Don’t even get me started on the fact you can’t just replace a fucking battery anymore.
Gotta keep that IP68 rating!
There are ip68 seals for phone fames so you can open it to replace the battery
Pretty sure that has almost nothing to do with it.
There are other non-smartphone consumer electronics with IP68 and user replaceable batteries.
Samsung Galaxy XCover series have replacable batteries
Fairphones have them too.
With headphone jacks and SD card slots! I don’t need a streaming service to enjoy my 1TB of onboard media.
What do you mean you can’t? Sure, it takes an unnecessary amount of work, which is fucking stupid, but it is still absolutely doable at home (in most cases)
Most people literally do not have the technical knowledge for that.
Just because I own the tools and can do it myself misses the larger issue of this being anti-consumer in general.
Consumers shouldn’t need to have those kind of skills to change a battery.
We want to hot swap our batteries on the go, you goof.
you need to heat the phone up and mess about with the internals, even as a tech person i don’t want to risk fucking up my phone like that.
The irony of the meme being that the food critic ends up loving Remy’s ratatouille. Meaning Bluetooth would bring him to a simpler time like the ratatouille did in the movie
Back when he grew up just listening to music rather than being a bitter adult worrying about bitrates.
When I was a kid, I used to drop my CD rips down to a 32,000kHz sample rate to make the WAV files smaller, because I couldn’t figure out MP3s yet. Adult me is horrified by the notion. But back then, sounding good enough was acceptable.
I used to download AMVs using YT to MP4 sites, then play back the audio on my phone instead of just downloading the music.
TBF, downloading YT rips is a much smaller offense than what I did (in terms of reducing audio quality). That said, if YouTube existed when I was young, I probably would have done the same thing and then become as equally horrified as an adult.
Pretty much exactly that lol
this was my exact experience tbh. I hated the idea of Bluetooth headphones, I had tried some 5ish years ago and they were horrendous, even though they were a relatively high end pair. last year I said fuck it and got another high end pair, and I love them. ldac capable, so it’s 990kbs so I don’t have any complaints at all about the sound, and the probability is great and I don’t have to worry about charging them nearly as much as I assumed I would.
i feel like there was a time where wireless audio devices were just too expensive and too low battery to be worth it, but now we’re well past that point and i can buy a pair of true wireless earplugs with ANC for 40 bucks, and that’s pretty good!
really the only real complaint i have is that i do not see the point of “true wireless” when you could just have a wire between them and be able to add more battery capacity while also reducing the risk of them being lost.
Same goes for SD card readers! I don’t want to pay extra for storage I already have!
There’s barely even an excuse for it, as most of these phones have a dual SIM tray and one of those can be a dual SIM/SD slot. It’s just enshittification so they can upsell $25 of storage for a $200 model upgrade.
This. I have an s20FE which is one of the last samsungs to keep the microsd slot. I’m considering very carefully what I should get for my next phone and this is one of my most wanted features, besides 3.5mm aux.
Depending on carrier compatibility and where you live, the Sony Xperia 1 V/VI may be your best bet. I ended up going for an Asus phone, dropping the SD card slot.
Looks good, thanks!
My last phone purchase went something like this:
“What phones do you have with a headphone jack?”
“Uh, I don’t think any. Maybe one? I’d have to look.”
“I’ll take that one.”
“But we–”
“Only spec that matters is a headphone jack.”
“There’s bluetoo–”
“Headphone jack.”
Gotta look for either a budget or non-major brand phone. I went with an Asus phone for my last upgrade (previous was an LG V60). Sony Xperia and some of the Chinese ‘gaming’ phones also have them.
Yep a bottom of the barrel phone from a no-name brand will still have an audio jack…
But the fucking Pixel line doesn’t. Pixels are the only real non-dogshit phone if you want a secure OS.
Sometimes you have to choose between two important things.
Sometimes you have to choose between two important things.
i love losing my little tiny dongle with a fragile little cable that I need to take off my phone to charge and need to take off my headphones to use them on other devices ♥️
Yeah it sucks. Though the usb-c converters will actually work on anything with USB-C
I have the slightly bigger green adapter that does charge and 3.5 jack and it’s 32 bit/384khz. And the two tips are magnetic so you can split it. It sounds great with my IEMs
Right? This — and literally nothing but this — is what all the outrage is about. Still, none of my business; everyone can buy whatever phones they want.
Which one did you get? :)
An open box A12 for I think $40. Working fine for almost two years now.
let me use a goddamn headphone, Jack
Old man yells at radio waves.
I swear I can hear them yelling back.
Bluetooth is amazing, don’t get me wrong. But it doesn’t always work and it’s hard to figure out why something won’t connect. Plugging something works every time.
Plus most Bluetooth modes have horrendous latency, which is jarring when playing a mobile game.
BT LE audio should help in that regard. It also has some cool features like directly sending audio to individual ear buds rather than having to have one bud relay the audio to the other and “auracast” which allows multiple devices to listen to a single source.
The latency is even more noticeable when using a phone to make music, like using it as a virtual guitar amp.
not sure why you have that experience, the only issue i’ve had with bluetooth is not figuring out how to enable pairing mode on some device, which… that’s the device having a shit implementation, it’s like putting a headphone jack under what looks like a screw cover.
Until the jack takes a hit and you can’t repair it.
oh yeah cause its way easier to repair something that uses bluetooth after it takes a hit
That’s not what I said now is it?
yeah thats how stuff that’s implied works
Whats implied and obvious is that bluetooth less often gets messed up. Since there isn’t a flimsy connector sticking out.
Don’t get me wrong, I do prefer wired headphones at home and in the office, but I’m done with broken cables on the go.
If i really feel the need, a usb-c to 3.5 sits in my overears’ headphone case.
Also why would i imply that BT is easier to fix, that would just be fucking stupid.
Is that what you are?
For those who are looking, the Sony Xperia line has a number of phones with both an sd card slot and a headphone jack.
They discontinued the 5 while I was waiting for it -.- And “We continue to produce the old version” was missing the “and prolong the software support window”. I think I have to usb or bluetooth dongle with my next phone.
And 2 years of security updates.
They type of person who owns a set of wired headphones or earphones for over a decade doesn’t replace their phone every 2 years.
And these days you really shouldn’t try and keep a device on the internet without updates.
It’s why the fair phone got rightly trashed when they ditched the headphone jack. Battery powered ear buds were completely against their demographics
HMD make decent repairable phones with a headphone jack. They took the Nokia brand for a while but they’re now just HMD and they’re doing some cool modular stuff with cases too.
I need a new phone and I want to cry because it is seeming that the Pixel Pro with Graphene is the best I can do. New phones fucking suck, It’ not about “I need the MAXIMUM PRIVACY 90000” it’s “I want some control, I’m not buying a Samsung ever again due to the mountain of irremovable bloatware”
Not being allowed to uninstall facebook should be a crime.
I just bought an A34 for my mom. I was able to remove all the bloat directly from the launcher, except for some Galaxy apps. For the rest, I used ADB.
That actually just hides it iirc.
Happy cake day btw.
For real. Samsung’s sheer quantity of bloatware on every phone is ridiculous. It’s the primary reason I’m never buying from them again, aside from just plain old privacy concerns.
I have a Galaxy Note 9 from the days of yore and it’s beginning to show its age, I need to replace it before it completely shits the bed, but like, what am I supposed to replace it with?
I need a headphone jack, I need it to be powerful enough to run modest phone games to the tune of Arknights and similar, and I want to feel like I have a half decent amount of control over it (no apps I can’t remove within reason)
I too was disgruntled with samsung and chose a pixel and grapheneOS. It does not have a headphone jack but I can reluctantly live with that. It has been the best OS i have ever used and I didn’t even have to root it.
And no sdcard, which is a real pain in the ass for a lot of people, I think, it’s more of a problem, than just the headphone plug.
Very much so. That is indeed the worst part about the pixel.
Same same
Happy Motorola G 84 user here. The only ding is the camera isn’t the best but for the price this couldn’t be beat.
Frankly I think it’s a bit weird that phones have subsumed actual cameras existing, gettin’ old…
See, this might be ok if there were two of them. But now when the battery gets low you are required to stop listening.
I see your point but, isn’t this more cumbersome than wired earbuds/headphones?
Sure, but what’s the use case at this point anyway?
“My bluetooth headset ran out of battery and my phone ran out of battery and I want to listen to music.” How often does that really happen?
Bluetooth is less cumbersome than all of these choices, but for under a tenner you can solve all these drawbacks. Whack it in a pocket of your travel bag with your earbuds and away you go. I genuinely couldn’t even tell you the last time I saw somebody in real life with wired headphones. My bluetooth AKGs actually have a headphone socket, that I’ve used exactly twice. Once to watch an in flight movie on a 480p screen on the back of a headrest, and again to use them with my Switch since for some bonkers reason it didn’t support bluetooth headphones for ages, despite having a BT receiver on board. No idea where the cable is for them now. I doubt I’ll need it again.
I travel 8+ hours by train several times a week, and regularly go a day or two without access to power where I sleep. By all means, I’m not the average consumer, but the situation of “need to change while also wanting to use my headset” comes up often enough.
I genuinely couldn’t even tell you the last time I saw somebody in real life with wired headphones.
You haven’t seen me walking my dog daily then /shrug
Now that’s just perverse. 😳
Sell the problem, sell the solution. 😒
They are all utter shite, I got a pixel seven, and I tried three of these, even the €20 google one. All would randomly cut out, or crackle and pop if they so much were touched.
let me guess, you’re also an Arch user? 😏
I wish I had the gall to switch off windows 😞
Get some gall then!
Yesterday was the best day to switch but today is fine too!
You’re right! End of this month then!
The only thing stopping me is losing all my photos and music saved to hard drives, I worry about file compatibility.
Photo and music file types should be fully compatible.
I’d recommend though snagging an extra hard-drive to back up your files even if you don’t switch.
If you’ve got your files in only one location you have them in no locations.
File compatibility wouldn’t really be a problem, just make sure not to nuke any partition. If you’re using ntfs you might need to install the drivers, but it’s pretty straightforward
You can create a bootable USB stick (so-called “Live USB”, which is the same thing you can later use to install the OS). Then you can test file compatibility and whatever else you want, while booted into that, without committing to the install.
I’m in the middle of switching to Linux. I’m dual booting so I can still use Windows when I need to or run into issues. If you install something like Mint you’d be surprised how easy it is. Not only that, in a lot of circumstances it runs better than Windows because of all of the bloatware that comes with Windows. If you’re afraid to switch but have enough hard drive space I highly recommend dual booting to test the waters. These days I end up using Linux more than Windows.
Same spot here, switched two weeks ago, dual boot with windows but only use windows for one game that needs an external mod manager to work.
Its easy, it’s fun and it’s customisable. Loving it so far.
Once I installed Linux Mint on my home desktop, I’m pretty sure I never booted into windows again. It was only a few weeks before I made a copy of everything on that windows SSD then formatted it to ext4 to have some additional fast storage for editing stuff.
I find Linux Mint so much nicer to use than windows. It is one of the most full-featured distros yet it moves like lightning in comparison. You can feel the difference you get when decades of development are driven by the desire to make good software rather than 37 different battling priorities within one of the world’s largest corporations.
And being full-featured does not mean it is dumbed down. It is good for experienced users too. I’m a software engineer that works on embedded Linux systems. On my work laptop I’ve been running Mint for over a year and it works beautifully. It’s still Linux, the command line is still there, and you can customize whatever you want to.
So sick of Nintendo doing stuff like this. Releasing the GBA SP and requiring a dongle to use headphones? What if I need to charge during a session of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance? This will never catch on.
Sadly it’s more profitable to force users to buy more shit
That wasn’t even the reason for that change. There just plain wasn’t much room on the GBA SP for a headphone jack. People have modded them in aftermarket but every single one of the possible positions looks like crap and the GBA was never the pinnacle of audio hardware. In fact, the headphone jack made a triumphant return on every handheld Nintendo has released since the GBASP, including the GBA Micro.
(I am not saying there weren’t good bops on the GBA, most Pokemon tunes are incredible. Just that audio quality was never a priority for design on the GBA.)
It’s a real tragedy how basically nothing new these days comes with a headphone jack anymore.
It feels like phone reviewers only know 3 phone brands and half of them are Apple. Some great phones still have headphones jacks and expandable storage. I use a Sony Xperia 6.
There are definitely some out there, but it feels like you have to go hunting for them. My current phone is some lower end thing I found which had everything I wanted. Ulefone Power Armor 13. Absolutely massive battery, microsd slot, and of course a headphone jack. I was sick of all the thin phones that barely make it through a day before being at low battery, so I got the thickest smartphone I ever seen lol.
Absolutely massive battery
You call that massive?
Slaps my Armor 24onthrough the table That is massive.Also, 3.5mm jack, dual sim + SD card (not hybrid!), ultra strong light, the battery and MTK Engineer mode which also allows for band selection. I wrote too much here before, but in short, it lets me manually select frequency bands rather than leaving that on my device or carrier. The biggest example would be in one certain city where I can boost my network speed on Telekom (T-Mobile) network from 8Mbps all the way to 150Mbps.
I just wish it could do 5G :(
But it does have issues too. It can occasionally momentarily trigger 12V (when the USB-A connector is moved too much) with something that gets recognized as Qualcomm QC 2.0 (this is MTK) by my USB tester until it throws an overvoltage error (the phone), and PD sources will bug out USB data transfer until reboot.
So the best bet is just a regular dumb 5V adapter.Oh, and it won’t finish rebooting while still connected to a PD source. No worries, it just gets stuck and resumes immediately after the cable is disconnected.
But overall it’s fine.
22000mAh
Good lord, I already charge like once a week at 13200mAh. I also feel like my phone is about near the limit of fitting in my pocket, does that thing still fit in your pocket easily? Color me impressed if it does. I’ve never heard of the manual band selection before, but that sounds really cool!
Unsurprised it’s another Ulefone though, giant capacity devices seems to be their thing.
Yep, it does fit into a pocket.
BTW, your Power Armor 13 is also MTK based. Good chance you can get into the hidden menu by dialing
*#*#3646633#*#*(it opens automatically without clicking dial).
But be warned, some settings may not be safe to mess around with.About the band selection menu, it looks like this:
There’s a lot of things in MTK Engineer mode, and a lot of them should probably not be accessible for a good reason. Most manufacturers seem to block access to this. Oppo and Realme even seem to encrypt it so that it’s only accessible to service personnel.
Preview of the main menu:
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any documentation for this, and there’s many things I am too scared to click. Something could make illegal transmissions, others could be some non-resettable options, who knows. Yes, there is some factory reset resistant stuff I found. If there’s one, there can be more.
For example, the MTU value setting:
I’ve also seen a post from someone who ran some automatic full device test in a hidden menu on some Chinese phone, it turned out part of the modem test was dialing some number, 911 was the number, it turned out…
Anyway, one illegal thing some of these are/were able to do is change IMEI. The AT command tool here doesn’t work, but on some devices it does. And there’s also a command to change the IMEI.
I found this on XDA, it seems some devices possibly even simplified that process:
Anyway, there’s also something step above band selection, specific cell tower selection:
I didn’t find that particularly useful, but I did find out the cell tower range limit in a city seems to be 1km. Makes sense, you don’t want devices screaming at some distant overloaded tower when the city is full of them. Maybe they can even have lower latency that way, I don’t know. I don’t know how the timing works.Oh, it seems I can transmit garbage on WiFi channels:
But I also found a way to force VoLTE registration even though my carrier doesn’t provision this device. EngineerMode -> Misc feature config -> hVoLTE device mode -> hVoLTE (even when already selected).
I was actually able to make a phone call in 4G only this way. But it has to be done every time the phone is connected to the network.
You couldn’t pay me to use Sony (in fact thought they stopped making phones over a decade ago). Might be worse than Samsung
I have major beef with Samsung. I don’t really change my hardware often though and am out of the loop. What’s wrong with Sony?
Well I think it’s mostly a me thing but I just hit a point a few years ago that I seemed nothing I’d owned from Sony for a long time had been worth a damn. Most of their products are at a price point that you expect decent quality, better than I felt I’d been getting
And the other brands that have features like headphones jacks and sd card slots are increasingly not bringing those products to the US, like the new Xperia and Zenfone.
im so tired of crappy usb-c dongles that stop working if my phone moves at all and bluetooth earbuds with shit battery i might just get an sd card with massive storage and use my old nintendo ds as a music player
I just bought a €10 mp3 player off aliexpress.
I, unfortunately, switched to a phone without a headphone jack. I hope to be able to switch back in a few years when I need a new one.
