My Fairphone 3 still has a removable battery. I replaced the battery myself last year. It took me 10 seconds once it arrived.
deleted by creator
I wish it could run iOS, I would switch in a heartbeat…
All Fairphones, not just the 3, of course.
Awesome! Now plug in a set of wired headphones without using a dongle. Oh, wait…
I could do that, what’s the problem ?
You’re right, the Fairphone 3 still had it. Fairphone 4 and 5 don’t.
Fairphone 3 still has the headphone jack, it was removed with Fairphone 4. Still worth it because you can swap out any component with a single screw driver within minutes and you get years of updates. Also while not perfect, they make an effort to source their materials as ethically as possible and pay the factory workers a living wage.
You make it sound like they had to remove the headphone jack to have the other stuff. They didn’t. They just wanted to push users to buy their very not environmentally friendly wireless headphones/earbuds.
Oh I’m not saying they had to do it. It sucks that they did. But their phones are still good.
As a f*irphone user, I feel so perplexed about this. On one hand, they do all these awesome things like unlocking the bootloader, repairability, opensourcing the schematics, etc. But on the other, they do this predatory garbage to get you to buy their shitty headphones. Just goes to show that companies are never your friends, not even “ethical” ones.
You really still use wired headphones? I can’t remember the last time I used mine. My phone and laptop still have the jack but I hate them. Catch on everything, having to keep the device by me at all times (which I don’t always have pockets for), God forbid I forget I have em in and go to move around, get em yanked out of my ears or send the phone flying. I mean I get it if the wireless ones die, but even then, I’d rather wait for them to charge.
Catch on everything, having to keep the device by me at all times (which I don’t always have pockets for), God forbid I forget I have em in and go to move around, get em yanked out of my ears or send the phone flying.
You’d be perfect for an infomercial.
I’d rather wait for them to charge
Godd luck doing that when the battery can no longer hold a charge.
I was very resistant to getting a smartphone. I think my first Android was the blackberry q20. then a Samsung A10? I resisted touchscreens. I wanted physical ports and memory expansion and buttons.
and while I still hate touchscreens, I learned to like Bluetooth headphones. specifically, the Anker a3212.
maybe you would like them, too.
I also previously really liked the besign sh03 headphones, and I’m now lusting after the Sony wi-1000xm2
I don’t “dislike” bluetooth headphones. They certainly are more convenient and I used them for things like going to the gym, commuting, vacuuming, etc. The problem is when that’s your only option for no good reason. There’s absolutely no excuse for omitting the headphone jack. Strange Parts on YT even added it to an iPhone that didn’t have it and it works just fine so no, it’s not a space problem and it would also not prevent the phone from being water resistant.
I like my Sony WF-1000XM4s but they don’t sound as balanced as my Moondrop Aria or AKG K361 and they certainly aren’t as durable.
i have not been able to justify any true wireless headphones at all. three loose parts, three batteries, so many failure points. it’s like the problem you’re explaining on steroids.
For walking (especially in winter) and going to the gym, they’re very practical. But yeah, you can’t get too attached. My earbuds in particular have a design flaw and Sony’s replaced them 4 times already.
You’re missing the point. It’s not about whether you like to use wired headphones or not, it’s about giving the user the choice to use them or not. Wired headphones are more sustainable, because they require less components, and don’t have batteries that degrade over time (and require slave labour to produce). So a company that brands itself as sustainable and ethical should absolutely include a headphone jack.
And some of us just want to plug it in and not worry about it. If you want me to fully support wireless then I need a protocol that doesn’t randomly skip and robot.
Also that doesn’t sound like crap on calls and supports simultaneous bidirectional audio.
I remember when my mom had a phone with a removable battery, she would drop it a lot and it would separate into a gazillion components but it wouldn’t break. I miss the days
I feel like the parts separating had a lot to do with saving the phone as a whole. It must be absorbing and dissipating some of that energy from the fall rather than all that energy being directed into the phone when it stays together.
I remember my old phones would fly apart from a fall but they’d never suffer any meaningful damage.
Also the phones were all plastic, soft and bouncy.
Compare that to a new glass box with a metal frame
Yeah, I think that combined with the explodey factor really saved a lot of my mom’s phones back in the day. In the absolute worst case scenario, there’d maybe be a bit of the corner gouged out if she dropped it on the road or something, but that kind of damage doesn’t spread and you don’t end up with glass shards in your finger if you try to use the phone anyway. Now I’ve gotta practically wrap the thing in bubble wrap to keep it working if it drops
Similar to crumple zones on a car, but it can be put back together.
As far as I understand, Europe will push for removable batteries by 2027.. So we might actually get back to those glory days.
Might is the key word. I honestly doubt it will be like in the old days where you just pop the lid and put a new one. EU requires replaceable battery by the end user but it doesn’t state how simply that can be done. Am expecting to see something like few screws at the bottom of the phone and stuff like that. But even that will be awesome.
People misunderstand this rule.
It’s not about popping batteries out, but instead about making them more easily replaceable (so no gluing them in place kinda thing)
But even then it only applies if the battery degrades by more than a certain amount over the course of 2 years. If it doesn’t, or if it’s over a certain capacity, they don’t need to do anything different.
Yeah, the spirit of the idea is much better than it’s implementation
Water resistance.
I used to have a water resistant Samsung Galaxy with a removable battery. The just put a seal on the battery cover.
Bull. If you can get current in through the waterproof Type-C port, you can have a battery with a waterproof housing send current through some terminals.
Usb c ports can detect a short and shut off to avoid damage. Batteries can’t do this and that’s why they are sealed into the phone.
Ok, then add that circuitry to the battery package.
Ok. Then the phone is bigger and more expensive once you add that.
I use the Samsung Galaxy S22 ultra. It’s already huge. Make it huger! More bigger! More money! CAPITALISM INTENSIFIES!
That’s what they want you to believe
I just don’t get this. I’ve had to get new phones twice now because the battery life got bad enough that my phone wouldn’t last even a single day on a charge, but I’ve never even gotten close to dropping my phone in water. Are people that clumsy that they loosely hold their phone when they’re in the bathroom or on a boat? It’s the same with dropping it in general - I’ve dropped a phone twice since getting my first smartphone in 2010, and both times it was luckily onto carpet. Yeah, survivability is nice, but it’s trumped by everyday usability.
Integrating the battery saves a small amount of space and weight. That makes the phone very slightly thinner and lighter, which is what most people seem to prefer. Same with not having expandable memory. IMO it’s a bad tradeoff, but I still miss physical keyboards.
You could plug one into the USBC port.
Yeah, but that’s not neatly as portable as the old Crackberries that had slide-out keyboards.
Oh I feel you. I loved them too. The only reason why I had to switch (back when a physical keyboard was still kind of an option) was because I started to type in cyrillic too, and - especially as a newbie who isn’t familiar with the keyboard’s layout - a digital one was much easier to use. But I still hate that feeling of typing on my screen.
Am not convinced there are many who honestly enjoy typing on screen. It’s never great, just passable.
Definitely. I think the only people that like them are the people designing the phones, because they don’t have to worry about smaller/lighter/more durable keyboards.
I had to give up my final phone with a physical keyboard because some of the keys stopped working, and there was no way to get an identical replacement anymore.
I so wanted Blackberry Key3 to come out and was holding out for that one, then they canceled their phone production entirely. Old Blackberry Passport was such a good design for my use case. Sadly outdated software meant I was unable to use it as my daily driver.
The stupid part is that they will buy phone cause it’s 0.1mm thinner and then slap on 3mm phone case on top.
Don’t think anyone has actually bought a phone for the thinness since like, 2016, but also a case isn’t a decision of thinness. The people who use their phones without a case continue to do so because they like the look and feel, and those who use a case for protection will want it regardless of whether the phone is 5mm thicker.
I’ve got an Otterbox Defender on my phone. It’s the only reason my phone is still operational.
I still want a user-replaceable battery though.
I never met anyone that said they wanted a thinner lighter phone.
I’ve met tons of people that would take a half inch thick brick of a phone if it came with an equally big battery that could last days between charges.
Go on Amazon and search for a “outdoors phone”. I have one that is about that size and weighs a lot, but I can go a week between charges easily. I can play games with my headphones for 8 hours straight without needing to charge.
But … The battery is not replaceable.
I want a thinner and lighter phone!
But you haven’t met me.
That’s genuinely one of the things people look for; iPhones are incredibly dense designs, in a very sleek, smooth, light package, and people love them. A very basic phone case and a screen saver adds nearly half the OE thickness of the phone to the package, and look how many people forgo those, even on a phone that’s $1500. If I added that much thickness to a phone that started out at .5" thick, it would end up feeling like I was carrying a brick on my pocket all the time.
I would still take the brick with replaceable battery though.
apple idiots buy whatever apple tells them to because they care more about the artificial status symbol of having the latest apple logo’d bullshit than they care about having a good or decent product.
Yeah, no. I’m an Android user, and have been for about a decade, but Apple makes good products. I think that Apple is overpriced, I don’t like their walled garden, but they’re still good. My wife had an iPhone 8 up until this year, and I’d gone through multiple Samsung and other phones in the same time period that all died due to hardware failures.
I wasnt saying you were, I was saying in general.
Samsungs phones fell off a cliff after the 9, imho. I would never buy another samsung.
Apple artificially destroying batteries to make you buy more phones, sooner, should have been the nail in the coffin of that company if people actually cared about the products and not the artificial status symbol.
It didn’t have a removable battery, but I used to use an older Asus Zenfone 3 ZE552KL that really kicked arse.
It had cards slots, a headphone jack, a built in radio that used wired headphones for signal, and the damned thing was as reasonably waterproof as I could imagine a smartphone to be. It’s camera was pretty great for the price, too.
Well, one day it fell very hard on a sharp rock, and the screen shattered. The crack made a hole a few milimeteres deep, and it was about a centimetre wide. It might not sound like much, but the crack in the screen was very much there. My happy arse managed to then have it fall out of my pocket and right into the flush of a high-powered toilet.
I left it to dry for one day, and it worked almost like new again. It still powers up today, but the since security updates stopped years ago, i don’t use it anymore. IIRC, it wasn’t too expensive, but I forget if there was a sale going on at the time.
I hope I can find another phone like that around that general price point one day. I can dream haha.
What the fuck is a high powered toilet? I want one of those!
for what? high powered diarrhea?
i think he means those like commercial/hospital/doctor office toilets that, when they autoflush and you are still on the seat, feel like you are going to have your insides sucked out by the full concentrated force of a galactic core black hole.
deleted by creator
I use an
HTCTCL vive. I can text, place phone calls, and barely take a picture, but god damn it I can replace the battery.That’s actually making a comeback because the EU got pissed.
My phone’s brand new and it has a removable battery, not even in the EU
I think it is because the EU listened to the people. This is what you get when elected representatives are not bankrolled by big business, and are allowed to enact legislation that doesn’t only benefit one side.
This is what you get when elected representatives are not bankrolled
The car lobby in the eu: Am I a joke to you?
yet cars in the EU still have higher standards, so where does that leave us?
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
The EU has politicians that manage to legislate against the interests of gigantic tech corporations because European tech corporations are far smaller, and thus have much less leverage. Even if the US political system was significantly less corrupt, they’d probably still have issues to legislate against them.
Having worked in the industry at that time, there were 2 main reasons they did it like that
- batteries were quite unreliable and failed often
- mfgrs couldn’t afford to have one year warranties and send out field replacement units for a battery
And the reasons they stopped doing it…
- batteries got better
- battery contact failure was higher than battery failure.
- replaceable batteries compromise waterproofing
I think they should still be replacible, but they should have better connectors that are sealed off from the rest of the device. It costs a tiny bit more to do that engineering though.
battery contact failure was higher than battery failure.
quite a feat, only doable if you try to make it fail
replaceable batteries compromise waterproofing
this is in no way true, and is a bold face industry lie. There is no shortage of water PROOF and not just resistant electronic equipment that feature replaceable batteries.
the reason replaceable batteries were removed is entirely due to planned obsolescence.
Look dude, I made my position clear. Just speaking what I’ve seen in the industry while repairing phones.
If you don’t want to believe contacts are a point of failure, I’m not sure what to tell you.
the most common failure on a Bosh SPS drill is the actuator arm for the pounding motion, and this is commonly shared among several power tool brands with SPS drills.
you could make the argument that these parts just fail more often, and if you go by what broke, that would make you think it’s a reasonable conclusion.
Until I tell you that said actuator arm is made of injection mold plastic and all other parts of this assembly are made of steel. So in reality, this part that just happens to break more often is doing so because it was meant to, we are more than capable of creating contact terminals that don’t break as easily
It has more to do with size than anything. A waterproof phone with a removable battery is going to be bulkier.
not really, the phones we have are basically all water-resistant, so they definitely aren’t waterproof (makes you wonder just why this argument is repeated so much)
and it doesn’t require something to be bulkier to make it waterproof, unless you are deep sea diving, but I think at the point where you require over $100,000 in gear to reach said point, I don’t think a deep sea diving case is out of the budget.
case n’ point, watches
mfgrs
Muthafuggrs? Or what’s that supposed to be?
Basically. Manufacturers
Planned obsolescence
It wasn’t all that useful.
Instead of the battery dying and you throwing your phone away, it just happened that the battery died, and you searched for a compatible one, that either didn’t exist or cost 70% of the price of a new phone, so you threw your phone away.
Now, if you want to talk about standard battery sizes, I’m listening.
It was extremely useful when it was more common than non-replaceable batteries. Most of the time, you could find a better battery than the stock one at a cheaper price.
As someone who frequently changed their phone batteries and bought spares you are talking out your whole ass about their lack of availability and price, you just made up some shit then justified your argument with your made up shit.
The craziest part to me is that it wasn’t until they started forcing them to be stuck inside phones all the time that they started exploding. And yet the FTC still doesn’t give a shit
I mean it’s not that crazy. If they’re removable, you need to design the batteries themselves to be a bit more rugged and harder to puncture.
I.e. cladding the cells in a relatively thick metal casing rather than a thin pouch
Take away user choice, use really bad excuses like water proofing and space saving, and you can be sure consumers will iteratively buy more frequently and spend more for cloud services.
Bye battery Bye bye headphone jack Bye bye user expandable storage.
Capitalism has steered us to this as the preferable product.
So you’re telling me that capitalism works, and that it’s working as intended.
I agree that this is a result of capitalism. But I would surmise that this is exactly the standard by which capitalism is based. Reduce complexity, reduce operating costs. That generally means that whatever you’re making is going to be generic with no customizability and no ability to be repaired or changed by the end user. Complete vertical integration with optimizations in productivity, materials cost, and other operating expenses, all while charging “as much as the market will bear”
Thank you for defining capitalism.
It really sucks that they charge so much money for the storage difference. Why are the pricing tiers based on the storage? It’s so strange.
Anyways, I recall having a lot of issues with external storage in the past. Like Android just didn’t integrate that shit properly. It was kinda painful having the phone data and photos in separate places. Don’t remember specifics, I just know I constantly wished they were a single location.
It’s fine now, external storage. Been that way for 5 years or so. Works as any computer does.
I ended up buying a Motorola razr because at least the fucking thing fits in my pocket for once. That’s honestly the biggest tangible benefit I’ve gotten out of a phone purchase in a while.
Each iteration of phone seems more like something I don’t want to even be involved with. Maybe I’ll just buy a light phone next time.
I remember when I could do everything with my phone using a single hand. I never grabbed my phone with two hands. Now I need two hands much more than before.
I don’t know why phablets are a thing. Phones are too big imo.
I had a Motorola g power from 2020? I think? That’s about the right size. I actually wish they could make a usable phone that’s about the size of the bottom half of this one I’m using right now, but it would take some UI innovation which nobody is interested in. It’s funny too because the bigger flagship phones are more expensive, but I’d never pay for that.
You might be interested in the unique looking designs on https://www.unihertz.com/ .
They’ve got some really tiny ones and some with physical keyboards even. I like the designs but dunno about their update commitment or hardware specs much.
This sounds almost perfect. I’m missing the option to install a custom ROM or as you said specs on support.
Installing custom ROMs on devices is still way too difficult. Recently tried to install divestOS on an old Oneplus phone and it is currently in brick hell. I followed the instructions. Unlocking is easy, rooting is still a massive PITA.
Thanks, these actually look really cool. I hadn’t heard of this before.
I blame Apple. They slowly got rid of features and still sold a shit ton of phones. This is obviously more profitable so other companies followed.
This is so the spyware can’t be disabled via battery removal
Also so that phones require more frequent replacement. Usually the battery goes first. It doesn’t hold a charge or undervolts and slows down the phone. They want you to buy a new phone every two years.
Usually the screen goes first after a drop. But that is also not easily repaired.
Yeah, but if you don’t drop it, the screen will last many years. Burn in hasn’t been a problem for a while.
On phone from 2013 I started to get burned pixels in around 2020-2021
I still won’t buy a phone without a microSD slot.
GET OFF MY LAWN!
What phones even still do? Sonys? Low end Samsungs? Fairphone?
My Xperia 1 V has one, but it shares the same space with the 2nd sim card slot, which I use.
Right now running a Samsung Galaxy A53.
Also using the A53. It’s certainly not the snappiest phone, but damn it, it holds my entire music library and all the movies I could want. Slapped a 512gb microsd card into this bad boy.
There are 2TB cards now. O_O
Moto G Pure from 2021 doesn’t have much but it’s got an SD card slot and a headphone jack.
My Motorola does
Crazy how every time someone asks what brand even supports some previously-normal feature, the answer is always Motorola. Headphone jack, FM radio, SD card, stylus…
They have been surprisingly good devices in past few years. No nonsense software, pretty good hardware for very acceptable price and like you said none of the good things missing.
Their cameras are always garbage, but other than that I’ve been always buying them since the Nexus line went dead because they’re always the best for the least amount of money.
If I’m expected to buy a new phone every two years my working thesis was that I’ll pay very little for it. A lot of their phones are pretty decent for like $50-$150.
I’ll admit I caved a bit and bought a Motorola razr last Christmas though. It’s much more like the phones I usually don’t buy: no headphone jack, no microsd slot, a bit expensive, etc… But I wanted a phone that would actually fit in my pants comfortably for once.
Yeah, cameras are not usually comparable to high end stuff, but they are good enough for me. For my use case camera is just and after-thought. A good convenience to have at hand, but not a necessary one, especially not necessary to have 6 of the damn thing.
I miss the Nexus series because it kinda had the best of all worlds, but I’m in your camp where the camera is basically an afterthought.
I took more pictures of like…wiring inside a wall than anything in the last couple of years. Some of that is probably related to the cameras on my phones being underwhelming, but also I just haven’t been that interested in photography overall as I’m aging. I’d rather just live the experience rather than taking pictures or videos of it.
Why
28 net downvotes so far for asking “why”. I think Lemmy is becoming more toxic than Reddit was.
Because the march of time terrifies them.
If demanding better features means you’re old, then fuck being young.
From the average user’s perspective, there is no real need.
Back in the day your 0.2 megapixel camera would take up a lot of space. That’s not the case anymore, especially with cloud storage and being able to just plug your phone into a computer and take the files off it that way.
Huh, buddy, I have some news for you, current cameras have evolved too which means that pics and especially videos take a lot of storage today too… (Not to mention that app resolution has also grown up which means they are heavier too).
If you think that the same proportion of storage is taken between the two. Then I don’t know what to say to you.
That’s the ultimate irony of being young now - satisfied with awful tech experiences. Watching videos on a tiny screen and listening to music on earbuds or even worse, a cell phone speaker.
I recently saw an Amazon review where someone couldn’t believe how much better full size headphones were than their apple airpods. A whole review blathering about why a speaker 25x larger sounded better. “Never imagined such a difference!!!” Funny af
And the tech companies absolutely know this.
Because they want more storage? I honestly don’t understand even asking the question lol
Storage for what though? That’s why I asked. My device storage is 256 and I’ve only used 100, that’s with 700 songs downloaded. I’m curious what you need a ton of storage for.
Because having the option of using a micro SD can provide additional storage that is significantly less expensive than buying a phone with larger storage capacity.
Pics of yo momma.
“If I dont have a problem that means NOBODY will EVER have that problem”
More like asking for insight to understand.
Why are you so angry?
Are you dumb? If you don’t want that many storage space doesn’t mean others don’t want it?
I’ve about 2,000 and counting FLAC files on my micro SD card for high quality audio. Many from my CD collection, and a nice amount obtained through other means. I’m already at 90 gigs used in my 256 gig card.
I’ll be getting a new phone at the end of the year, and to transfer all that music (plus my commissioned art collection) all I’d have to do it just pop the card into the new phone.
No wrestling with cloud storage subscriptions or having to worry about my digital stuff being in somebody else’s hands. Just keep it on a tiny card smaller than my fingernail and back it up periodically to my desktop and my laptop. Best part is that I don’t even need any adapters to use headphones, as Motorola phones still have headphone jacks.
There’s people with downloaded movies and shows they like having local access to without any streaming woes, folks who take tons of photos and videos, etc. Having an SD card slot is one of the requirements I need for me to want to use a phone.
Also, I’ve got an entire music library and several movies I can just pop into my next phone
What a dumb question
Cheap, easily expandable expandable memory
I like that all of my media is on a removable card I can pop in any device I want and it doesn’t interfere with system files and apps. Makes the initial setup of a new device much easier, not to mention backing it up to my hard drive (
cp -r * /media/user/whatever_diskand I’m done).
