Next will be memory. They will say everything you meed should be stored online for a subscription fee.
Microsoft is already trying hard. My poor mom did not notice all her files are on OneDrive. Now she has two laptops with everything remote on OneDrive. It’s has some advantages, but it’s annoying in so many more ways.
There’s a setting in Onedrive to keep a copy of everything on the device. It will still get stored in the cloud too, but it means that everything will be available if the internet goes down.
I fell victim to that :(
Drake in the first picture: marketing.
Drake in the second picture: surprise, we signed you up without asking. You’re welcome.
It’s not annoying at all. It’s peace of mind. People are just not used to it
Nah, fuck off. The cloud is a place you don’t have any control over. I remember getting angry when Windows 10 LTSC got an update that added an online backup system. I do not pay them to take a copy of my important work and documents, they should pay me for that privileges. Furthermore, it’s an absolute disgrace to see that on an LTSC copy to begin with, it’s meant to be the barebones OS that you purchase at a premium for minimal updates and changes as well as extended service lifespan.
Fuck OneDrive, I store locally and I make local backups. What I own is mine without exception.
additionally I exclusively use local windows accounts. Passwords are to keep your nosy parents, partners, or kids away from your machine, if a hacker has physical access to your computer it’s jover, no amount of microsoft accounts will save you
I was recently refurbishing a laptop for a friend and I got frustrated that I had to make sure it doesn’t connect to internet during the OS setup or I’d have to start the install over again. Online accounts only stop forgetful owners from getting in, does nothing helpful.
Google keeps trying to back up my non existent photos. It’s annoying.
Google photos made it difficult to download or delete your pictures on purpose. You have to manually select them. There is still a way to get them and it was because of GDPR, when you ask google for the whole data of your account they include the pictures and video from google photos.
You don’t need to request all account data, you can request only the Google photos data
They’ll take away volume control (SW/HW buttons) and replace with dynamically adjusting “magic volume” so that you can’t mute ads.
Oh Christ. You’ve just triggered a premonition in me–the Galaxy S32 Ultra will be the first smartphone with no physical buttons or ports. You can turn it “off,” but that will only turn on a sort of extreme power saving mode. It will still ping your location once every few minutes, and will keep the fingerprint scanner active. You will “turn on” the device by holding your finger on the fingerprint scanner for four seconds. They will advertise the “quick startup” as a new feature. Volume will be controlled by sliding your finger along the right edge of the phone, which the screen will wrap around all the way to the back. It will be impossible to hold the phone without touching some part of the screen.
It will only allow wireless charging. You will not be able to connect it directly to a computer. In marketing, this will be to meet rigorous water safety standards. In reality, this will be to prevent you from using ADB to remove apps that come with the phone. You cannot turn off mobile data. You cannot turn off location. You cannot use a third party SMS application. You cannot choose your own wallpaper. You cannot set a private DNS. You cannot install applications that haven’t been approved by Samsung. You cannot block ads. This is all covered on page 74 of subsection 32(a) of section G8 of the terms and conditions that you agreed to when you set up the phone.
They will meet the physical limitations of how well a small lens can focus light. Zoom will cap out at 150x. Nevertheless, there will be seven cameras.
nahhh you’ll be able to choose your own wallpaper, the average user will eat up all of those “feautres” but god forbid Keighleeeigh can’t put her little baby Xaileeyn as her screen saver
But Keighleeeigh will happily pay for it.
Or her baby daddy, Jaxxon
Obligatory, “The rise of -leigh, -lee, and -den names”:
This is when I go back to having a “dumb” phone 🫡
Why are people up voting this? This is such ridiculous FUD that I can’t take it seriously.
I know, right? I mean, does he seriously expect virtually every smartphone manufacturer to put holes in his screen and take away his headphone jacks, removable sim cards, SD cards, replaceable batteries, and IR blasters, and switch to an aspect ratio other than 16:9? That would be ridiculous. They never make user-unfriendly changes!
They’re not user unfriendly changes if 95% of users just don’t care.
And which of the changes he listed would the 95% figure you mentioned care about? By your definition, short of literally turning each feature into a micro transaction, there’s no such thing as user unfriendly changes - and knowing the general public, not even then.
You will not be able to connect it directly to a computer. In marketing, this will be to meet rigorous water safety standards.
Making devices water-proof is also a marketing scheme to avoid replaceable batteries :
Some manufacturers are already eyeing an exemption for batteries used in “wet conditions” to opt out electric toothbrushes and possibly wearables like earbuds and smartwatches. The exemption is “based on unfounded safety claims,” states Thomas Opsomer, policy engineer for iFixit, in Repair.EU’s post.
Despite the coming up regulation on batteries and waste batteries by the EU Council batteries in water-proof devices will probably be exempt from being replceable, because the water proof feature of the device cannot be guaranteed. This undermines the right to repair and manufacturers can hope that customers replace their entire devices soon. Making phones water-proof is a loophole to seal off the device so that it is not to be repaired, at least without keeping the water-proof features after repairing.
I dropped my phone in the bath once, so it’s worth it 🤣
I dropped several flip phones in water ranging from bath, to sink, to ponds and creeks in the mid 00’s to mid teens before getting a smart phone. Out of probably 10 phones used only one was ever ruined by the water, the rest all dried out fine when taken apart and left to dry for a day or two.
Yeah pretty sure the Fairphone 5 and its predecessors have a pretty good IP rating, despite their ability to have the battery removed.
The Galaxy S5 did it first :)
(for a competent smartphone that is)
correction a bit, you can use adb via wifi. That’s what I do to sideload an app to my Android TV
The EU is mandating easily replaceable batteries from 2027.
Smartphone manufacturers, if you’re reading this:
I spent 6 hours on google to find a phone with a screen smaller than 6 inch. I did find none (except an old iPhone, but I want android), so I had to buy one 6 inch. It is too unwieldy. I am annoyed.
There is a serious market for people like me. Do not look away. Somebody will buy these phones.
Also, by the way, it’s not bad if the phones are a bit thicker.
Have you tried Sony’s Xperia 5 series? They are fairly compact and the 21:9 ratio makes it nice and slim.
Zenfone 9 /zenfone 10 has a small screen size plus a headphone jack
See, I want a smaller screen on my phone too, my big issue is that when manufacturers go with a small screen, they usually also think “budget phone”. No. Fuck you. I want a premium phone, same as any other flagship, but smaller. Sure, you can lose a camera, I don’t care as long as the pictures are still decent… You can put in a smaller battery too, there isn’t as much space inside so I get it… But give me all the same of all the other sensors and storage and everything.
They just won’t.
my big issue is that when manufacturers go with a small screen, they usually also think “budget phone”
Wait I thought the situation was different. The only small phones I see are models of premium flagships while the budget segment has humongous monstrosities because designing a small phone with decent packaging and heat dissaption requires much more R&D
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First, it depends on what you consider small. Second, a big problem with the premium phone segment is their obsession with the idea of thin. Like your phone should be a piece of paper in your hand kind of thin. Obviously that’s extreme and impractical but it seems like their objective… To reduce the thickness of the device to it’s minimum.
I don’t really care about how thick my device is, as long as it does the job and isn’t unreasonably thick (like, an inch thick), I couldn’t really care any less.
Premium “small phones” (examples that come to mind are things like the pixel 8, Samsung S23, and the non max/xl/whatever iPhone, to name a few) are still rather large… Often with screen sizes around or larger than 6". To go smaller, you would need to go for their cut rate phones, like the pixel 7a or iPhone SE. The only standout is the iPhone SE with a 4.7" display, the pixel 7a is 6.1". Samsung is also 6.1". These phones often have concessions that make them unappealing to me. Whether it’s a lack of memory or missing sensors, or software cuts… Whatever it is, it’s there. On top of that, you need to also accept the 6"+ screen on these devices which is the main problem. I was happy with the Nexus 5 screen, or the 5X, or even the pixel 1… At 4.95" for the Nexus 5, and 5.2" for the 5X, and 5" for the pixel. To me, this is more optimal. I’m solidly an Android user and I’m pretty firmly in the pixel ecosystem, so I’m forced to accept 6" to 6.2" screens.
I’m currently using a pixel 7, and while I’ve accepted that this is what I must work with, I’m displeased overall with the screen.
Yes, there are cheap/budget phones that have utterly monstrous screens and phablet designs, usually using last-gen CPUs and the bare minimum of RAM; but I’m not talking about that stuff, the budget segment is wild and completely unpredictable. The cuts to CPU and RAM alone are enough for me to walk away. Unless I want to go for a small manufacturer that may not support me in my region (much, if at all - for which, updates are critically important to me, so I wouldn’t), I’m pretty stuck. I went with the pixel because it’s not monstrous, and it gets updates before most others, usually all others. The concessions I need to make about the screen are less important to me right now than having all the features and support I desire from my device.
As I see it, my only real option right now is to abandon Android and go with a very recent/modern, iPhone SE or mini. It’s the only way I would have a screen that’s less than 6". This is not desirable for me because I have usage issues with iPhone. Which isn’t to say the iPhone is a bad product, it’s just not the product for me.
I don’t think the base model iphone, galaxy or pixel are small. What I meant was phones like the iPhone minis, pixel 4a, S10e, etc.
I mostly agree with you but have a small observation. You are using the screen size to argue that the phones are small but you are mistaken. The iphone se has a 4.7" screen as compared to the 6.1" in the iPhone 13 but in terms of phone size, the se(138.4 x 67.3 x 7.3 mm) is only 9 cm shorter than the while being just as wide and thick. The mini is smaller even though it has a bigger screen. There is a similar issue with the nexus phones you give an example of. While the screens were much smaller, the phone dimensions weren’t as drastically different to the standard 6.1" premium phones now because the older phones had much bigger bezels.
IMO, it’s about being able to one-hand the phone. With the Nexus 5, though the phone wasn’t much smaller than something like my pixel 7, the bezel put the screen within reach of my thumb while holding the phone. With the 7, I have to adjust my hand or two hand the phone to reach the furthest parts of my screen.
I don’t have small hands.
6.1" is too big for my preferences. Give me a 5.5" or even a 5", and I’ll be flying.
There is a serious market for people like me
Unfortunately this just seems to be not true. Samsung, sony, google, apple all had smaller phones in their lineup at one time but eventually pulled them from the stack because they were not profitable. Don’t even get me started on the small phone scene in the budget segment. Absolutely no options exist. The unfortunate reality is that while small phone enthusiasts like us are very vocal, we a vocal minority and not enough of us exist who can make designing a smaller phone viable for companies.
User serviceability is intentionally not a focal point especially when it comes to anything a person has to use day to day. Any kind of tool or appliance- and especially electronic devices, forget about it. Luckily there are off the beaten path companies like framework and fairphone, but these are hard to market to regular joes and some are unavailable in a lot of regions.
Tech enthusiasts like presumably a lot of this comment section is are lucky there’s at least something out there.
No. This law keeps being misquoted, and people are going to be disappointed if they go into 2027 thinking we’ll be able to pop out batteries like the good ol’ days.
It does not necessitate battery removal like that. Only that it not be too difficult to change out for a repair (i.e. stuff like gluing it in place with a strong glue, or necessitating removing the display before the battery). That’s still a good change, I’d be happy if it were something like removing 4 screws then unplugging, but it’s not the same as what everybody makes out.
It also doesn’t apply at all for batteries over a certain capacity, or so long as the battery retains 63% capacity or more (presumably this means throughout the warranty period, but I’m unable to find a timeframe for which this standard gets applied) from 2027, or 73% from 2030.
There’s also a 2 year grace period after the law comes into effect where it won’t really be applied.
There are different categories of removable.
With my old Note, I had an extra battery that came with case/charger combination. If my battery on my phone died, I could swap the battery in 10 seconds.
It states that any battery should be removable and replaceable by the user. So this slap on tactic will only work if your device has no internal battery.
I also noticed this is for all batteries. Not just phones, but also cars etc.
EDIT: As any EU law there is a lot of nuance and exceptions. I dig a little further and found the following:
The regulation introduces requirements that say that portable batteries should be easily removable and replaceable by the end-user and LMT batteries and cells in LMT batteries should be easily removable and replaceable by an independent professional.
So what is LMT?
The regulation defines five battery categories depending on how the battery is used:
- Portable batteries
- Light means of transport (LMT) batteries
- Starting, lighting and ignition (SLI) batteries
- Industrial batteries
- Electric vehicle (EV) batteries
I couldn’t find any concrete wording for “easily removed and replaceable”. But I sure hope it means no more glue for the portable batteries.
Source: https://www.intertek.com/blog/2023/08-17-battery-regulation/
“Replaceable by user” has a lot of wiggle room. It could still be a 20-minute process that risks damaging other parts and requires specialized tools.
If phones are to keep their water resistance, they almost certainly won’t be tooless, and will involve swapping out gaskets. It’ll be something you can do to replace a failed battery, not a quick swap because you went camping for the weekend and threw an extra battery in the bag since there are no outlets.
Could you read and understand the information behind the link before replying with nonsense?
FYI: there were waterproof phones before replaceable batteries disappeared. Also the Fairphone for example IPS rated for resistant, so not perfect, but it’s possible.
“User replaceable” just means that they have to make it possible, not easy.
Usually legislation is intentionally vague like that, ultimately courts will decide what that really means in practice.
It will end up being just reasonable. Any person can have a reasonable expectation that they will be able to replace the battery with a reasonable amount of time and effort, with readily available tools, with a reasonable amount of guidance.
If you were a judge would you say that it’s reasonable to expect people to be able to replace soldered components on their phones?
Making them increasingly difficult to hold (“but design!” They cry) so you “accidently” have to buy a new one again.
Here’s my take on what phone companies will do next: replaceable batteries are back! With an inkjet twist:
1- You have to buy them precharged
2- You can no longer recharge them
3- The phone will explode if it detects a 3rd party battery
Or maybe they will go the Musk Tesla route:
Phones will come set to let you use 64gb of space and have a battery that lasts almost a day. For a fee of they will let you make use of 256gb and additional 50% battery capacity. There will be fees for enabling software that allows supercharging with special adapters.
Don’t forget the RGB notification led!
I switched to Chinese brand phones, they still have all this and they’re dirt cheap, currently rocking an Ulephone power armor 18t, which also has a flir infrared camera and a microscope for some reason. No I’m not joking, they work surprisingly well and have come in handy more than I thought they would!
Not sure I’d consider £600 “dirt cheap” but the thermal camera is definitely cool.
They have frequent sales, i got it for under 300
Don’t forget the RGB notification led!
The Nexus One had this, the trackball had an RGB LED inside it. With custom ROMs it could be customised to flash different colours and patterns for just about anything.
This goddamn camera built into my screen instead of above the screen pisses me off so fucking much. So often I have to move a picture down to read the top of it.
IT’S BLOCKING MY MEMES GOD FUCKING DAMMIT MY MEMES
Hey man, I know this is a rant, but in case you didn’t know there should be a setting to resize things to make a black bar at the top. Google it for your phone, but for samsung it’s something like “full sceeen apps”.
Just looked. Not a thing for pixel 6A :(
Googled it, try this
https://mashtips.com/hide-display-notch-and-cutouts-on-pixel/
Holy crap that did it! Thank you!!
That seems like a weird thing to want. You’ll have less screen space because the notification area is now using your useable screen area instead of being up in the unusable dead space.
MY. MEMES.
They removed my slide out keyboard, too.
I just want my physical keyboard back, damnit!
They now sell it as an addon in a phone case
Ew
That looks so wrong to me.
If you want the good camera, you need to get the giant version of the phone.
If you want a phone that fits in human hands, you can only choose from subpar cameras.
I mean, that’s a technical limitation not an anti-user move. Unless you want a phone that’s all camera and no battery or speed.
Do you think that the sensors in flagship phones take up significant space in the phone or are significantly larger than the sensors in smaller or cheaper phones?
I might agree that a smaller phone can’t have like FIVE cameras, like some of the flagships, but they can certainly fit the same high-end sensors themselves.
I’m afraid I don’t know. Perhaps I assumed wrongly. But having taken apart a couple of phones and knowing how tightly packed everything is, I expect the sensors, lenses, processing chips and whatever else of better cameras would be harder to fit into whether phones. Besides, isn’t the high end nowadays often about the postprocessing taking advantage of the multiple cameras?
The sensors themselves are generally standardized sizes, and the top end ones aren’t much (if any) larger. They may have slightly larger supporting hardware to allow better electrical insulation to reduce sensor noise, but not significantly larger per sensor.
To the best of my knowledge, the post processing on flagship phones don’t use multiple photos from different cameras, they use machine learning / AI, which can run on lower-end phones too, it just takes a bit longer. Which imo is totally fine because it’s done by the photo app, not by the camera itself. The only thing that I’m not sure about is the “portrait mode” which seems to do a better job if I select portrait mode in the camera rather than apply a portrait effect in the photo app, so maybe it’s using multiple sensors; but I’ve never seen a phone that had a better than 5% success rate at producing a portrait photo that wasn’t absolute garbage, so that’s a feature I’d be happy to sacrifice.
I don’t need all the processing power, I don’t need all the memory. I need a good OLED screen at a size I can fit into my hand, all day battery, a good amount of storage, and a top of the line camera sensor and lens.
THEY TOOK MY SLIDE OUT QWERTY KEYBOARD!
They’re going to bring back an ABCDEF keyboard instead!
I am never buying an expensive Smartphone again. Just something that works for emergency calls and 2FA and lets me buy a ticket for public transport. I am not gaming on it, I rarely listen to music with it, I only have about 6 apps on it in total. Give me a long lasting battery and let me replace it. The only thing that I need is a big screen, because I am handicapped and have bad eyesight and it is easier to see and use the software if it isn’t too small, otherwise I would prefer a smaller size and I give a f*ck how slim or thick the phone is or how water proof, non of my phones ever got even a tiny bit wet. In the 7 years I own my current phone I have taken about 50 pictures and 48 got deleted shortly after. I also do not need a lot of storage.
Do many people know that there is actually a patent for the idea of an advertisement that plays to a certain point… and then does not end, will not let you skip it, until you as the user, via a camera and microphone, can be verified to have assumed a pose, made a facial expression, and/or said a specific phrase?
The actual patent shows a smart tv ‘owner’ standing up and saying McDonalds! in order to like keep watching Netflix.
We quite literally have the tech and the legal framework for ‘Drink Verification Mountain Dew Can’ to actually be a thing.
The illustration of that patent practically a meme, many on Lemmy should know it.
Though it should be kept in mind there’s thousands of patents that were never actually applied, and this one was filled back in 2009.
We quite literally have the tech and the legal framework
Do patents necessarily have to follow the law?
Though it should be kept in mind there’s thousands of patents that were never actually applied, and this one was filled back in 2009.
This is genuinely a good thing, then. If you patent something and “accidentally” never use it, it prevents other companies from using it legally. Screw over advertisers and save the consumers from their terrible ideas by hoarding patents and working with a patent troll firm :)
Not really. Patests expire and then they can just read the specs in your idea. No reverse-engineering effort required.
