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It's hard to feel positive about upgrading my phone when every new phone seems to remove things I want while adding stuff I don't care about. My S10e is a reas

It's hard to feel positive about upgrading my phone when every new phone seems to remove things I want while adding stuff I don't care about. My S10e is a reasonable size in my pocket. It has a headphone jack. It has an SD card slot. Any new Samsung phone I buy will be missing these things, and I'll be forced to pay hundreds of dollars extra to increase the on-board storage that will still be far less than the 512GB sd card I've currently got in there. And I could try switching away from Samsung, but then I risk losing even more features I take to be standard, like wireless charging. The phone still works just fine, it's fast enough for my needs (although the battery is certainly worse than when I got it). I would be more than happy to pay like $100/yr for "extended" support on it to still get repairs and security patches, rather than having to chuck it in the bin.

ThrowAwayChris 3y ago
I bought my S10e for 450AUD ($300US) on clearance six months after it was released. I've replaced the factory rom, and the battery once. There's nothing on the android market like it, it's only slightly larger than the iphone 12/13 mini that's also discontinued. Small phones with all the bells and whistles aren't made anymore by anyone. I will be very sad when I can't get parts.
kernelbugs 3y ago
Also a S10e user here. I've been eyeing the Asus Zenfone 10, but it's unfortunately not available in the US for most mobile networks here. Truly a shame that not many are making small phones, and those that are are not paying attention to the US market.
parl_match 3y ago
I have an iPhone 13 mini, the last <5" flagship phone you can buy. I'm not particularly tied to the iPhone ecosystem, but when this dies, I don't know what I'm going to do.
- timeon 3y ago
  I'm starting to think about combination smart watches + dumb phone. But I have no clue how the smart watches actually are. But smartphone seems to be targeted for people that do not use laptop/desktop that much.
  - leptons 3y ago
    >But smartphone seems to be targeted for people that do not use laptop/desktop that much. I'm a "power user", and I want a powerful device when I'm away from my laptop/desktop. Currently using the Samsung Fold 4, and loving it.
- DiggyJohnson 3y ago
  Same here, I am genuinely shocked they discontinued the mini series. Will there be another version of the SE maybe?
  - jghn 3y ago
    As another person in the same boat, the problem is that people don't buy them. Like it or not, we're in the minority.
    - TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
      IIRC, the mini versions skimped on the camera. That’s the only reason I didn’t buy one. I preferred the small size but wanted the best camera offered.
      - the_snooze 3y ago
        Other than battery capacity and physical size of the phone (body and display), the Minis are identical to their non-Mini non-Pro counterparts.
        4ggr0 3y ago
        I guess what this person wants are the cameras of the Ultra Max Pro Super Mega iPhone model, on the mini version. And not "just" the cameras of the standard iPhone.
      - chrischen 3y ago
        Yea I agree. They tend to market the mini or smaller ones not just as smaller phones but as lower end phones. Since my order of preferences is the features and then the size, I end up never able to justify the smaller phone even though I don't need the big size.
      - lotsofpulp 3y ago
        I would be surprised if even 5% of people noticed the difference in a picture taken by a 13 mini and a 15 pro max.
- coldpie 3y ago
  This is the only thing on the horizon that I'm aware of: https://smallandroidphone.com/ https://smallandroidphone.com/ but it's looking like vaporware at this point.
  - danielnoiz 3y ago
    Yeah, I signed up for updates more than a year ago and haven't gotten any. Migicovsky seems more interested in Beeper than furthering this project. Which I get, an app is easier and cheaper to deploy than a phone. Still a bit disappointed, I might end up buying a Unihertz Atom XL for a reasonable screen size with bonus FRS radio built in.
- chx 3y ago
  The smallest current vaguely mainstream phone IMO is the Asus Zenfone 10 at 146.5 x 68.1 x 9.4 mm. The iPhone 13 mini is 131.5 x 64.2 x 7.65mm. Then you have weird stuff: https://www.gsmarena.com/results.php3?nYearMin=2022&fDisplayInchesMax=5.8&sOSes=2&sOSversions=2940,2930 https://www.gsmarena.com/results.php3?nYearMin=2022&fDisplay... so perhaps by the time your phone dies the Cubot Pocket 4 or 5 will be your answer. Here's the Pocket 3: https://www.gsmarena.com/cubot_pocket_3-12314.php https://www.gsmarena.com/cubot_pocket_3-12314.php
  - gpm 3y ago
    I agree it isn't really mainstream, but Samsung has the "Samsung Galaxy Z Flip5" at 85.1 x 71.9 x 15.1 mm while folded.
  - gfv 3y ago
    Zenfone 10 is only marketed as a compact phone. In reality, it is just slightly narrower than a Samsung S23 (146.3 x 70.9 x 7.6).
    - chx 3y ago
      yet that makes it 5.9" instead of 6.1" clever marketing gimmick to fit into the below 6" bracket
  - prpl 3y ago
    The iPhone SE 3rd generation would be the smallest mainstream phone, seeing as it’s still sold, but might not meet your definition of “current”. At this point I’d go back to iPhone 8 form factor if it gets an upgrade, but I’m on a 12 mini and it’s not a big step up
- generalizations 3y ago
  Technically the LTE iWatches are a <5" phone, too.
  - gpm 3y ago
    Can you use them completely independently from an Apple phone? I thought not... Context: I'm not particularly interested in switching to Apple's phone ecosystem, but their watches seem to be superior to Android's and I am slightly interested in getting one of them.
    - vel0city 3y ago
      I don't have one, but I was under the impression cellular versions of Apple Watches can be used independently from an iPhone. You can take calls, send messages, stream music, etc. miles away from a phone, as its connectivity isn't through the phone its through its own onboard cellular modem. Now, do you have to have some kind of iPhone somewhere for it to do things like route messages through iMessage? I don't know.
    - freeone3000 3y ago
      You can but it’s not the most ideal experience. Calling, maps, and health stuff works fine; texting is alright; other apps are going to be hit or miss, mostly miss. You also need to get the more expensive LTE version, and to have a provider that will sell you an esim for just the watch without an attached plan for a phone.
    - generalizations 3y ago
      With the newer iterations, you can. I bought a series 5 used off ebay and plan to try using it independently. It's obviously not going to give you the full functionality of a full-sized phone, but if we're talking minimalist phones I don't think that's the point anyway. Maps + (very) basic texting + phone calls.
- hashtag-til 3y ago
  Same. I had an iPhone 5, then an SE (1st gen) and now with a 12 mini. Form factor is the key argument. If there no more "mini" form factor, I'm moving to something else.
- wilsonnb3 3y ago
  the mini has a 5.4" screen, its not <5"
  - ksec 3y ago
    Really sad to see not being corrected after dozens of comments and upvotes. It gives me the feeling people dont actually know what they are talking about.
argulane 3y ago
I also loved my S10e. Unfortunately the mainboard on it died few few months ago. I bought Sony Xperia 1 V to replace it. It has a 3.5mm headphone jack and a MicroSD card slot. The build quality is excellent but I'm a bit worried what the software support will look like in a few years.
- ThrowAwayChris 3y ago
  It's a Sony, you should be worried that it's being supported at the time they released it. Akio Morita is rolling in his grave.
maxrecursion 3y ago
Eventually you'll just have to upgrade because the phone is too slow. I had to upgrade from my galaxy S8 earlier this year because it slowed to a crawl, my wife commented on how slow it was every time she used it. I had it for 5 years. I still hate not having a headphone jack, but having 5G and an insanely fast phone made it worth it.
- sumtechguy 3y ago
  I bought a usbc to barrel adapter. It has a extra cable for power if I want to charge too. Still annoyed they took it away. s5->s22 was my step.
  - aqfamnzc 3y ago
    That's quite the leap! Good job holding onto the old one so long.
    - sumtechguy 3y ago
      replaced the battery 3 times! this new one not so much. I bought it thinking 'ill get the best there is. At the time it was. Then all I used it for was very light web stuff and phone calls. So as long as it did those 2 things I was fine. Still trying to figure out what to use it for. I think one of the flash chips is EoL at this point.
- leptons 3y ago
  It's well known that the flash memory degrades and gets very much slower over time, and this is why smart phones get slower as they age. Can't replace the flash, so the phone is essentially unusable after a few years.
marcosdumay 3y ago
Oh, I didn't even notice why I keep postponing upgrading my out-of-line phone that can't even get new software from the play store anymore. But yeah, it's because I dread of looking around trying to decide what I'll give up to get a headphone jack.
- coldpie 3y ago
  You can put a USBC-to-3.5mm (or lightning) adapter on your headphones and just leave it there. Not as good as having a proper headphone jack, but it's good enough. Yes, they make combo listen & charge adapters, too.
  - i_am_jl 3y ago
    I don't think it's good enough, and I don't think the others complaining about the same issue are somehow unaware of charge+listen USB-C or Lightning dongles either. My gripe is that I don't want to pay for a new thing that causes me a problem that I don't currently have. I don't want to carry and keep track of a dongle. I don't want to put wear and tear on the USB-C port for the 8-12 hours a day I've got headphones plugged into the phone in my pocket.
    - coldpie 3y ago
      Yeah, 100% agree it sucks. But what I'm responding to is, "I dread of looking around trying to decide what I'll give up to get a headphone jack." I'm saying it's not worth making an enormous sacrifice to retain the jack. I've been using adapters for at least 5 years at this point, I've never had a port break. The dongles do break after 4~6 months, which sucks, but they're only like $8-10. Buy a handful and swap in a new one as they break. It is a downgrade, and you're right to complain, but again it's not worth making a big sacrifice over.
      - dumpsterlid 3y ago
        [dead]
      - 3y ago
expertentipp 3y ago
I loved my s10e, although the camera glass (or rather plastic) cracked during the first months from basically placing the phone on flat surfaces. Otherwise the form factor, dimensions, audio jack port, photos quality were excellent.
vasdae 3y ago
Still with SD cards and headphone jacks? The world has moved on, my man.
- atomicfiredoll 3y ago
  This is a technical audience. This article is about people not upgrading phones. There are many technical and professional people that have chosen not to upgrade phones because of the lack of these features. Clearly, that group isn't the main reason for the decline (it's not even mentioned as a trend in the article,) but it really shouldn't be surprising that there are people on this site who still take these things into consideration when upgrading.
- freedomben 3y ago
  Oh yeah, moved on to what? What has replaced those things and rendered them obsolete? On-board storage sure didn't, that's small and not portable, and we already had that. Bluetooth headphones didn't, those require special hardware, have to be charged (battery), have higher latency, reduced sound quality (lower fidelity), packet loss, and spyware built in, and DRM capable. Not even close to a replacement for analog headphone jack.
  - vel0city 3y ago
    The storage on the device is portable when the device is portable. There are very few instances where I'd find an SD card acceptably portable but a phone not so. Phones these days come in hundreds of gigs of storage. My current phone was a decently cheap one and had 128GB of storage, easily >100GB of usable space. On Android one can easily mount the storage as a USB drive and transfer data at high speeds. And given its a nearly permanently network device its pretty trivial to have it sync storage someplace else, including your own self-hosted infrastructure. I don't need to have my complete music library on my device everywhere I go, I just cache the playlists I'm in to at the moment and stream when I have network (which is the majority of the time). Same goes with consuming video content or listening to podcasts or whatever. Why save it locally when it can trivially be streamed? Why keep your entire photo and personal movie collection on your portable device which can get lost and broken when you can just connect back home and access even more storage with higher reliability anytime, anywhere? Between on-board storage ballooning in size and network infrastructure making it pretty easy to access things over the net, for me and many others having SD cards is entirely obsolete. I don't understand what you mean about "spyware built in" for Bluetooth headphones. All my Bluetooth devices do not have any other kinds of network connectivity, they don't phone home or anything like that. There's no app or anything like that needed for them. There's also no "DRM" for Bluetooth, the output of the Bluetooth audio doesn't have some kind of macrovision or something preventing you from recording it or anything like that. I've got Bluetooth receivers which output to S/PDIF and analog RCA connectors, its not protected or anything like that.
askonomm 3y ago
I'm pretty sure almost every mainstream phone nowadays has wireless charging. The iPhones do, Pixel phones do, etc.
- berbec 3y ago
  I thought so too, and believed it so much I didn't check the detailed specs of my OnePlus 10T.....
  - askonomm 3y ago
    Oh damn, I would've not expected OnePlus to not support it, with them being always on the more cutting-edge of technology. That's a huge letdown.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    OnePlus is a big disappointment to me. I'd be a customer for life if they'd kept doing what made them so good: 1. Never settle: big specs, lots of features. SD cards and headphone jack on a flagship? yes please! 2. Factory images available so I can easily re-flash to stock 3. Great pricing 4. Not required proprietary charger to get max speed They could really turn it around, but they would need to return to their roots. Until then I'll just stick with the Pixel A series. It never excites me about phones, but it checks most of my boxes.
- vel0city 3y ago
  For a while the "a" versions of Pixels didn't have wireless charging. The 6a does not have wireless charging, but the newer 7a does.
major505 3y ago
And new phots are super expensive. You are paying more in the phone than your work notebook, something is terrible wrong with that.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
  That's why I drag out my upgrades as long as I can. If I want a decent upgrade it's gotta be higher end, and if it's higher end it's gonna be >$1000 CAD (if not ~$1,500). If I have to spend that much, I'm going to try to get it to last as long as possible so that I get the value out of the current phone AND the greatest improvements possible before plopping down that money down again. The phone makers did it to themselves with the prices.
  - major505 3y ago
    pretty much. This days Im happy with a middle end phone, because my mother and step daugher always Inherit my old phone from me, so if I have to buy for everyone I will buy every year a middle of the range phone and after a year or 2 give to one of them,
seydor 3y ago
Former S10 owner here. It had an audio jack, and an SpO2 meter (which is useful to a family member), and FM radio (used it a lot when doing farm work). The S22 has none of those, and it is heavier. Feeling so cheated by phone ~~makers~~ grifters is making me very careful with any of my next purchases. It's as if the market has reached a peak and the only thing they can think of is scraping the bottom of the barrel.
nuancebydefault 3y ago
My galaxy s10 rocks. I guess the battery has had almost 1000 charging cycles and is still performing good enough. I like the smaller than average size and weight, the smooth and snappy scratch resistant screen. Speaker sound is quite decent. I don't see how I would benefit from things like 100Hz or more screen refresh rate or even tinier pixels. 5G, I would not use since that would increase the amount of wireless data so much that i'd need a more expensive plan. I guess a lot of phones in use are sitting on a 'more than decent' plateau. It's a good thing.
wildrhythms 3y ago
I'm not upgrading from my Pixel 5A. It has a fingerprint reader and I can unlock it from my pocket. It has a headphone jack. Every new phone has taken these things away. Very disappointing.

ThrowAwayChris 3y ago

I bought my S10e for 450AUD ($300US) on clearance six months after it was released. I've replaced the factory rom, and the battery once. There's nothing on the android market like it, it's only slightly larger than the iphone 12/13 mini that's also discontinued. Small phones with all the bells and whistles aren't made anymore by anyone. I will be very sad when I can't get parts.

kernelbugs 3y ago

Also a S10e user here. I've been eyeing the Asus Zenfone 10, but it's unfortunately not available in the US for most mobile networks here. Truly a shame that not many are making small phones, and those that are are not paying attention to the US market.

parl_match 3y ago

I have an iPhone 13 mini, the last <5" flagship phone you can buy. I'm not particularly tied to the iPhone ecosystem, but when this dies, I don't know what I'm going to do.

timeon 3y ago
I'm starting to think about combination smart watches + dumb phone. But I have no clue how the smart watches actually are. But smartphone seems to be targeted for people that do not use laptop/desktop that much.
- leptons 3y ago
  >But smartphone seems to be targeted for people that do not use laptop/desktop that much. I'm a "power user", and I want a powerful device when I'm away from my laptop/desktop. Currently using the Samsung Fold 4, and loving it.
DiggyJohnson 3y ago
Same here, I am genuinely shocked they discontinued the mini series. Will there be another version of the SE maybe?
- jghn 3y ago
  As another person in the same boat, the problem is that people don't buy them. Like it or not, we're in the minority.
  - TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
    IIRC, the mini versions skimped on the camera. That’s the only reason I didn’t buy one. I preferred the small size but wanted the best camera offered.
    - the_snooze 3y ago
      Other than battery capacity and physical size of the phone (body and display), the Minis are identical to their non-Mini non-Pro counterparts.
      - 4ggr0 3y ago
        I guess what this person wants are the cameras of the Ultra Max Pro Super Mega iPhone model, on the mini version. And not "just" the cameras of the standard iPhone.
    - chrischen 3y ago
      Yea I agree. They tend to market the mini or smaller ones not just as smaller phones but as lower end phones. Since my order of preferences is the features and then the size, I end up never able to justify the smaller phone even though I don't need the big size.
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      I would be surprised if even 5% of people noticed the difference in a picture taken by a 13 mini and a 15 pro max.
coldpie 3y ago
This is the only thing on the horizon that I'm aware of: https://smallandroidphone.com/ https://smallandroidphone.com/ but it's looking like vaporware at this point.
- danielnoiz 3y ago
  Yeah, I signed up for updates more than a year ago and haven't gotten any. Migicovsky seems more interested in Beeper than furthering this project. Which I get, an app is easier and cheaper to deploy than a phone. Still a bit disappointed, I might end up buying a Unihertz Atom XL for a reasonable screen size with bonus FRS radio built in.
chx 3y ago
The smallest current vaguely mainstream phone IMO is the Asus Zenfone 10 at 146.5 x 68.1 x 9.4 mm. The iPhone 13 mini is 131.5 x 64.2 x 7.65mm. Then you have weird stuff: https://www.gsmarena.com/results.php3?nYearMin=2022&fDisplayInchesMax=5.8&sOSes=2&sOSversions=2940,2930 https://www.gsmarena.com/results.php3?nYearMin=2022&fDisplay... so perhaps by the time your phone dies the Cubot Pocket 4 or 5 will be your answer. Here's the Pocket 3: https://www.gsmarena.com/cubot_pocket_3-12314.php https://www.gsmarena.com/cubot_pocket_3-12314.php
- gpm 3y ago
  I agree it isn't really mainstream, but Samsung has the "Samsung Galaxy Z Flip5" at 85.1 x 71.9 x 15.1 mm while folded.
- gfv 3y ago
  Zenfone 10 is only marketed as a compact phone. In reality, it is just slightly narrower than a Samsung S23 (146.3 x 70.9 x 7.6).
  - chx 3y ago
    yet that makes it 5.9" instead of 6.1" clever marketing gimmick to fit into the below 6" bracket
- prpl 3y ago
  The iPhone SE 3rd generation would be the smallest mainstream phone, seeing as it’s still sold, but might not meet your definition of “current”. At this point I’d go back to iPhone 8 form factor if it gets an upgrade, but I’m on a 12 mini and it’s not a big step up
generalizations 3y ago
Technically the LTE iWatches are a <5" phone, too.
- gpm 3y ago
  Can you use them completely independently from an Apple phone? I thought not... Context: I'm not particularly interested in switching to Apple's phone ecosystem, but their watches seem to be superior to Android's and I am slightly interested in getting one of them.
  - vel0city 3y ago
    I don't have one, but I was under the impression cellular versions of Apple Watches can be used independently from an iPhone. You can take calls, send messages, stream music, etc. miles away from a phone, as its connectivity isn't through the phone its through its own onboard cellular modem. Now, do you have to have some kind of iPhone somewhere for it to do things like route messages through iMessage? I don't know.
  - freeone3000 3y ago
    You can but it’s not the most ideal experience. Calling, maps, and health stuff works fine; texting is alright; other apps are going to be hit or miss, mostly miss. You also need to get the more expensive LTE version, and to have a provider that will sell you an esim for just the watch without an attached plan for a phone.
  - generalizations 3y ago
    With the newer iterations, you can. I bought a series 5 used off ebay and plan to try using it independently. It's obviously not going to give you the full functionality of a full-sized phone, but if we're talking minimalist phones I don't think that's the point anyway. Maps + (very) basic texting + phone calls.
hashtag-til 3y ago
Same. I had an iPhone 5, then an SE (1st gen) and now with a 12 mini. Form factor is the key argument. If there no more "mini" form factor, I'm moving to something else.
wilsonnb3 3y ago
the mini has a 5.4" screen, its not <5"
- ksec 3y ago
  Really sad to see not being corrected after dozens of comments and upvotes. It gives me the feeling people dont actually know what they are talking about.

argulane 3y ago

I also loved my S10e. Unfortunately the mainboard on it died few few months ago. I bought Sony Xperia 1 V to replace it. It has a 3.5mm headphone jack and a MicroSD card slot. The build quality is excellent but I'm a bit worried what the software support will look like in a few years.

ThrowAwayChris 3y ago
It's a Sony, you should be worried that it's being supported at the time they released it. Akio Morita is rolling in his grave.

maxrecursion 3y ago

Eventually you'll just have to upgrade because the phone is too slow. I had to upgrade from my galaxy S8 earlier this year because it slowed to a crawl, my wife commented on how slow it was every time she used it. I had it for 5 years. I still hate not having a headphone jack, but having 5G and an insanely fast phone made it worth it.

sumtechguy 3y ago
I bought a usbc to barrel adapter. It has a extra cable for power if I want to charge too. Still annoyed they took it away. s5->s22 was my step.
- aqfamnzc 3y ago
  That's quite the leap! Good job holding onto the old one so long.
  - sumtechguy 3y ago
    replaced the battery 3 times! this new one not so much. I bought it thinking 'ill get the best there is. At the time it was. Then all I used it for was very light web stuff and phone calls. So as long as it did those 2 things I was fine. Still trying to figure out what to use it for. I think one of the flash chips is EoL at this point.
leptons 3y ago
It's well known that the flash memory degrades and gets very much slower over time, and this is why smart phones get slower as they age. Can't replace the flash, so the phone is essentially unusable after a few years.

marcosdumay 3y ago

Oh, I didn't even notice why I keep postponing upgrading my out-of-line phone that can't even get new software from the play store anymore. But yeah, it's because I dread of looking around trying to decide what I'll give up to get a headphone jack.

coldpie 3y ago
You can put a USBC-to-3.5mm (or lightning) adapter on your headphones and just leave it there. Not as good as having a proper headphone jack, but it's good enough. Yes, they make combo listen & charge adapters, too.
- i_am_jl 3y ago
  I don't think it's good enough, and I don't think the others complaining about the same issue are somehow unaware of charge+listen USB-C or Lightning dongles either. My gripe is that I don't want to pay for a new thing that causes me a problem that I don't currently have. I don't want to carry and keep track of a dongle. I don't want to put wear and tear on the USB-C port for the 8-12 hours a day I've got headphones plugged into the phone in my pocket.
  - coldpie 3y ago
    Yeah, 100% agree it sucks. But what I'm responding to is, "I dread of looking around trying to decide what I'll give up to get a headphone jack." I'm saying it's not worth making an enormous sacrifice to retain the jack. I've been using adapters for at least 5 years at this point, I've never had a port break. The dongles do break after 4~6 months, which sucks, but they're only like $8-10. Buy a handful and swap in a new one as they break. It is a downgrade, and you're right to complain, but again it's not worth making a big sacrifice over.
    - dumpsterlid 3y ago
      [dead]
    - 3y ago

expertentipp 3y ago

I loved my s10e, although the camera glass (or rather plastic) cracked during the first months from basically placing the phone on flat surfaces. Otherwise the form factor, dimensions, audio jack port, photos quality were excellent.

vasdae 3y ago

Still with SD cards and headphone jacks? The world has moved on, my man.

atomicfiredoll 3y ago
This is a technical audience. This article is about people not upgrading phones. There are many technical and professional people that have chosen not to upgrade phones because of the lack of these features. Clearly, that group isn't the main reason for the decline (it's not even mentioned as a trend in the article,) but it really shouldn't be surprising that there are people on this site who still take these things into consideration when upgrading.
freedomben 3y ago
Oh yeah, moved on to what? What has replaced those things and rendered them obsolete? On-board storage sure didn't, that's small and not portable, and we already had that. Bluetooth headphones didn't, those require special hardware, have to be charged (battery), have higher latency, reduced sound quality (lower fidelity), packet loss, and spyware built in, and DRM capable. Not even close to a replacement for analog headphone jack.
- vel0city 3y ago
  The storage on the device is portable when the device is portable. There are very few instances where I'd find an SD card acceptably portable but a phone not so. Phones these days come in hundreds of gigs of storage. My current phone was a decently cheap one and had 128GB of storage, easily >100GB of usable space. On Android one can easily mount the storage as a USB drive and transfer data at high speeds. And given its a nearly permanently network device its pretty trivial to have it sync storage someplace else, including your own self-hosted infrastructure. I don't need to have my complete music library on my device everywhere I go, I just cache the playlists I'm in to at the moment and stream when I have network (which is the majority of the time). Same goes with consuming video content or listening to podcasts or whatever. Why save it locally when it can trivially be streamed? Why keep your entire photo and personal movie collection on your portable device which can get lost and broken when you can just connect back home and access even more storage with higher reliability anytime, anywhere? Between on-board storage ballooning in size and network infrastructure making it pretty easy to access things over the net, for me and many others having SD cards is entirely obsolete. I don't understand what you mean about "spyware built in" for Bluetooth headphones. All my Bluetooth devices do not have any other kinds of network connectivity, they don't phone home or anything like that. There's no app or anything like that needed for them. There's also no "DRM" for Bluetooth, the output of the Bluetooth audio doesn't have some kind of macrovision or something preventing you from recording it or anything like that. I've got Bluetooth receivers which output to S/PDIF and analog RCA connectors, its not protected or anything like that.

askonomm 3y ago

I'm pretty sure almost every mainstream phone nowadays has wireless charging. The iPhones do, Pixel phones do, etc.

berbec 3y ago
I thought so too, and believed it so much I didn't check the detailed specs of my OnePlus 10T.....
- askonomm 3y ago
  Oh damn, I would've not expected OnePlus to not support it, with them being always on the more cutting-edge of technology. That's a huge letdown.
- freedomben 3y ago
  OnePlus is a big disappointment to me. I'd be a customer for life if they'd kept doing what made them so good: 1. Never settle: big specs, lots of features. SD cards and headphone jack on a flagship? yes please! 2. Factory images available so I can easily re-flash to stock 3. Great pricing 4. Not required proprietary charger to get max speed They could really turn it around, but they would need to return to their roots. Until then I'll just stick with the Pixel A series. It never excites me about phones, but it checks most of my boxes.
vel0city 3y ago
For a while the "a" versions of Pixels didn't have wireless charging. The 6a does not have wireless charging, but the newer 7a does.

major505 3y ago

And new phots are super expensive. You are paying more in the phone than your work notebook, something is terrible wrong with that.

SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
That's why I drag out my upgrades as long as I can. If I want a decent upgrade it's gotta be higher end, and if it's higher end it's gonna be >$1000 CAD (if not ~$1,500). If I have to spend that much, I'm going to try to get it to last as long as possible so that I get the value out of the current phone AND the greatest improvements possible before plopping down that money down again. The phone makers did it to themselves with the prices.
- major505 3y ago
  pretty much. This days Im happy with a middle end phone, because my mother and step daugher always Inherit my old phone from me, so if I have to buy for everyone I will buy every year a middle of the range phone and after a year or 2 give to one of them,

seydor 3y ago

Former S10 owner here. It had an audio jack, and an SpO2 meter (which is useful to a family member), and FM radio (used it a lot when doing farm work). The S22 has none of those, and it is heavier. Feeling so cheated by phone ~~makers~~ grifters is making me very careful with any of my next purchases. It's as if the market has reached a peak and the only thing they can think of is scraping the bottom of the barrel.

nuancebydefault 3y ago

My galaxy s10 rocks. I guess the battery has had almost 1000 charging cycles and is still performing good enough. I like the smaller than average size and weight, the smooth and snappy scratch resistant screen. Speaker sound is quite decent. I don't see how I would benefit from things like 100Hz or more screen refresh rate or even tinier pixels. 5G, I would not use since that would increase the amount of wireless data so much that i'd need a more expensive plan. I guess a lot of phones in use are sitting on a 'more than decent' plateau. It's a good thing.

wildrhythms 3y ago

I'm not upgrading from my Pixel 5A. It has a fingerprint reader and I can unlock it from my pocket. It has a headphone jack. Every new phone has taken these things away. Very disappointing.