphone because manufacturers artificially reduce storage size on phones to force people to use cloud services, and the available mp3 players that accept microSD cards are remarkably bad in many ways. It makes me pessimistic about tech in general, there is no sense of humanism or building progress, that in the future the products will be easier or better. Based on current trends, it seems like in the future the tech will just be more exploitative and consumers are just captive at this point.
I have an iPod that I use for music and I love it. I could put Rockbox on it so I don't need iTunes, but I do really love the stock firmware.
Anyway, point is, my 2nd gen iPod mini has 128gb of microSD storage and is the best portable DAP I've ever owned.
Data cassettes using current LTO tech, but in standard compact cassette format
LTO cartridges are shaped so much more efficiently, for so many reasons, so why specifically compact cassette format?
Although I'm also just realising now that LTO is specifically optimized to be used linearly from start to finish (It's even in the name) and is pretty inefficient if you'd want to use it a bit, remove it and using reading it later.
It was more the size than the format, something that would be pocketable and consumer friendly.
A SBC with SATA ports, to use as a Plex server. I've only ever found one (the Zimaboard), but it's a bit pricey for something that I'd still have to find some way to house with an external HDD.
The ODROID-HC4 has two SATA ports. Alternatively, you can get one with an NVMe slot and stick a NVMe to SATA card in it that will likely get you four ports.
Ive heard some people use usbC connecting drive enclosures, could probably rig something up with the backplane from one of those, but yeah a finished product like that would be neat.
I think ive seen a mini-PC with a hotswap m.2 bay built in though?
Depends what you call tech. I've been looking for a salt nic vape (say 10 watts) in the 1 ohm range with a easily replaceable battery for the last year. Bonus points if it doesn't leak to hell and gone. Haven't had a whole lot of luck with that so far.
Pretty much any portable device with a standard type, user replaceable battery. God bless Ryobi and the other power tool companies for building weird but useful tools beyond power drills. All with replaceable batteries.
At one point I was looking for any type robust portable storage media that had reasonable storage capacity and good shelf life (2+ years), and was large enough to actually write on a label what was on it. So far the closest I've seen since 2005 have been the portable SSDs and the newish USB m.2 enclosures but that's still not quite what I'm looking for. Too large and non-standardized. Gave up on it several years ago and built a publicly accessible Nextcloud server. Yes I'm an old fart, dislike cloud storage and miss the floppy, Zip and Mini-Disk storage formats. I currently have a dozen mystery jump drives sitting on my desk in a 3d printed rack with only the vaguest clue whats on any of them. Most of them so small you can't even put a key tag on them. I hate it.
A reliable multi port (4 or more) USB-C charger that can output 65+ watts on all of its ports at the same time.
A reliable source for 100w USB-c 3.x PD cables that don't cost an arm and a leg. Anker makes good PD cables but tops out at USB 2.whatever.
Pretty sure more would come to mind if I sat and though about it for a while, but I've got to head to work now.
Thinking more about it, rather than getting something like a suorin edge, you'd be better off just getting a backup pod system of whatever type you already have/enjoy.
Pod devices are essentially just a battery in a hard case as it is. To go a more hot-swappable method than they already are would involve compromises you might not have considered.
Suorin have some user-replacable battery models
A phone with current hardware but without a camera notch in the screen. I absolutely hate the notch, it annoys me on a deep level that I can't get over.
I have a nothing phone 2a and it's just a circle on the screen, standalone. Idk if that's much better but it's smaller and not connected to the top.
there are multiple phones without camera notches, the sony ones with just a thicker top bezel, the redmagic's with an under-display one and some of the older ones with popup cameras
I'd like a way to disable all the various way too bright indicator lights.
Electrical tape
The edhesive eventually melts down and becomes a sticky mess. Expidided by heat.
there are sticker packs for that, called "light stickers" or whatever
They put the lights behind ports, controls, vents etc that you can't tape over. And indicator light is helpful I just dont need to read a book with it.
Sometimes spraypaint or model paint works but not suitable to every application.
Something like this ?
If you're wanting a mirrored classic numpad with the bigger enter/plus I am surprised it seems like an unexplored niche of custom keyboard stuff. Can't find any atm.
Could probably grab a numpad kit like this and mount the everything on the bottom of the PCB, but you'd need to do some soldering. On the other hand, that kind of kit is generally recommended as a first soldering project.
The phone is a moto hyper one. 4 or 5 years old, I fear the day i need to switch. Technically it has two sim cards slots. More precisely: one sim card slot and one slot that can be used either for sim or SD card. Since sd card is non-negotiable for me, it means one usable sim.
Audio jack yes, but not replaceable battery.
I haven't tried vertical mouse. Maybe I ought...
No luck with the imgur link :( I'll try again later
