What is a nifty little feature modern gadgets have lost?
What is a nifty little feature modern gadgets have lost?
For me it’s the notification light you used to find on older phones, was particularly good to know if your phone was charged without picking it up
Headphone jack, bigger batteries, front facing speakers, SD card slot, IR blaster, magnetic field to let you use your credit cards at check out from your phone (MST) - THROUGH THE ACTUAL CARD READER SO THEY DIDN'T NEED GOOGLE/APPLE/SAMSUNG WALLET WHATEVER THE FUCK. I also agree that I miss the light too lol
That said, here's what I can't stand in newer phones: camera bumps. Unless you're a droid x or Nexus get that rocking on any flat service while I'm trying to type shit outta here. I don't give a shit about my cameras but if they need to be that fat and advanced, just make the rest of the phone that fat and give me the extra battery instead of making a tiny stovetop in the corner. Fuckin weird and dumb. Also camera cutouts in the screen, put that shit under the screen or set it next to a front facing speaker on the bezel. Also bezel-less phones, I know we're trying to fill our phones with screens but my fat palms don't care about that when I'm accidentally touching everything on the side while holding it
By far replaceable batteries. You used to be able to purchase physically larger and higher capacity batteries to get insane battery life, but because they would include a larger rear plastic for the phone it would still look normal. Now we have to waste space and lose efficiency with external power banks.
Physical buttons in cars for radio and environment settings.
There used to be a time when I could have my hand on the gear shifter and just reach out with my fingers to change radio stations or adjust the heat or a/c without needing to look down at all.
Now with modern touchscreens in cars, you can't do any of that. I have gotten used to playing with the radio via the steering wheel buttons, but anything else requires hunting around, looking for the correct spot to touch the screen.
And yet they say, "don't take your eyes off the road!"IR blaster for smartphones. I still have one on mine and I can use it for tons of stuff, not just as a TV remote.
I even worked for a company who made lots of IR based products (taps/faucets, accessibility stuff) and it was amazing how many people had to buy the dedicated remotes for these products for extra money.
When I asked them if their phone has an IR blaster, so they could just download a free app and use it instead. "I have an iPhone" was the most common answer.
Kinda surprised that no one has mentioned the FM tuner. For reasons I never really understood, a lot of companies continued to build the hardware into phones but then wall it off with firmware.
My first MP3 player had one, my TV had one, there were even watches and lots of other devices that had one. People still listen to radio, so why don't they give us a tuner?
Pretty much everything the Galaxy S5 had
- Notification LED
- IR blaster
- Replaceable battery
- Headphone jack
- Heart rate monitor
- SD card slot
I currently use a FP3 which has 4 out of the 6 features above, which I feel is the best we'll get right now.
Admittedly the Heart rate monitor is more of a gimmick nowadays, especially that it's standard and automatic on most smartwatches and sports watches. Back then when stuff like the Sony Ericsson LiveView and LG W100 watches were popular, they did not have heart rate sensing built in
Everything. We're down to barebones and marketing now focus solely on camera software updates or phone materials ("now with titanium!" How fucking sad is that?) And they are all selling the same phone.
Some of the most important loses...
Swappable batteries changed travel for me. Always having two extra charged batteries in my backpack, that you could swap top 100% in 20 seconds, made me ONLY use my phone as a free and completely useful tool without any planning or restrictions on my use. Otherwise, you can't take too many pictures or videos, stream music or video or make video calls too long or you might be fucked when you need phone, GPS, payment or to get a rideshare to where you're staying.
Audio jack similarly meant freedom. Bluetooth headphones out of battery, broken or one earbud lost? Have a pair of wired in the backpack always add backup. Also better audio quality through wired with DAC on certain models and less daily device load to charge/babysit
secondary screens LG V10 had a bar on top, they also had the T shaped dual screen phone and the secondary screen phone case. There was just creativity and attempts at innovation.
microSD expandable memory, again less and less available and this was about freedom - fuck your cloud storage add its data leaks, corruption and redaction. I own my data, you don't control it.
I forget which Samsung galaxy model it was, maybe S6, but it had a universal IR blaster built into the phone which was super convenient for controlling all of my devices. I did however often abuse the shit out of it by flipping the channels on bar tvs or turning off the stereo receiver and nobody was ever suspecting it was me on my phone. I guess that's probably why they removed it lol, but it was fun while it lasted.
A real keyboard and general tactile-oriented inputs. Touchscreens are okay as a supplement like in the DS or Samsung devices that have a pen, but touch-centered everything has never stopped being a frustrating user experience. Even worse is the way companies have embraced it for business use as well. Heavy industrial machinery should not come equipped with unintuitive little interfaces that are clearly an afterthought at best.
The other thing is the general desktop metaphors, and file/folder structure. The way that Android, and so many apps, hide the file system from the end user just leads to more confusion when the user needs to use a file manager to track down where those apps have actually stored data only to (maybe) find them in the most pointlessly obscure locations.
Tactile buttons, all my homies hate cap-sense
Rootable modable phones, with a 3.5mm headphone jack, SD card slot, and an ultrasonic fingerprint reader cherry on top. Maybe some heart rate monitor sprinkles if you are so inclined. My S10 that I still use checks all of the boxes minus root. It feels like I have a sundae with all the high quality toppings I could want... but no proper ice cream. And I want the whole custom sundae, which these days seems impossible to find.
Headphone jack.
My Sony Xperia 10iii still has that light as well as a heaphone jack, SD card slot that can be removed by hand (no ejector tool needed) and full waterproofing. These are literally all the features missing on newer phones. Plus it has a genuine 3 cameras: wide, ultrawide and telephoto - no fake "macro" BS here.
Best of all it's successor the Xperia 10v can be bought on the UK Sony site for just GBP299! Incredible price. But alas I don't live there but if one had a friend there you could have them order it send it to you via courier.
Simplicity.
iPhones are far too big and have too many huge cameras for me. Everything requires a subscription or some login to do anything. Applications and operating systems are updated at the whims of CEOs while the job of UX designers is de-prioritized. Software updates keep breaking established workflows. I can no longer rely on devices or apps to maintain a consistent experience from one year to the next. It's just been years and years and years of disappointment and stress as technology changes for the worse.
All this is pushing me towards a more unplugged lifestyle. Which is a bit ironic given how it adds more complexity with the need to own and travel with more things. A bag of five 'things' that always work regardless of network connection is better than a little tablet that could crash or die or be updated at any moment and having a significant impact on your lifestyle.
There's just no fucking zen anymore. I feel like I'm living inside a simulation built by the same people who brought us Windows 95.
I too miss the LED notification light. If you have an amoled display, check this out:
What's kinda crazy is we could reimplement the notification LED with blue OLED now just via software. Just no one has done it.
Edit: It's been done, but a quick Google search says it no longer works. I might get bored and write one.
Edit2: This one seems to be working fine for me.
In the gaming sector, nothing has adequately replicated the stylus used by the DS, 3DS, and Wii U. It was the best way to play a few signature games like Elite Beat Agents (now incarnated as Osu) and Trauma Center: Under the Knife. Touchscreens are just a bit too universal and resilient for us to go back to them.
Good keyboards on computers. At the office, everything are those extremely uncomfortable $5 dell keyboards. At a climbing gym or pool, the liability iPads that you sign forms on is using those really uncomfortable apple keyboards too.
I miss the better keyboards that we had back 25 years ago. Modern box jades bring some of that back for your own PC.
I'm sad that popup front cameras didn't catch on. I only remember 2 or 3 phones that had them. For me it's the perfect compromise - this way you can make an end to end screen without the need for a notch, and since I very rarely use the front camera, I wouldn't be too concerned about the durability of the popup mechanism. The only real downside I see is that it complicates waterproofing.
The Nexus One had so many features I miss:
Trackball for scrolling
Notification light built into the trackball with customizable colors depending on the app
Back plate came off, replaceable battery
Small and a one handed wonder, the trackball kept my fingers off the screen
It was a replacement for my jail broken iPhone OG, such a better interface for me than the iPhones and it had very basic multitasking when the other guys could only do one app at a time
Edit: Formatting
Oh yes the notification light was incredible. I had one on my Pixel 2 XL. I just switched phones like a week ago to a Nord N200 and it doesn't have one. Not too big of a deal though.
I wish phones still had IR blasters but those are long gone. It would be awesome to control my Edifier speakers with my phone as a remote control.
Edifier RC10E (Unofficial remote control for Edifier R1280DB speakers) https://f-droid.org/packages/ir.remote.edifier.rc10e/
Edit: Also how about a good camera? All mid range and low end phones today have like 3 or 4 mediocre cameras because it looks fancier then having 1 nice camera.
The ability to reach every part of the screen with the thumb on the hand holding it
I miss phone bodies being plastic. Sure, metal feels premium but you can't drop your phone without leaving a permanent mark on it. Not to mention how stupid the idea of having glass background is. These days it's hard to see a phone whose glass is not messed up.
To be honest, peak design for me was Samsung's Galaxy S2. I loved that device. Thin, very light, perfect size for my hands. I'd kill for something like that but upgraded to modern standards. I'd also love to see devices with physical keyboard. I waited for BB Key3 to come out when they decided to discontinue the line. Ended up with yet another Samsung device.
A built-in scripting language. The TI-83 line of calculators have an app programming language that requires you to side-load code from another computer, but they also have TI-BASIC, which allows you to write a wide variety of scripts right on the calculator itself. This should be standard on all 'smart' devices. It's so stupid to have gigahertz of computing power in your pocket and not be able to do anything without writing the app on another machine.
I know Termux for Android exists and that's a good start, but I'd like to see something baked right into the OS that has access to all my device's cool sensors and gizmos. The camera, the microphone, the aux port, the usb port, the accelerometer, the bluetooth antenna... all of those things should be exposed to the user. This would be a really good use case for 'visual' programming ala Scratch, since you could assemble a script right from a touch screen instead of having to plug in a keyboard.
My 2001 flip phone could schedule sms messages to be sent and it took smartphones a decade ish to add that feature.
I miss tether points. We have these super expensive, slippery devices and we have to stick something like a pop socket onto them to be able to get a good grip on them. I used to have these little dangly thumb loops that if I dropped my phone, it would just dangle there instead of slamming into the ground. It's very minor, but I don't understand why they don't have them anymore.
Durability, battery life, repairability.
Replaceable battery, micro SD card slots are hard to come by these days, too.
Physical buttons.
Aren't notification LEDs somewhat obsolete now that we have always on displays? One advantage could be that they are less power hungry than keeping the screen / touch panel alive all the time. But in theory one could just create a permanent "notification LED" with an always on display, then it's the same thing from a user's perspective.
My trusty old Psion Series 5 was an awesome pocket computer that would run for three weeks on two AA batteries!
It also had a large touch screen and a clever physical keyboard that was just large enough for ten-finger typing.
I used it for 15 years, it was amazing and no smartphone ever came close.
Snake, I spent way too much time on it.
For me the Galaxy Nexus was the peak of enthusiast phone joy. Notification LED was bright and colorful, replaceable battery (to be fair, this was necessary because battery life was so short), unlocked by default, slightly curved front glass made it a pleasure to use as a phone. I also liked the ceramic back of the Essential Phone. The back fingerprint sensors on most phone models were so much more practical than the in-screen options and provided a handy way to lower the notification tray. I miss the litltle touch navigation nubbin on my Droid Incredible, which was handy for scrolling around without touching the screen.
I also miss how open Android was; Google has been gradually cracking down on enthusiast use cases in the name of "security" like text backup no longer being possible for Play Store apps, email access locked down (requiring a security audit for apps to access GMail), scoped storage screwed up a lot of use cases as well.
I know most people here knock the always on display, but my Samsung has the option to only show if I tap the screen or a notification comes through. I also use the option that blinks a certain color light around the perimeter of the screen and/or the in screen camera so it effectively simulates that old led.
5.25 inch drive bays on computer cases.
For me it's this (the color coded notification LED on phones) and while on the topic of phones I used to have a xiaomi phone several years ago that had an infrared face unlock feature so you could use face unlock in complete darkness. Haven't had a phone with that before or after. It was awesome.
Actual keyboards, my Moto Droid was my favorite phone I've ever owned. Miss it so much. I'd give anything to have an updated version of it.
Graphic design with depth or shading.
Recent phone do not have notification light? I am still using my phone from 2019 and it has it.
Headphone Jack.
Privacy
Giving me annoying audible notifications that my battery is low. We moved to batteries that degrade when lower than ~40% and got rid of the notifications that let us know your battery is dead..
Ooh I'd have to say an IR blaster, before switching to an S23 Ultra, my Huawei P20 Pro had one and a notification light. Didn't realise how much I used the IR blaster until it was gone.
I also miss the little light
Everything apple and Samsung helped remove from phones to squeeze more pennies out of their customers. Headphone jack, micro SD card slot, ir blaster..... etc
Any phone with an OLED screen can emulate this
Of course the 3.5mm headphone jack, but also IR Blasters.
I don't really miss 3.5mm, neither do I miss SD card slots. I don't even miss replaceable batteries and all that stuff. But I do sincerely miss good devices with physical keyboards. Damn I wish Blackberry came back for a good flagship.
My current Xiaomi phone has an IR blaster, but what I miss is having an IR receiver as well, trying 100 random remotes to find which one works with your obscure TV/AC is such a pain when you used to be able to just clone one instead.
Rechargable bat-trees, the headphone jack, nugget shaped phones (ie. BlackBerry Bold much), and the damn hardware keyboard >:(((
Suddenly I feel very happy (and a little bit smug) about my 2 year old Sony Xperia which both a notification LED, headphone jack and micro SD card slot.
But a replacable battery is sorely lacking..
I think I'll go with the latest Fairphone when my current needs replacement, but I'm a bit worried about it's lack of water resistance
Nobody needs bazillion cameras, a range finder, laser focuses and shit that's needs to be in a professional camera hardware in a phone. You just need total of 2 cameras and a decent hardware. I don't want to pay for a extra N cameras in a phone.
Also what the fuck happened to changeable batteries. I had a Samsung note 4 and used that shit until 2019 when I broke it ( had some anger issues that year). Waterproof dust proof excuses can go have an intercourse with their phones. I used that phone in 6 different countries and all kind of weather nothing happened to it.
Free and easily added custom ringtones
IR led, useful to use your phone as a remote control for various non-connected hardware
Those tiny solar cells calculators used to have
Rewind! None of my devices have a rewind feature any more and it’s driving me crazy!
Being able to use my phone as a remote control for TV's that was so awesome. Could mess with TV's at bars and never had to look for the remote lol
Existing. I feel every gadget has either become a phone app or an integrated sensor inside the phone (while losing precision because of not being a dedicated device).
What modern gadgets? All that's left are cell phone tracking devices
I only miss the IR blaster. Headphone jack, replaceable batteries etc are gone for a good reason.
While the LED notification light was awesome, it is something that I don't really need. I also don't need a removal battery because my battery life has been extremely good and I'll replace my phone before the battery goes bad. I don't need wireless charging. My phone had that years ago but it's kind of a gimmick, especially when a phone can charge up in about an hour and a half from dead. I don't need a 3.5 mm headphone jack because I don't use wired headphones, I have Bluetooth headphones but they rarely get used.
If anything, this thread kind of shows how much people fail to get informed about their smartphone before they buy one.
Literally every single one of these features is available on the market. Most of those phones are actually the quality stuff, like the German produced Gigaset/Volla, or the Dutch (assembled?) Fairphone. But no, you have to go out of your way to get the bottom of the barrel Iphone and Samsung made in China.