And it comes with a 3mm headphone jack! Hallelujah!! I’m so, so glad someone is stepping up to fill this niche. My only complaint, and it’s kind if a big one, is that the screen is too damn big. I’m tired of phone manufacturers forcing me to carry a television in my pocket. I want something small that I can hold in one hand without a pop socket. I’ll trade performance, camera quality, basically anything for a phone with a small form factor.
Agree! There should be a couple of different form factors? I got an iPhone 13 mini specifically because I hate the giant phones. My hands aren't small or weak (I do chinups and push ups, practically have to as maintenance to prevent nerve pain, muscle pain, low circulation with all the typing I do), but why do I need to ruin my finger nerves and muscles and wrist carrying and using a GigantoPhone. I find phone use to be way worse for my biomechanical finger-hand-wrist health than typing on a HHKB.
But also...I think this would be hilarious (in a good way) if this (thankfully anachronistic throwback) repairability really took off and in the next 3 years Apple releases a budget / or premium( prolly premium? knowing Apple hehe ) set of products like a framework style repairable moddable laptop, and a "wePhone" that you can swap parts and mod. Truly I think there's a cool cyberfunk future in there somewhere. TikTokking teens showing off their latest phone mods, builds and hacks (and holoscreens). I mean they already "discovered" the flip phone and went mad. I think this is waiting to happen :) ;p
Yeah! I had a 5S. I loved that little guy. Another reason I got the mini for the angles like the 5S. How much bigger is it? 13 is okay. But I should make it go back to 5S size
The more important difference is, the 12 mini screen is 5.42" diagonal instead of 4" like the 5. This is maybe marketed as a benefit, but it means I can't comfortably reach the entire screen during one-handed use.
Mmm, yeah I thought they felt similar. A little different. Screen size, yeah maybe that affects the reach of the finger. Gotta keep the hands loose and clean, not get them twisted up. Thanks! :) ;p xx ;p
I still use my SE (first gen) which is the same form factor. I love this phone, and I regret the day it’ll be so far behind the latest supported iOS that I have to stop using it.
SE is still the only one with touch. Which is very cool. I also considered it...but I didn't like the rounded corners anymore, if it had the original square ones, then def! Also lack of blue. Picky! :)
I don't know about iPhone, but Android has navigation gestures where you sweep from edge for back, from bottm for home and few more. I started to get thumb pain from light of small phone (S10e), and pain went away after switching to these gestures. Yes, these gestures have slight issues in some cases but you can't argue with RSI. Took a day or two to get used to. I assume pain came from scretching thumb too much for reaching controls on the bottom. So give it a chance if your phone supports something like that.
Loving my Unihertz Atom (for a particular sports application). https://www.unihertz.com/products/atom if you haven't tried one. I agree that it would be great if Nokia did this product but in a reasonable size.
It's interesting hearing in this thread about some of the smaller android companies, you mentioned unihertz and someone else mentioned ulefone. Something a little different from the usual flagships at least.
I bought an el-cheapo, small (really small) one (originally only to manage EU green passes) that (after that use was over) I started using as a "backup" phone when I cannot carry the (larger, heavier) "main" one.
It turned out to be not bad at all, of course within its limits.
The model I got was a King Kong mini, but I believe that in the last two-three years they made some two or three newer models.
Umidigi is another company to mention. Their Bison models pretty much fill the gap between a massive rugged phone and a standard phone. The phone's battery @~6kmAh usually covers a 2-3 day trip without charging.
I've been running unihertz jelly 2 for ages and it's phenomenal. The only two annoyances I have are no 5g (I'm always tethering my laptop) and that google maps scooter mode just isn't available on this phone and there's basically no solution to get it working (and I'm hard pressed to figure out whose fault that is - google for failing to recognize the device location? Unihertz for failing to indicate my location correctly?)
I wouldn't recommend 2E as the jelly is already a very low power phone that struggles with Slack for example lol.
No idea if they work with Android Auto but isn't android auto some kind of mapping plus music UI? The screen is quite small, I don't use it mounted on motorcycle when I ride for that reason.
I've had one for about a month. The battery life was very bad at first, but then I twiddled with the settings about stopping certain apps from running in the background and now it's tolerable
I just leave airplane mode on all the time and have a short screen timeout. I also use wired headphones. It's certainly usable as an mp3 player. The extra functionality is a bonus that I very occasionally use (I have a cheap sim card in it).
I just wish Unihertz had better ROMs or made it easier to flash alternatives like LineageOS. I've got a Titan and the software ruins an otherwise-wonderful piece of hardware.
While I enjoy smaller phones, it makes no sense to have high end smaller phones.
It doesn’t sell.
Just look at Apple’s sales and their cancellation of the mini. I’d love it to be the opposite so I didn’t have to hold on to my iphone 12 mini, but it’s just how things are. Most people don’t like smaller phones and would be a waste of resources to make high end ones.
I buy them. I’d even suggest a deviation: make them a few mm thicker and fill the extra space with battery. I’d use a small powerful multi-day battery smartphone far more than anything else.
My own personal itch: a phone with an antenna setup allowing it to function as a hotspot just as well as an actual hotspot, combined with longer battery life. I'd actually be happy with a phone half-the thickness of my jetpack but that could replace my jetpack because its antenna setup was as good.
We've been seeing reports for a while that the iPhone 14 Plus is selling softly. It might not be the mini's fault; perhaps Apple simply cannot get four models to sell like it wants to.
Something to consider: small phones are a niche and producing them is a way of capturing a specific set of customers.
I was an Android guy, but one of the top two reasons my newest phone is an iPhone is due to the small form factor (the other is longer support cycles). If Apple stops making small phones, my next one may well be an Android.
On consideration, capturing a niche market segment like this may be more valuable for Apple than it is for other manufacturers, as it increases the odds of getting them locked into your ecosystem.
There is a huge gab between high and low and devices. Some manufacturers will want to sell - and many consumers will buy- a few models that are more expensive than $150 but less than $1000.
Maybe I’m missing the hyperbole, but almost all iPhones and Google Pixels fit into that gap. The base iPhone 14 is $799, the iPhone SE is $429, and there are older model iPhones in between. Even the base iPhone 14 Pro is $999, technically in the range. A Pixel 7 is $599, a Pixel 7 Pro is $899, and a Pixel 6a is $449.
There’s perhaps a gap in the $150-$400 range, but used phones can definitely be found there, and I would bet that there are Android manufacturers that sell new phones there.
(All prices are USA and before tax, so other markets will be a bit more expensive.)
I don't know if the US market is very different, but in Spain I'd say like 80% of the phones people buy fit into that gap...
Below $150 you only have the cheapest models by brands like Xiaomi, and over $1000 you only have the flagships.
There are plenty of models in the middle, not only Pixels but also a plethora of offerings from Oppo, Samsung, Xiaomi, Vivo, Honor, Poco, etc. Name any [X,X+100] interval in that range and there are phones of that price. Last week I went with my mother to buy one for her, she settled for the Oppo Reno 8 (about $500) but there was the Lite version at about $100 less, the Pro version at about $100 more, and then other lineups from the same brand (Find X5 in Lite/normal/Pro versions, etc., and many, many others we didn't even look at); and that's within a single brand.
So your parent comment doesn't make much sense to me even if it's hyperbolic. Maybe the available offer is really different in the US, here there are definitely plenty of models of all prices. A different story is that all brands tend to make the same decisions and follow trends (e.g. ditch the headphone jack, make screens larger, etc.) so everything is sameish and even if there are hundreds of models to choose from, it's possible to not find a model that fits one's needs. I myself imported my phone (Pixel 6 Pro) from Australia because no brands other than Apple or Samsung seem to sell 512 GB storage models here...
For SMS? And people put up with that? Here, SMS is free for the recipient, and quite often also free for the sender.
But even if SMS costs money, why not just use free apps like Whatsapp or Signal?
And if SMS does cost money for the recipient, does that mean it doesn't get used for 2FA? I imagine some people would block it in order to prevent unexpected costs.
Wait, so people in the US don't use Whatsapp but iMessage, and using iMessage on Android is possible but costs money?
I had not expected either of those, but I'd imagine if iMessage costs money on Android, that would massively increase the popularity of either Whatsapp or Signal.
Since when does a $999 phone not count as high-end? As far as I'm concerned, everything over $600 does. So the iPhone SE and the Pixel 6a would count as midrange, with all the other phones you mentioned being high-end in my book. Or at least priced that way.
There's no significant market for a 4.5" screen phone in 2023. It's not like manufacturers haven't tried.
I would also argue that small screens are awful for consuming content nowadays. People with bad eyesight struggle with bigger fonts in a small screen, and publishers tend to try to fit more and more content in each screen. It's systemic.
> I would also argue that small screens are awful for consuming content nowadays
I wouldn't. Most content is time wasting nonsense and ads.
> People with bad eyesight struggle with bigger fonts in a small screen,
My experience with Presbyopia is that a bigger screen is still impossible to read without glasses. Without glasses my only hope is to pinch zoom or browser zoom which works on both large and small screens.
Also, if you think that most content is not worth consuming, thus smaller screens are “good enough”, perhaps you are not part of the target market anyway. There are still feature phones out there for the minority who holds that sentiment.
And it will under guaranty for at least six months. The website guarantees a at least 70% of the orginal capable batteryu
That's what I have. Has a jack, a physical home button and back button, a microSD slot. Don't know your expectations but the camera is better than the expensive camera I bought in 2005. I am not ashamed of sending photos to any of my friend. Performance is fine. (Usage: I text, use Google Maps, YouTube and I browse without an issue)
If those are the only apps you use, you might be fine for a while but lots of apps won't support old Android versions which could be problematic if you depend on such apps, e.g. for banking or signing into government services.
That phone is amazing. Headphone jack + Notification Led + great size + good photos + good battery + nice design. I used it until a few months ago. Unfortunately, it was getting somewhat sluggish for normal use.
I got the Google pixel 4a 5g and tbh couldn't be happier. Still, if the S7 was faster I would keep using it.
Similarly, I recently picked up a Sony XZ1 Compact for cheap. It's a brilliantly sized phone with an SD card slot, fingerprint reader, and headphone jack. Turns out flagship processors from 2017 still work just fine, especially when you have ad blockers to keep the nastiest globs of JS from trashing your CPU and battery.
It's a fair bit bigger than my old 2016 iPhone SE, but it's actually smaller than the iPhone Mini.
Headphone jack isn't even a niche. Every phone should have it, and they did, and would still had phonemakers not realized they can make a lot more money selling wireless earbuds. The flagship smartphone market is in a state of reduced competition and vertical integration, and if that ever ends, the jack will come back.
Not sure about everyone else but personally I don't want a headphone jack. I prefer the slimmer phone and increased battery that is only possible once it is removed.
Related - I'm a huge fan of Airpods and only ever want to use my wired headphones with my laptop
I don't know which uses more power, wired or wireless headphones. If the wireless ones use more, idk if the additional volume gained by removing the jack makes up for that, and if so by how much.
All I know is when I want to pass the aux to a newer iPhone, I need a stupid dongle now, which funny enough doesn't work with the old one. And either phone's battery will last all day regardless.
Ip68 is important. I went with xperia 10, and am positively surprised. Fits all the checkboxes and less undesired software than google. I don't have the mandatory search bar in the front screen!
For whatever reason, Xperia phones are given the cold shoulder in these discussions. I secretly wish everyone who has complained about headphone jack/card slot/hole punch/screen size would buy one, and then limit their complaining to only whatever remains that an Xperia phone doesn't provide.
I just cracked the screen on my Pixel 5a yesterday and ordered an Xperia 10 IV this morning to replace it thanks to this thread. I've owned an Xperia Z3 Compact and Z5 Compact previously and was quite happy with them. In fact the Z5C still does bicycle computer duty today. I paid all of $340 for the (brand new) Xperia 10 IV. Not sure how that's not a competitive price for the features and quality you get.
Might be worth having a look at Sony if you want to spend more money for whatever reason. Latest Xperia 1 and 5 both have 3.5mm jacks and SD card slots. There is some preinstalled software (camera apps, Google apps, probably FaceBook) but overall not too-too bad.
Fairphone has a microSD card on their phone. At least there is one slot for a microSD card on my FP2 and FP4.
Source: https://shop.fairphone.com/en/buy-fairphone-4 under specification/storage -> unfold the block "Storage" and under the main storage is : External storage capacity: microSD up to 2TB (SD 3.0)
Because tech companies are about to fill your storage with un-uninstallable bloat.
Built-in storage is the next limitation, if you get past holding your huge-screen no-grip phone securely (like with a pop holder) and the battery that degrades exponentially f(time).
The newer microSD cards are quite fast. Not as fast as built-in storage but fast enough for things like photos and videos if you buy a card with the appropriate speed class. V30 512 GB costs about 40€ including VAT here in Germany.
SD cards are made for cameras etc, and they're good for that. They have sequential RW speeds to match common video formats at 1X speed or burst photo capture. The spec sheets won't tell you how terrible the random write speed is, and even the quoted sequential speeds aren't very good, but that's ok for cameras.
I use a modern high-end SD card from SanDisk as semi-permanent storage in my MBP. If I copy anything to that card that's not a single file, it takes forever. Overall it feels worse than using an old HDD. I have to actually think about what I store on it (mostly videos/photos), so I totally see the reason for wanting more internal storage instead of an SD slot.
That's only sequential write speed. Of course the camera features on a phone will have no problem using an SD card, but other stuff dealing with more random writes to things like SQLite stores (common for phone apps) or directory trees might. Like I said, I've only used an SD card on my Mac, and it was a bad experience, so I'm guessing a bit about phone usage.
With a decent filesystem and a ram buffer the better microsd cards still beat an old 5400rpm 128GB HDD's sequential speed when doing random writes of ~500kB files by a fair margin.
150MB/s is nowhere near SSD speed, but it would saturate a SATA I port.
I'm not sure about that test cause there are too many variables, but in the typical real-world usage of like cloning a git code repo onto my SD card or opening a zip file, it was always painfully slow. I wasn't even benchmarking, I was just trying to get stuff done and not wanting to wait on it. In fact I moved the files to an HDD to do it one time.
Considering 100 GB HDD's came out 20+ years ago that's not very suprising. If people are comparing SD cards to HDD's they're probably comparing to HDD's made in the last 10 years.
OP specifically cited an old hdd in the pre-ssd days. New HDDs are still at best on par with a high end microsd used as internal storage (compare an A2 microsd 'rated' at 2000 but actually getting about 800 iops vs a high end hdd benchmarking at 200-300).
Mounting without a buffer on a badly chosen filesystem in what could well be the M1's abysmally slow sd reader isn't a representative test.
Hare braned formatting tools will also often offset the filesystem by 512 Bytes (necessitating two writes and two reads for one 4k write) or use blocks that aren't 4kiB
FWIW my MacBook Pro is the 2015 Intel version, and my card is HFS+ formatted (Android would use FAT32 or Ext4). I got similar performance with an external USB reader IIRC, but maybe it's time to test again.
USB 2 has very poor latency for this use case and the sd connector lacks the pins for newer sd cards.
A usb 3 UHS III reader would be able to talk to the card at full speed, then it's a matter of convincing the OS to trim it and buffer as if it's an internal hdd. Kinda expensive and pointless to go to that effort to get 2x hdd performance when there are NVME enclosures for cheaper SSDs that have 100x the IOPs though.
Don't flash LineageOS on the Moto G until you get a year of use at least.
My display started failing after 4 months, when I was browsing intensely (and it was hot to the touch but I was using a pop holder), but they wouldn't fix it under warranty because they claimed the software caused the overheating. Screen replacement would have cost 70% of the device new.
That is when I started boycotting smartphones. I have a 7-year-old device (second-hand) and I do not use it for anything security critical.
I have a Moto G6, bought in 2018, that works perfectly well. It replaced a G4 from 2014 that also worked perfectly well until I fried it by plugging it into a custom USB plug that I had wired backwards.
I don't quite get the appeal of high end phones or of changing so frequently. What works, works.
* Moto didn't do stupid things such as break VPN functionality when they released the Android 12 upgrade. This was a failure of pre-prod testing that had to be corrected with a further update a few months later.
I'd rather buy 4 of the Nokia and live with the unwanted big screen rather than having the "right" form factor for 4x the price. That's not even a compromise here.
So very much agree. I just want a pocketable, repairable, physically robust generic phone that does all the basic things at modest cost. The only circumstance under which I'd consider the price tag of a 'premium' phone (notice how corporations have trained everyone into this risible use of language?) is if it ran a real OS and could be used as a primary computing device. But until we reach that Schlarrafenland I would like a smaller version of this Nokia.
If you would trade basically anything for a smaller form factor (including the 3mm headphone jack), you'd just own an iPhone 13 mini by now.
I was on your same boat until I actually owned an iPhone 12 mini. In reality, it sacrificed usability and battery life to achieve that small form factor. I had to bail on the phone because it was physically straining my eyes.
Our phones are basically pocket computers. That's why the screens are big. They're used for everything.
Here's the other thing about the 3mm headphone jack on phones: it's irrelevant to anyone with enough disposable income to afford wireless headphones. I personally own the second generation AirPods Pro, and to be honest they're completely mind-blowing compared to what we thought was possible on a technical level just 5-10 years ago.
Yes, I spent a lot of money on them. Yes, they are perhaps a disposable item considering how difficult/impossible it is to replace their tiny little batteries.
But would I go back to using wired headphones and getting them caught in a bunch of shit? No, not ever. No amount of dollar savings or latency shavings could convince me.
I still use wired headphones on my desktop computer, but that makes a lot more sense in that context. I'm not taking wires onto the train or the bus or the airplane ever again.
The reason budget phones like Nokias have headphone jacks and sometimes even microSD slots is because their customers will not pay for upgraded internal storage or expensive wireless headphones. On the other side of the market, companies like Samsung and Apple can upsell a lot of their flagship phone customers and give them a nudge by removing that port.
It's the same reason why you don't see a number of options packages on a Toyota that you can get on a Lexus that's based on the same vehicle.
Is the removal of the headphone jack a shady tactic? Maybe it is. On the other hand, maybe it's just an obsolete port for that market segment. If I am using an expensive gaming PC, do I need my graphics card to output to VGA or DVI? Of course not. But I might need that if I'm buying a PC to hook up to a 15 year old monitor in a school computer lab.
Headphone jack and OLED display are my only two musts on a new smart phone. Wireless earbuds are scam solution by the problem created by removing the jack. But I really can't go back to IPS on any display in my life where the experience and color matter.
I hate removal of 3.5mm port same as you, but wireless earbuds are not a scam per se. I have some Sony buds which have great sound and there's no more a minute of untangling cable whenever I take them from the bag.
However, that's not the reason to not have headphone jack since it has other uses and can perfectly coexist with bluetooth devices.
I bought the XM3s to try out a while back when my old laptop lacked a jack and offerings for a good OLED are slim in my country, but these headphones just don't sound very good--especially for the price. My IEM cables are thick and don't tangle. I would take untangling 100% over dealing with batteries. I thought ANC would be better than it was, but the passive noise canceling is just as good in real world use--just eliminating low-frequency sounds isn't too useful when you can hear the crying baby either way.
Wired earbuds are obnoxious for phone use cases because the cables get tangled up and cause telephonics - that's when walking/running/touching the cable causes it to send unintended sound into your ears.
For desktop use cases they have the problem that you have to take them off to get up.
Not saying there aren't use cases where it would be preferred, but you can still use truly wireless earbuds with a Bluetooth capable phone/laptop/desktop that has a 3.5mm headphone jack. You can't however jam a plug into a phone without a jack--the option has been removed. There was a time before the headphone jack was dropped that very few people had wireless earbuds or cared, and now that choice to switch was placed on them. When we talk about the ethics of e-waste and repairability, which lasts longer: a pair of IEMs with detachable cables, headphones with detachable cables + replaceable whatever the cup material is made out of, or Bluetooth headphones with battery and a processor? Do my IEMs ever need a firmware upgrade? Are firmware upgrades only deliverable via Android or iOS apps only? Some folks would take the minor inconvenience of having to take off headphones to get up in trade for a product that will last a decade or longer. Some of these earbuds, when you buy them and the battery dies or swells, you have to throw the whole thing out. Instead it feels like the same powers that want us cycling through new smart phones every 3 years, want us replacing the same audio gear just as often.
> You can't however jam a plug into a phone without a jack--the option has been removed.
You can use an adapter? Or a headphone amp with a BT receiver, I have one.
Considering the light weight of wireless headphones it doesn't seem like they're actually a significant ewaste issue, especially since earbuds aren't repairable either.
It is good that larger over ear headphones have replaceable cords, but I don't know, people are too enthusiastic about audiophile headphones - the ones they recommend only work well in perfectly quiet listening environments. In the real world you want noise cancelling, not open ear cans.
You can get in ear monitors with replaceable cords too. You can even get cords for them to make them Bluetooth. Not even expensive ones, like $20 ones.
I think Bose still has wired noise cancelling headphones too.
USB c headphones are dime a dozen as are headphones with lightning adaptares.
But worrying about ewaste from headphones and then buying an Android phone with a piss poor history of long term operating system support is looking at the wrong place
And where were those when I got my current set of headphones in 2006 (!)
Why should I throw away headphones that work perfectly fine (or constantly lose and buy new adapters)?
It's not like removing the headphone jack helped in slimness or battery runtime – the iPod shuffle had a headphone jack and that worked just fine, almost 20 years ago!
You’re right. Why would I rebuy my perfectly good cassette tapes and buy CDs and then later on pay $12/month for a streaming service.
I really shouldn’t have had to get rid of all of SCSI peripherals either.
And Apple really should haven’t abandoned the 32 pin connector either on the first iPod. All of my accessories like my cassette to 30 pin adapter that let me pause and play my iPod from tape deck became obsolete
Btw, did you also complain when you couldn’t use your 32 pin iPod accessories with your Shuffle?
BTW, are you a runner? Do you travel a lot and go through airports? Wired headphones are really irritating and are always getting tangled. These days, when I run outdoors, I leave my phone at home and run exclusively with my cellular watch.
Besides, I have an Apple Watch, iPad, phone and Mac. When I start doing something on one, my Airpods automatically switch.
The AirPod shuffle was also not waterproof and running with that and the wired headphones was irritating especially compared to my Watch with AirPods.
There are plenty of Lightning headphones available
Are you seriously suggesting lightning should replace the headphone jack universally?
We replaced SCSI with SATA. Or music cassettes with CDs.
But the headphone jack is and remains a standard. My audio interfaces have XLR, 6.3 mm or 3.5 mm jacks. My cameras and Zoom recorders use XLR, mini XLR or 3.5 mm. My AV receiver uses 3.5 mm, 6.3 mm or XLR (or banana plugs for passive speakers).
These connectors remain the standard across desktop computers, laptops, audio interfaces, professional condenser microphones, mirrorless cameras, audio recorders, etc.
I don't see a reason to throw away expensive my Sennheiser headphones nor my IEMs, just because a handful of devices in one industry want to force me into paying more money.
> Btw, did you also complain when you couldn’t use your 32 pin iPod accessories with your Shuffle?
No, back then I complained that “made for iPod” required a proprietary port which wasn't compatible with either mini-USB nor micro-USB devices. I never bought, owned, or will own a device with proprietary connectors.
Oddly covid made me finally just give up and get wireless headphones, simply because i'd go to take off the mask and catch my headphones.
Well that and the struggle of finding half decent headphones that fit my needs (decent enough they wouldn't die in a year, but not so expensive i'm going to regret it if they get damaged or lost).
I still hate that I now have headphones that can die, but it is nice to be able to walk around listening to whatever without having to carry my phone on me while I cook/clean/whatever. Not what i paid for them nice....but it's something.
A<something> is probably A52 or A72. These are the models from 2 years ago. A53/A73 from last year don't have headphone jack. And that's industry wide trend.
I checked we have A12s and A21s.
I looked at what is available right now in the A range and the A13 which probably replace the A12 still has an headphone jack.
I absolutely love my watch and mostly stopped using my phone since getting it, but it’s mind blowing that such an expensive and capable device is forced to piggy back off of a phone. Why can’t my watch be supported by MacOS rather than iOS?
I mean, I know why, but it’s crazy. As soon as I find a high quality standalone watch I’ll start to seriously consider not having a phone at all. Or perhaps just not an expensive iPhone.
Watches cover pretty much every use case I have with a phone.
> I don't think anything forces you to keep it after
Many watchOS apps and features require an iPhone in order to be set up. For example: Oceanic+, Waterlamma, Overcast, various Apple Health features, or Sleep Cycle. That's a pretty wide variety from my own experience so I suspect it's quite common.
Until that stops being a thing, we'll need iOS to maintain our watches. In some cases it sort of makes sense because you're using apps that function sort of like a sidecar to iOS apps, not a standalone app. There are several where this isn't the case at all though, and it feels a lot like unnecessary tethering which limits our ability to use an otherwise very capable device on its own.
I think we'll get there; other manufacturers won't have the same incentive to keep watch apps tethered to phones, and I suspect that freedom will become increasingly appealing to Apple Watch users. I could be wrong, but I imagine eventually that limitation will seem too ridiculous to consumers. I don't expect to happen for quite a while still, though.
The Apple Watch Ultra can quite easily (I listen to podcasts, make phone calls, respond to messages, monitor sleep, and always make it through a day and end up charging the next evening), but it's extremely expensive for something that isn't properly standalone.
The other watches seem to come close, but should be topped up pretty much daily (with my level of usage) from what I understand.
You still need a iphone for setup. It’s a hard requirement. But they did semi-recently create a flow where one phone could setup a watch for someone else like you're in a "Family Sharing" group with: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211768
I jumped from apple because at the time, all they had were $1000 giant phones. I jumped back because they released the SE, and my current motorolla was having quite a lot of issues, and I couldn't find anything smaller.
I still have it, and don't plan on buying anything new until I can either 1. get an iphone mini with a usb C jack or 2. find a competitor that's similar sized.
Nice! I've been waiting for something like the FairPhone to show up in the US.
A sweet bonus would be if they also provided and fully supported de-googled image or at least had an option to download the de-googled image after accepting some disclaimers. Or perhaps even set up a public community for phone hackers to help them build said image i.e. crowdsource the work.
An optional large shell for a bigger battery would be a nice upgrade too. My current phone has a 10,000mAh battery and lasts a very long time after disabling background networking on most apps.
Why do none of the good phone options get sold in the US??!? E.g. Sony has one of the few modern smartphones in a reasonable size (xperia 10II (might be the dumbest name though)), and way too few of the bands work in the American market.
As someone who works in e-commerce related to phones, I think a big part of the answer is that the US is not a big market when it comes to selling phones without a contract.
In the EU it's common practice to buy without a contract, whereas this is very rare in the US.
In other words, carriers have way more power in the US.
> I think a big part of the answer is that the US is not a big market when it comes to selling phones without a contract.
If that was true, then Wal-Mart wouldn't bother carrying every pre-paid SIM under the sun in the same section of the store that sells shitbox Motorolas, nor would Amazon bother carrying the same exact Motorola shitboxen - all unlocked, mind you.
I can and will complain when the "abundance of choice" here is overwhelmingly geared toward ad delivery rather than actual long-term ownership and usefulness.
We have decent variety in the US, but I think it's fair to want phones for specific purposes that aren't generally served here. The more repairable phones are hard to come by, and as someone who likes trying alternative OSes the phones that seem best served by e.g. Ubuntu Touch (Volla Phone and Fairphone) aren't available.
There are plenty devices that work well with UT and are available in the US, e.g Google Pixel 3a/3a XL. Mentioned devices still have an Android Kernel and many limitations. Waydroid on the Volla phone isn't stable, Ubports itself mediocre compared to SailfishOS and suffers from competing for developer time over other Linux on Mobile OSses.
You're overestimating the Volla phone and Fairphone, 1st one still doesn't support VoLTE which I heard is essential in the US, 2nd thing isn't even recommended by UT.[1]
Either go with an Xperia + SailfishOS [2] if you want more than a toy or Pinephone + PmOs [3] if you love to tinker on your daily driver. Both have VoLTE support.
> FP2 is the second device on the "promoted" devices page. That feels like a recommendation?
The FP2 is a very old device lacking some features and probably got recommendation back then because other devices were worse. https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/device/fp2
Otherwise I'd also could have recommended the Nexus5.
On FOSDEM 2023 Ubports developers didn't show off this old phone, either.
Plenty of models that can work with all frequencies, so I am not sure if that's enough of a justification.
Anyway, your point reminds me that the my "dream smartphone" would be one with no cellular connectivity at all. I'm still waiting for some company to start producing a keychain-sized 4G (or 5G) hotspot with an eSIM, which (I hope) would lead to more people asking for the return of the iPod Touch and for something equivalent in the Android/Mobile Linux/Windows world.
> Anyway, your point reminds me that the my "dream smartphone" would be one with no cellular connectivity at all.
You mean a PDA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_digital_assistant)? Modern smartphones are basically a PDA with cellular connectivity (this is more obvious with early smartphones like the Treo 650), so if you take out the cellular connectivity, what you have is once again a PDA.
Personally what I want is a dumb flip phone which can act as a 4/5G hotspot for my 7" tablet.
When I'm on the internet, browing maps, reading books, I find a phone screen too small. But I don't want a massive phone.
A dumb flip phone that lasts a week on a charge so that I can camp with it, combined with a 7" tablet that I can throw in my bag, for when I want to read, but doesn't need cellular connectivity so that it lasts without spying on me.
I don't think this distinction makes any sense nowadays. A "smartphone without cellular connectivity" is a lot more than a "Personal Digital Assistant". Could a Palm Pilot stream music? Did it have an app store? GPS? Microphone? Could it make VoIP calls? Could it connect with an external modem so that it could work as a softphone?
If I had to plug a surf stick every time on the device to use it as a phone or to connect to the internet via 4G, then of course I'd rather have it integrated with the device already. Wireless connection is not a nice-to-have, it is the key feature.
Eh, getting the device out of my pocket, turning it on, activating the wireless connection, remembering to charge it every day vs. just plug it in. And on top of that my phone can already give me a hot spot (with bad battery life). Not quite sure I see any big advantage.
>turning it on, activating the wireless connection.
Can be managed by bluetooth LE.
> remembering to charge it every day
People do it for their smartwatches. Also, making it in a key fob format would lend itself naturally to some nice key holder accessory where you can charge it (wirelessly, even?) or it can have a spring-loaded usb port to charge in your car.
Non-US corporations, of any size, have no duties towards US residents whatsoever. It's entirely their choice whether or not to enter foreign markets. Americans are not default humans, and they do not decide what products other nations' companies offer them.
Not a duty to the people buying, a duty to the owners of the company. To make a profit out of easy opportunities. Or justify not doing it, to the owners.
And the duty to owners is what you said yourself in your other comment, so I'm not sure why you seem to not understand what I'm saying.
You are making the exact blinkered US-centric assumptions I'm poking fun at. US companies may be duty bound to put increasing owner value above other considerations, but fortunately out here in most of the world, your law does not apply to us, and our laws are not modelled on yours.
I can assure you, for example, that in many nations companies can legally have many reasons for choosing not to export a product to a specific country that don't make any reference to profit. Again: all you know is your laws. Your laws are not our laws. It's a big world out here, not encompassed by the mores of the nation you just happen to come from.
> Plenty of models that can work with all frequencies, so I am not sure if that's enough of a justification.
Only some chipsets work with all frequencies and when 90% of the population of the planet all use the same settings why spend the cost to cover the other 10% which would double your chipset costs but would unlikely increase sales.
Americans bully each other over the colour of their chat bubbles because apparently not buying iPhone makes you appear poor. There are lots of justifications to avoid increasing costs to try selling to the Americans.
Hum, maybe I meant the size of a key fob? It could be a bit thicker, I'd guess it would hold something like ~2000mAh. For just the radio, and for something that would be used only while on the go (otherwise you can use your home/your job connection), why couldn't that work as long as a feature phone, which could go for a week in a single charge?
In my experience with hotspots on the go, it's having to maintain the WiFi AP that kills their battery fast. Maybe there's a better protocol to run between the hotspot and other devices, although you'd need one that would also allow for 5G speeds.
- WiFi AP in super reduced Rx/Tx power mode when not charging. The only requirement here is that signal is strong within a 3ft radius from the hotspot, and acceptable on a 6ft radius. It really shouldn't need more than that.
- WiFi AP in normal mode when charging.
- WiFi AP completely shut-off when the paired device reports that they have access to any other trusted wifi network.
My idea here is that for me at least, mobile data is truly a connection of last resort. Almost anywhere I go there is WiFi available. And the places where there isn't, perhaps I simply don't need an always-on fast connection?
I feel like I recall reading that getting some certification here is more annoying than it should be, which means some devices are just straight up not brought here - curious if anyone knows if this is true or not.
Does it? I thought Americans were still using alternative frequencies to everyone else.
[Edit]
It appears that the US doesn't overlap with the majority of the world for most of the ranges, except for one band at the top which overlaps with Japan/Korea.
At this point frequency compatibility is purely a firmware setting, no? It seems like every 5G (and even 4G) phone these days supports every frequency on a chipset level and just enables/disables some of them depending on the intended region.
Honestly it would be a huge selling point for this device if it had excellent custom ROM support on top of the repairability. There are phones from 2015 still being supported today by Lineage.
Lineage: My S5 (klte, 2014)[0] still works and is still getting updated last I checked.
I did buy a newer phone a few months ago, but I'm keeping the S5 around as a spare. In fact my previous S2 is still working as well, but I don't think it receives updates (also it has no battery right now - luckily it can operate with just power plugged in).
I still have my original LG V20 and I bought the international/dual-sim version to be my main. It's like the Thinkpad of smartphones. Along with my T480, it's on the best gadgets I've owned.
They aren't responsive to Americans. I used a reshipper and they wouldn't forward loose batteries, FP was unresponsive and we had to throw away batteries because they couldn't be returned or forwarded. Shame....
Otherwise FP works fine with Google Fi and T-Mobile in the US. Maybe not the best coverage but worth it to be able to swap parts easily.
I think they would be perfect. I was hoping they had a rom for my phone but I could only find one supporting a really old version. If they partnered with Nokia to build supported images for their phones that would be incredible.
I have an old Nokia smartphone. I barely use it as a phone; really it's just for 2FA, when the provider insists on SMS for 2FA.
An inexpensive Android device which is hackable and exposes GPIO pins would make an interesting robotics platform. If this device supports replaceable CPU, then perhaps it also exposes GPIO.
I ran a Samsung S5 (?) like this many, many years ago and it was pretty cool but holy crap it was a beast. My jeans pockets started to stretch out from carrying it, and it was impossible to keep it in a jacket pocket at all.
I did similar with a galaxy S4 (third party battery w/special back case to accommodate the larger size). Worked nice but eventually the battery bulged.
The tradeoff with replaceable batteries is if when you swap the phone loses track of time until finding a cell tower. Fine if in range but a risk when hiking far away, and might also propagate the wrong time to your smartwatch.
That's quite a line-up they have! I have a Elephone S3 pro, two day battery is really great when traveling, no worries. I'll strongly consider an Ulephone next..
I'm happy about this! But, while repairability is always great, a major (maybe the biggest) part of phone obsolescence is due to software. 2 or 3 years of updates are a joke, Apple does up to 8.
The best hope here is that this phone's repairability will attract a software hacking community to provide inofficial updates, but what a terrible thing to have to rely on. Besides: Phones by other brands like Pocophone are plenty repairable, being made for the indian market, and have good community software support.
The real next innovation for an Android device maker will be providing at least 5 years of updates (I'm well aware of the challenges involved, but these are not that hard, make it so).
Wish these chip makers would start playing nice with the Linux kernel already. They should me mainlining their drivers before their products are even releaaed.
And they hated him because he spoke the truth. Phones being disposable is something we just accepted. A POTS phone bought in the 1890’s would work without modification until the 1990’s and still will work today with an adapter. Why? Because we didn’t have continuous protocol churn. If it was invented today in 2 years there would POTS/2, KETTLE, and a draft spec for POTS2.1 written on a used napkin but somehow already in production at Google.
Our stuff turns to trash because everything is built on shifting sand with no thoughts given to supporting it long term and for some reason we like it this way.
Do y’all not long for a future where you can get off the upgrade treadmill because the developer facing API is fixed? Not backwards compatible because that implies you ought to be moving to the next, like once it works you can call it done.
But new shiny thing! Alright, that’s great. Is it so
much better that you want everyone in the world to throw away their old devices? Probably eventually but you’re daft if you think those kinds of events should be every few years. God can you imagine if we did that to cars? Sorry, Honda dropped support for your Civic, you can keep using it for a bit but in a year we’re gonna change the roads and it will be undrivable.
Some of it is to do with your so-called "protocol churn" but also the fact that a phone from the 1890's is order of magnitude less complex than a modern smartphone. It's really a ridiculous argument.
Many of the required updates to a device are security related, perhaps they could write said software better so that there are never bugs...but software is complicated now; millions & millions of lines or code and dozens and dozens of different chips. It's better to make phones much more recyclable than it is to make them last longer.
And to that I point to cars, devices that also have millions of lines of code (some luxury cars apparently have 100 million lines of code) that drive security and safety critical systems. They are also an amalgam of far far more parts and chips than any phone is.
But here’s the thing, the complexity isn’t even relevant, the thing that would make phones last for ages is just committing to some basic set of hardware interfaces. You can pull an ancient desktop out of your basement and run the latest Linux on it and you ought to be able to do that with phones too.
> Do y’all not long for a future where you can get off the upgrade treadmill because the developer facing API is fixed? Not backwards compatible because that implies you ought to be moving to the next, like once it works you can call it done.
No. We want modern APIs that prioritize modern concerns, usable with modern toolkits and frameworks and taking advantage of modern programming principles. Even if we had an API intended for longevity, once its creators die we will tear it down completely and replace it with something that suits our newer-therefore-better tastes. For them it was the cornerstone of an industry's worth of innovations; for us it is but a millstone around our necks and must be replaced. I know this because I've seen it happen many times. Once the people who've staked their entire careers building upon $THING, and developed some truly remarkable software, grow old, up rises the chorus of people who are sick of $THING, who can't even fathom how anyone got anything done with $THING, who give talks at conferences about how $THING is fundamentally broken and how we should be using $NEWTHING instead. And these voices grow louder, their chants more thunderous, until it's generally accepted that $THING is a relic and $NEWTHING is the future. Even the things we thought would last forever -- POSIX, C, X11 -- are now, if anything, well past their expiration date.
This is how things are. This is how they must be. There is naught we can do but be like a Japanese person observing the seasons, contemplating, with some sadness, the constant change and the endless cycle of death and rebirth.
There's such a thing as lasting too long without deprecating old cruft.
POSIX isn't too bad, but is still kind of a mess. C has a lot of broken features. X11 doesn't fit how hardware works these days and trying to force it with extensions isn't a good fix.
There are real problems with faddishness on the scale of 5-10 years, but there are also real improvements that happen across decades, and if 40 year old tools don't get updated then they should be replaced.
But you forgot to mention how this requires ignoring the old devices. Can X11 replacement not work on old hardware? What critical improvement in POSIX would mandate the same?
Unless that's slowly=unusable that's not a good example (would also help if this poor support was a result of some "modern programming principles"). Otherwise that's way too early to retire in Japan
I expect lifetime updates. I get that on my real computers: my Linux distribution doesn't suddenly stop updating just because my computer is 3+ years old. Why should phones be any different? You're telling me these trillion dollar corporations can't match the quality of service of Linux distribution maintainers?
> I expect lifetime updates. I get that on my real computers: my Linux distribution doesn't suddenly stop updating just because my computer is 3+ years old. Why should phones be any different?
No other desktop OS works like that. Both Windows and MacOS sunset support for devices. Admittedly - after much, much more time than phone OSes, though.
> You're telling me these trillion dollar corporations can't match the quality of service of Linux distribution maintainers?
I mean, "quality" means different things. There's a reason the "year of the linux desktop" still hasn't arrived.
But yes - volunteers do things that corporations won't.
> Both Windows and MacOS sunset support for devices
Yeah, and they suck too because of it.
Truth is there should be no need for them to "support" anything. All they have to do was get their device driver code into the Linux kernel where it belongs. Then everything would work out of the box and the Linux community would support their device for them. If things change, the community will fix their driver for them. If no one does, it's because nobody's using it.
But no, they just need to keep making shitty proprietary software instead. As a result I get insanity like "manufacturer applications" that only work in a single version of Windows to control stuff like laptop fans, power profiles and keyboard LEDs. Software so shoddy it takes over a minute to display a window on the screen. I had to reverse engineer that crap and write a Linux version to make my system usable again. I went as far as my skills allowed me to go and the result was free software that will work forever. That's what quality means to me.
> "quality" means different things.
"Quality" here means shipping software continuously to a diverse set of users and having things not break down just because they'd really enjoy it if we bought their latest flagship phone. I get that on my Linux laptop, why not on a phone?
> But yes - volunteers do things that corporations won't.
Yes, and these corporations should be profoundly ashamed of themselves that they can't match what a bunch of "volunteers" provide even though they're worth billions.
Some professionals. It certainly seems to be the rule rather than the exception with these corporations. The copyright industry literally can't match the quality of the output of a bunch of "pirates" either: while they're streaming to their paying customers some shitty compressed video with artifacts in 95% black frames, "pirates" get blu-ray remuxes in convenient DRM-free formats.
> No other desktop OS works like that. Both Windows and MacOS sunset support for devices. Admittedly - after much, much more time than phone OSes, though.
10x more. Windows 10 runs on computers that are 20 years old.
You have to remember billions of people don't live in the west, they live in india or africa where they use equipment much longer.
10 - 20 years is a real lifespan for cars and appliances, it is also realistic for electronics (leaving batteries aside).
The pace of improvement for computer hardware is slowing, so this issue will become more relevant
> 10x more. Windows 10 runs on computers that are 20 years old.
1. The last Apple phone that lost OS suppose was the iPhone 6. Apple supported that phone for 7 years.
2. I'm skeptical that Windows 10 would run on many Pentium IV computers. Windows 8 only came out 11 years ago. And I remember a whole lot of computers out there that couldn't run that at the time.
I feel a bit vidicated by that video. In the beginning, he basically says that he needed to run the rare last variant of the Pentium IV to get it to work and that most Pentium IVs would be impossible to get it to work.
Pretty impressive that it's possible at all, though.
Do you? Or do you just say/write/comment that you expect that? Actual expecting would be refusing to buy a phone that didn't provide said updates. Otherwise it's just an HN comment, with no (real, physical, 'economic') role to play, certainly not that of an expectation.
I absolutely do. I always buy top of the line flagship phones and use them until they literally break down. Well, I used to do that: my next phone will be an iPhone because of stupid problems like this.
Truth is Android's situation used to be tolerable for me because I would always trash the official OS and run something like LineageOS instead. Unfortunately, that will become impossible due to hardware remote attestation. Therefore, I no longer care about Android phones unless they run postmarketOS.
Yes, EU needs to step in and deal with the software lifespan problems on Android just as they have with ports and repairability on Apple. It is obvious that this is a market failure leading to negative social outcomes (e-waste) and phone vendors clearly are not going to deal with it on their own.
This really should be from date-of-purchase and not date-of-launch as well. Otherwise you're leaving refurbished phones out in the cold too. We should be encouraging refurbishment and not giving those users a worse experience - if anything the law should attempt to favor them, they're doing the thing we want.
Requiring bootloader unlock when support ceases is another fantastic idea someone pointed out - and that one will hit Apple too honestly. But if you're not going to support the thing then at least let someone else do it.
That actually makes me really happy to hear tbh. Unpopular take but the support story scared me away from android for my second smartphone (and I buy for 5+ years), it just was a real mess with my cheapo Moto G Falcon, say what you want about iOS lockdowns (as a nerd/dev I think there are logical ideas there taken to sometimes-unpopular conclusions around eg app sandboxing, app store root-of-trust freedom vs permissioning social enforceability, etc) but $50 for a battery replacement plus a couple otterbox cases for 5+ years of ownership (with my 8+) has been a very reasonable overall package.
I don't mind "bundling" service into the initial purchase if that guarantees it'll be there and I also get a premium phone with walk-in service with first-party repair staff and parts (not at+t store or w/e either) etc. I've shifted to (lower-end/refurb) apple devices for a few things and I know the TCO involved and I find it favorable overall given the expected longevity and service levels and device quality.
But there needs to be more than one "gets 5+ years of solid support" option on the market so that shitty point A doesn't lead to a lock-in on shitty point B. At the end of the day competition is what keeps the ecosystems relatively honest and having options if Apple does a dick move is always welcome too.
I expect manufacturers not to offer bad options like a 150 € phone with 3 years of updates. Give me a 200€ phone with 5 years? Or a 10€ service fee per year of updates.
The problem is: you and ten other persons might genuinely pay for that after three years (also considering the specs of this thing). In silicon valley, I suspect devs can't open up their env for that money and still put food on the table in the evening after paying for their morning outdoor coffee and rent.
I'm curious how much work honestly goes into these updates, though. How many patches do they maintain on top of Android that security updates would cause them to need to fix their patches again? Or how many parts of Android are even changed by those updates in a given month? I don't really have any idea of either proportion. How much money would it require us to pool to get one month longer security updates? One year?
May be something to ask Fairphone, they seem like the type of business that might be willing to share this for the purpose of pressuring the market to offer the support after a successful crowdfunding campaign.
Why they don't support heodphones? Because Google needs to sell matching Pixel buds that can't be repaired due to size and operate on flaky Bluetooth connections with questionable sound quality.
That'd just get lost. Such small devices constantly get lost, especially when not using the device for fun but e.g., to use the phone as an LTC reader to check timecode generators on set. (or even as cheap ToD LTC generator for multicam work).
The headphone jack is not just for music, it's a versatile industry-standard connector. Being able to swap the same devices between a phone, zoom audio recorders, the monitoring out of my Ninja V, or audio interfaces when editing is a valuable advantage of a standard connector.
And the entire rest of the industry continues using 3.5mm, 6.3mm and XLR. It's only a handful of phones that try to force you into wasting your money.
I feel your pain, and I just buy bunch of them so I always have some.
> It's only a handful of phones that try to force you into wasting your money.
companies have marketing department, who probably found that customers more interested in slick design and Ok to use usb-c buds or bluetooth headphones.
LG used to produce phones with 3.5 and audiophile signal quality, now they are out of business.
> I feel your pain, and I just buy bunch of them so I always have some.
Sadly many don't support all the features of a headphone port, meaning TRRS with control, allowing you to use an external microphone and play/pause/skip buttons as well.
I'm using some tech that actually makes use of that, specifically as timecode reader for AV stuff.
I need my phone to be a modern version of star trek's tricorder, not a piece of jewelry.
Wait, OnePlus provides 9 years of security updates? That is huge!
Apple’s update policy (and history) is one of the two reasons I own an iPhone (SE). The other reason being all the unremovable junkware I’ve had on Android phones in the past.
Next time I need to upgrade (hopefully 6+ years in the future), I will take another look at OnePlus.
When you optimize around something that's more of an interest than a need, you get results that don't make a lot of sense, like a stick-shift electric car. The Indian market has a legitimate reason for repairable phones, so they have a solution that makes sense in terms of cost and usability.
> 2 or 3 years of updates are a joke, Apple does up to 8.
Saying an iPhone can handle 8 generations of iOS updates is a bigger joke. I’m a cheapskate that somehow uses Apple phones, and I’ll let you know after 2-3 major OS updates the performance is always severely diminished.
My dad uses a 5yr old iPhone X and it runs perfectly fine with the latest software updates. The baseline CPU (and RAM) quality has improved dramatically since around then where it's not a big deal to upgrade. Or maybe the software has matured enough.
My mom had a 3yr old mid-teir Samsung phone and tablet (combo deals they always sell) they both became unusable when it upgraded to the latest version of Samsung basterdized Android 2 months ago. But I'm sure Pixels are more similar to iPhone.
Sadly most Android come with vendor crippled software. Maybe the >2yr crippling is the goal for them.
If you make a claim like this can you provide details?
My anecdote: I'm using an iPhone XS that has seen 4+ years of use across iOS 12-16 (5 major versions) and I haven't noticed any real consistent slowdowns. I've seen the occasional clear bug shipped where performance dips from time to time doing certain specific things, but these seem to be resolved upon the next update or two usually.
Are you sure it's not just that the battery has aged after a few years? I've of heard many people (myself included) getting their battery replaced and saying their phone felt like new.
I use an 6S that I bought in 2016. It is on its 4th battery replacement. So I've got almost a full 7 years out of it. It won't receive any major iOS updates anymore, but will still receive security updates. I'd continue down this path for another 2 years, but as a non-iCloud user I want iCloud Advanced Data Protection to sync Notes and Messages.
I felt this way with the 6 because it got downthrottled into the ditch with iOS-whatever, but my 5 (which I actually got after the 6 cause it, uh, accidentally broke) was a perfect phone its entire support life. I even kept it past Apple support limits and only left it when my cell carrier stopped working with it entirely.
No. Your phone becomes damaged (DRAM and flash and performance problems due to battery) but the phone itself usually is fine.
I just got a whole new phone out of a failed battery replacement for my iphone 8+ - my guess is the OS installation was just too damaged to accept the battery pairing process and it just flaked out, it was bootlooping and refusing to charge the battery. I got a refurbished 8+ in consideration, and it's actually great despite being a 5.5 year old release at this point. It's not the actual performance level of the phone itself that's the problem, they just tend to become worn out at a hardware level and the phone tends to become unstable. It was showing all kinds of weird software quirks (discord "send" button would fail to appear when posting a meme despite the image being in the send box, and you'd have to tab back and forth to a different server before the "send" button would show up, etc) and all of that vanished as soon as I got a new phone.
While I can't prove it, my opinion is it would have come back over time even if I did a factory reset, perhaps even worse. Because I had the same experience with my previous phone, an Android Moto G first-gen (Falcon), which I owned for just about 5 years exactly (early 2014-early 2019). The phone simply got more and more unstable due to bad flash/RAM and perhaps some glitching caused by the weak battery... first I'd have to factory reset once in a while, then the whole OS would need to be reflashed, finally the installs were being corrupted less than a day after a clean reflash.
The practical lifespan of the DRAM/flash in a phone seems to be about 3-4 years in my experience and by the time things hit 5 years they are so damaged they are unusable even after fresh OS installs/etc. The timeframe is identical for both my Moto G and the 8+, I bet if I'd continued to use the same handset for another year it'd have started corrupting itself even after a factory reset/etc. I don't know why that would be - whether phones are writing certain flash cells too much and they're burning out, or what. Obviously PC SSDs and DRAM can be fine for a decade.
I am very onboard with some degree of refurbishment being a critical element of long-term phone repair after these experiences. They start to go janky at 3 years, by 4 years it is becoming a problem, and by 5 years it is unusable. Even with clean software installs (factory resets or OS image reflashes), it just is not stable. The Moto G I could write off as a fluke, it was a cheap phone to begin with, maybe it was just janky. The 8+ failing in the exact same ways on a very similar timeline (about 6-12 months later due to higher hardware quality) says to me that DRAM or flash is just wearing out over time. If it was just battery performance problems then it wouldn't have failed to re-pair after a fresh battery was installed either.
Again, now that I've got a refurbished 8+ in like new condition, I can tell you it's still perfectly fine as a phone/piece of hardware, it's more than fine enough to run discord and apollo and gmail and banking and all the other things I do day-to-day. It's not the hardware spec that's the problem, it's a particular unit becoming worn and failing.
This also goes to show the importance of long-term software support... I have basically a new handset on 5.5 year old hardware. It will probably be 10 years old before I retire it. iOS is insanely good about that, I am still receiving full software updates at this point, although probably not for that much longer. Show me an Android phone with 6-7 years of feature updates, please. Most androids won't even get security updates for half of that. That is what keeps the e-waste down. I'm sure my handset will be diagnosed and refurbished and sent out to someone else for replacement too, or sent to APMA region for those customers, the circle of life.
I paid $725 for the phone originally (refurb) and $49 for the replacement, and I just got my third otterbox commuter for the replacement case, probably will kill a 4th one over the life of this handset too. So all-up I am expecting to be around $900 for all hardware expenditures for this phone for 9-10 years. Not too awful overall.
Does anyone notice the irony of it being partly repairable, while offering just three years of security updates, after which you basically have to throw the thing away? The repairability sounds nice, but it is very irrelevant compared to the limited software updates. Imagine buying a Windows laptop and only receiving three years of security updates. (I know, most other phones aren't better.)
It would have been better if they offered slightly longer security updates in exchange of only letting you change the battery. Other things probably won't break anyway before the security updates stop coming in.
> while offering just three years of security updates, after which you basically have to throw the thing away
Nope, you don't.
It's just that somehow techies seem to have gotten this meme into their heads that an unpatched life isn't worth living. Can't update my phone within 1 microsecond of a patch being released? I guess I might as well just die. Much safer than risking the << 1% chance of getting malware on it, and everyone knows malware is worse than hell.
> The repairability sounds nice, but it is very irrelevant compared to the limited software updates.
I had an Android phone that didn't have OS updates for several years and... it was just fine. I was only forced to finally upgrade to get better reception on other bands it didn't support. If the hardware could keep pace I would've easily kept it with its current OS for another half decade, until apps just got so bloated that I couldn't use it anymore.
> Imagine buying a Windows laptop and only receiving three years of security updates
That's a bad analogy for so many reasons. Android's security is WAY more hardened than Windows's, your phone's apps (including your [likely] Chrome browser) would still get security updates, and even with Windows this isn't as horrifying as you're suggesting. (I've done much worse.)
I build Android apps for a living. Let me tell you, the majority of users are on "outdated" OS versions. You have to support 5-7 years of Android releases to cover a substantial part of the Android user base. The app I'm currently working on requires a minimum version of 6.0 — this came out in 2015. I still test my apps on a Nexus 5.
Many people would buy a phone that will never receive a single update. The software it came with is the only software it'll ever run. And they're fine with that. They see software updates as an annoyance and I fully understand them.
I you look at that data then you can see that the oldest version with any significant usage is v8.1. But even that is quite low, and you might do quite well in not supporting anything older than v9.0.
What management? I decide this kind of thing myself in that project. The app is open-source and for a nonprofit. I don't see much reasoning to drop Android versions above 6.0 because there aren't that many API changes that would make a difference for my case. It's not like supporting 4.x or 2.x, the "you gotta carry the reimplementation of a substantial part of the UI framework with your app" kind of annoyance. The app in question doesn't even use appcompat. The apk is around 3 megabytes.
> Tell your management that usage of v6.0 is as good as gone, and you are wasting resources in doing any work to keep support for it
How do you say this without any knowledge whatsoever about the type of app they work on, or their target audience? v6.0 alone is almost 2% of users based on that chart. In fact if you include everything before v8.1, you seem to get something like 8% of users. What if their app, say, provides the poorest people access to public transportation? Would you really just drop 8% of people on the floor in any scenario?
Exactly this. Even if your demographic is the same as the chart, dropping 2% of users can be the difference between profit and destruction. Maybe it's margins that you'll save but keeping those users, possibly bad reviews, maybe market share over a competitor, there's plenty of reasons supporting older versions is not a definitive "waste."
Is it a pain to support old SDKs? Yep. But that doesn't make it inherently a waste of time to do so.
You have to weigh in the quality improvement of the app that you can provide by not limiting yourself to old apis, and also the resources that you can spend on improvement now that you aren't spending as much effort doing support for old versions.
>> Can't update my phone within 1 microsecond of a patch being released? I guess I might as well just die. Much safer than risking the << 1% chance of getting malware on it, and everyone knows malware is worse than hell.
Malware can indeed be worse than hell. Have you ever had your bank account hacked? Or your email account broken into? Or your identity stolen and had to deal with dozens of credit cards being registered and then hit the limit under your name?
I’ve had friends (and family) deal with such things, and you know what? I’ll do anything to minimize the risk for myself, including throwing away an expensive gadget that can no longer receive updates for some totally arbitrary reason.
> Malware can indeed be worse than hell. Have you ever had your bank account hacked? Or your email account broken into? Or your identity stolen and had to deal with dozens of credit cards being registered and then hit the limit under your name?
To be honest - as an older-phone user, that's part of why I never access email on my phone, nor my bank account. I see my phone as something that's basically insecure, and take into account (no pun intended) the possibility that other people will be able to access its contents.
I realize, though, that many old phone users don't hold this view necessarily.
My phone has a large amount of software written and installed by Google and by Xiaomi, both of which I absolutely don't trust; and it also has software which I do trust - but trust to spy on me, like Meta's WhatsApp...
> Malware can indeed be worse than hell. Have you ever had your bank account hacked? Or your email account broken into? Or your identity stolen [...]
I've never been to hell (I think?)... I suppose I can't assume you're the same, but I'm pretty confident I would much rather deal with, say, a stolen identity, than go to hell.
Most people's risk-tolerances including many life-threatening dangers they face on a daily basis... like getting hit while jaywalking, having their phone igniting in their hands and burning their homes down, dying in an earthquake, etc. If you can't tolerate the same risks as most other people, then great, you have lots of alternative options to choose from. It's not like Nokia is preventing you from imposing your will on yourself or your family.
> It's just that somehow techies seem to have gotten this meme into their heads that an unpatched life isn't worth living.
Do you wish to hear the endless stream of CVE numbers that allow remote exploitation, including Wi-Fi and Bluetooth module vulnerabilities that don't even require an active Internet connection?
Have you ever tried to expose a new server to the Internet and watched the endless barrage of probing requests coming seemingly within seconds?
Have you been a target of DDoS coming from unpatched appliances and modems?
The only place for an unpatched phone is offline, within Farady cage.
Well, I agree partly. I'm also on a phone which doesn't receive security updates anymore. I don't know how risky that is. However, it seems clear that longer security updates are much more desirable than increased repairability. Most people won't need to repair their phone, apart from changing the battery after a few years. Especially not when it is a cheap phone anyway, where any repair cost is likely higher than a new phone would be. So a device with longer security updates seems still better than this increased repairability.
I don't see a 3-year security update as an irony. In fact, I see that as a great gesture for the budget price point android phone has a 3-year software warranty. Nokia probably have done research on this pricing segment to know that the averaging budget android device lifecycle is about 2.x years and guarantee a 3 year security update to make the device more worthy, comparing to other brands at this price point. By the way, NO ONE offer unlimited years of security updates, even Apple iPhone as the gold standard only provide security updates up to 6-7 years but Apple charges at least 2 times of the price.
I started programming in the 90s. The other day I found some of the first programs I ever wrote (in qbasic), and ran them in qbasic 4.5 on dosbox on my Mac laptop.
I was running an arm laptop, emulating a modern x86_64 chip, emulating an old i386 chip, interpreting a qbasic program unmodified from 30 years ago. Sound, graphics modes, input events - all of it worked perfectly. I didn’t try running it on windows, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it just worked there too without even needing dosbox.
Backwards compatibility on phones is a joke. Decades of phone software is totally lost to history, impossible to download or run anywhere.
The web isn’t much better because old websites go down. But at least modern browsers will still happily render webpages from the 90s just fine.
The point of fixing security holes is sometimes to make it not possible to do certain things which applications may have been written to "expect". There's a bit of not being able to have your cake and eat it.
Tosh. The fact you can’t download old iOS apps from the App Store, nor can you run them on modern 64 bit iOS devices has nothing to do with apps using undocumented APIs.
What about documented APIs that are flawed? I'm not an iOS programmer but let's imagine an API that requires an SHA-1 signature ... so those become insecure and the API is dropped - or an API that offers an SSLv1 connection and that's insecure so it gets dropped. The only way to emulate that would be to re-introduce the problem.
Perhaps these are bad examples and the real reasons for Apple to not support something is not so neat - I don't know about them - but FWIW my experience from working at Nokia was that compatibility was a big drag to being able to implement improvements and it's a huge effort to maintain it that doesn't come for free.
I see what you're saying - that we can't run old iOS apps on our phones because some features / APIs have been removed. And there are some APIs which have been taken out, and Apple has forced developers using them to update their apps.
The two most ready examples of this sort of thing are that (I think) 32 bit apps aren't supported any more, and that the HID guidelines specified the fixed pixel dimensions that iphones were. That isn't something you can assume any more.
But if I want to run an ancient version of flappy bird, I don't really need it to run on my modern iphone - just like I don't need modern windows to support 1991 QBASIC in order to run my old qbasic programs from when I was a kid. We need two things:
- Access to old versions of iOS app binaries. I have no idea how to get these, if they're available anywhere in the app store (or can be backed up), or if apple deletes them.
- Access to an early iOS simulator / emulator to run those apps on. Apple has had fantastic iOS simulators going all the way back to the first app store releases, though I think they only ran ios apps compiled to x86.
It'd be great if there was a way to run old ios games and apps and things. I don't want those heady days of early ios apps to be lost to history.
Who do we have to thank for this? Apple or Google? The old Symbian app were cool enough that could run on different versions of the OS, they were basically jar packages.
The switch to App Stores and the too fragmented OS updates made everything just a mess like this
You are absolutely right and it is shameful what consumers simply accept for software support periods! I try to buy things that I hope/expect to work for 10, maybe 20 years. Appliances, cars, tvs, and electronics including phones. Yet software support for all these things lasts a mere 3-5 years if that. I have an iPad1 original that still works great! But software support ended a year after I bought it—over a decade ago. Totally unacceptable. I hate how the hardware industry forces obsolescence by cutting off software support for devices in the field. Nobody should be grateful for a mere 3 years of software support.
The companies just do what people want - new phones, more capabilities. People will pay up for new physical gadget but not support, so the money is only coming from making new models. The number of old models gets bigger all the time but the number of people updating the software cannot because they have to be paid for by the sales of the new models.
Well a lot of people are looking at Windows 11, which launched in 2021 and required a ~2018 CPU. Especially when Intel's 8th generation chips were barely different from the ones going back years. Chips close to that cutoff are going to have awful support lifetimes from microsoft if you can't get updates past 2025.
This is looking at it from the wrong side though. It isn't the hardware vendor ending support there, it's the software vendor.
PC hardware can be supported indefinitely because it's documented, more or less. Windows uses a hardware abstraction layer so the old drivers can be used with the new Windows. Hardware only stops being supported by Windows when Microsoft decides it, not Intel or NVIDIA or Broadcom.
The Linux community writes open source drivers, or the hardware makers do themselves, so they can be updated by the kernel developers when they make changes to the kernel and continue to work. You can put run the latest Linux kernel on a PC from 1995.
But for phones the hardware support comes as an opaque binary blob tied to a specific kernel version, so when that kernel falls out of support, the hardware is slag unless someone has the resources to reverse engineer it. Which they might if it was just the wireless or just the storage controller, but it's not.
Win11's line in the sand requirements aren't nearly as "bad" as Vista/XP/ME in terms of disruption. Honestly I wish they'd gone a step further and required ECC support.
> Honestly I wish they'd gone a step further and required ECC support.
That's a non-starter because Intel upsell ECC as an "enterprise"/"prosumer" feature and regular, non-high-end/workstation/server processors don't support ECC. Sadly Intel is still the CPU market leader, so that would have meant Win11 not being able to run on most existing hardware at launch.
Yes, how different are Intel's consumer CPUs from their Enterprise? Is ECC disabled physically in their CPUs or is it simply a software limitation?
AMD's CPUs have ECC support but the motherboard manufacturers don't support it.
Intel has been shipping TPMs in CPUs for a while. That begs the question, is Intel dictating requirements to Microsoft or is Microsoft dictating them to Intel?
I have a similarly new PC and found there were BIOS settings needed to allow it to get windows 11 -- some security stuff that wasn't turned on by default.
Of course, then I looked into what windows 11 provided and decided I'd wait a bit either way.
I initially upgraded a Ryzen 7 1700 system with the hold TPM module, then got an incredible deal on a 5700X. I was surprised how much I had to fiddle in the BIOS with a year old motherboard to get things like Secure Boot and memory isolation working.
It was something like 5 or 6 BIOS expeditions before I had all the right features enabled.
Windows 11 is meh... They fixed some of my issues with 10 and created new ones. I wouldn't rush anyone to adopt it, it's a Vista/XP/ME style release. I'm expecting Windows 12 to be the keeper.
The original iPhone had 128MB of memory. The iPhone 6s (releasing in 2015, which is the oldest model currently receiving security updates) has 2GB of memory. The latest iPhone, the iPhone 14, has 6GB.
It doesn't make sense for Apple to support devices that aren't even going to be able to run the apps that users want. Not many users are going to want to be using a 6-7 year old device when hardware is advancing and therefore the software is becoming more resource hungry.
There are tons of people who use their phones to make phone calls and send texts and read the occasional Wikipedia article. They don't need newer hardware.
People who want to play video games on their phones will need newer phones, but even they benefit from being able to sell their old one to the people who don't need that instead of having to throw it away.
You're completely right, but I don't think Apple is targeting those people. Most people don't want an iPhone for just the basics.
Aside from that, I'm not sure that even web browsing would be very enjoyable on an iPhone 6s today considering that the performance demands of web pages are getting higher and higher.
Better phones would be designed with upgradeable modems because the phone would be useful for longer than the modem is, but anything with WiFi can be connected to a hotspot.
I'm kind of surprised that isn't more popular in general, because the hotspot lets you connect all your devices with one plan for <$10/month if you don't use a lot of cellular data, e.g. because you mostly use it in your car and spend most of your time connected to some other WiFi.
Yeah, and Linux will probably have an even longer support period. But MS is in a totally different business. HW manufacturers build and sell new devices to customers who then buy software from a different company (MS). One of the selling point of Windows is that it runs on basically all HW. But they can only afford this because they have monopolized the market.
The mobile phone business is very different. (But you may argue that that's the problem.) The HW manufacturers sell the SW bundled with the HW. As soon as they have sold the HW, the software is just a liability (while for MS it's a recurrent revenue!). Not only that, but the longer and the better the SW works, the less likely you are to buy new HW from them. (And since that's the only thing they are selling, it means the less likely they will see a revenue from you.) Now this may imply that the business model is flawed and maybe it will change as the market matures and people will stop buying newer and newer phones every year. Just like it happened to desktops and then laptops. (I'm typing this on a 7+ year old Thinkpad and the only thing I miss is +16GB RAM.)
> But MS is in a totally different business. HW manufacturers build and sell new devices to customers who then buy software from a different company (MS). One of the selling point of Windows is that it runs on basically all HW. But they can only afford this because they have monopolized the market.
It's really the opposite problem. Essentially all of the relevant phones run Android; the monopoly doesn't help. And PC/workstation hardware was supported for just as long back in the days of Novell Netware and proprietary Unix. Some of the hardware from those days is still supported now.
The problem isn't the lack of a monopoly, it's the presence of one. The majority of the SoCs in phones are from Qualcomm, and they provide neither documentation nor source code, even though the market is clamoring for the longer support lifetimes that would allow, because with limited competition they don't have to.
There was some hope that Samsung would do better, and they might increase their market share quite a bit if they did, but a duopoly still isn't much competition. Samsung is already a big enough player that they have to be weighing the increase in market share against the longer repurchasing cycle. The have to decide if they want to be the heroes and capture that much goodwill from the people paying attention and making recommendations to others, or not. So far so fail.
Yeah that is pretty good. You're right about MS being the gold standard for backwards compatibility and forward support. Amazon talks about being the best at customer service, I guess that's how MS excelled in customer service, a key differentiator, super-wide compatibility, long lifetimes.
If you where to start a new software project in the mid-90s and had the benefit of hindsight, there is no argument for not starting on Windows NT. Looking back the "correct" career choice would be a C++ developer on the Windows NT platform, you could build a lifetime career on Windows (unless it fails in the next 10 - 15 years, which I doubt).
Sure we have abandon-ware that requires a Windows 95 desktop or a Windows 2000 installation, but bringing a piece of actively developed Windows software forward through the version in the past 25+ years has been relatively easy.
I picked Linux/Unix and languages like Python 20 years ago, so it's a little late for me, but if I could go back in time, I'm not sure that Windows and C++ wouldn't have been an equally good choice.
This comparison isn’t really relevant. Could you run the then current operating system in 2006 on a computer that you bought in 1986?
A 2010 iPhone 4s can’t connect to any network in the US let alone a 2007 iPhone. Computers changed leaps and bounds in the first 20 years just like smartphones have.
Sure my 2010 Dell Core 2 Duo with 8GB of RAM can run Windows 10.
But a computer bought in 1997 couldn’t run the then current Windows OS in 2010.
> This comparison isn’t really relevant. Could you run the then current operating system in 2006 on a computer that you bought in 1986?
The processor available in 1986 was the i386, which was supported by Linux until 2012. i486 support is on its way out just now, more than 33 years later.
> A 2010 iPhone 4s can’t connect to any network in the US let alone a 2007 iPhone.
It's not expected to do what modern phones can do. But it could still connect to WiFi, so why shouldn't it be usable for reading text or listening to music?
Why not connect the USB and turn it into a NAS or a doorbell camera or any of the things anybody would do with a Raspberry Pi?
> The processor available in 1986 was the i386, which was supported by Linux until 2012. i486 support is on its way out just now, more than 33 years later
What could you do with it in 2012? A 2010 Core2Duo 2.66Ghz Dell laptop can run Windows 10. Browse the modern web, mine had gigabit Ethernet, could run the latest version of Office decently and had a 500Gb hard drive.
> It's not expected to do what modern phones can do. But it could still connect to WiFi, so why shouldn't it be usable for reading text or listening to music?
Yes, as far as I know, the iTunes app still supports all iPods and iPhones. You can sync your music. And you can fill all of its massive 4GB or 8GB of storage.
Even back in 2004 - 3 years before the iPhone. I had this
Now you're arguing against yourself. An original iPhone is much more capable than an i386.
> Yes, as far as I know, the iTunes app still supports all iPods and iPhones. You can sync your music. And you can fill all of its massive 4GB or 8GB of storage.
But as you point out, the storage is quite small. The hardware could perfectly well stream over WiFi, until you take away security updates and the ability to install the app.
> It was a much better NAS than trying to repurpose an iPhone with very bad Wifi.
A modern one would be better still, but I'm trying to use the thing I already have sitting in a drawer, not acquire something else.
And sometimes the performance is irrelevant. If I'm just using it for automated backups I don't much care if it finishes in one minute or ten.
> You are going to “read text” on a 3.5 inch 320x480 Poot resolution screen in 2023?
Maybe I wouldn't, but some kid whose alternative is having no device at all, sure.
> And you want Apple to continue supporting a “phone” that can’t be used as a phone anymore?
It was never just a phone, but hotspot + WiFi calling and it still is a phone. To say nothing of Signal or similar.
Your argument comes down to "newer things are better," but that isn't the same as older things are trash. Until you stop updating them and refuse to provide the documentation needed for anybody else to do it.
> Now you're arguing against yourself. An original iPhone
I’m arguing that my 2010 Dell Core2Duo that had 8GB RAM, a 500GB hard drive, gigabit Ethernet and a 1920x1200 display has specs that in some ways are equivalent to a computer you could buy today and has hardware capable of running the latest browsers, the latest version of Office has enough RAM, has wired Ethernet that is still capable of completely taking advantage of my gigabit Ethernet and has wireless N.
A 2007 iPhone has a crappy display, not enough memory or processing power to run a modern web browser and can’t actually function as a phone. My old first gen iPad crashes repeatedly on modern web pages. Of course I have newer devices.
The earliest iPhone that has any decent hardware to handle the modern web is the iPhone 5s. Apple just a released a security update for it recently but
What are children going go do with it if it can’t even use the modern web? They would be much better off getting one of the many $40 unsubsidized unlocked phones you can buy on Amazon.
And from working with different educational institutions, I know for a fact that they think old computers are more trouble than they are worth and would much rather have a bunch of low cost ChromeBooks.
If you want to help a child, give money to the organizations instead of junk computers.
> It was never just a phone, but hotspot + WiFi calling and it still is a phone. To say nothing of Signal or similar
The first gen iPhone couldn’t support hotspot functionality nor could it do wifi calling.
Again, why try to keep an old half functioning phone when you could buy a much more capable $30 Android phone.
Even in developing countries the average phone user has a much better phone than the original phone. The phone penetration rate even in the poorest countries is 80-90%
And on top of that, Apple only sold around 10 million first gen iPhones. How many do you think are still in the wild?
> I’m arguing that my 2010 Dell Core2Duo that had 8GB RAM, a 500GB hard drive, gigabit Ethernet and a 1920x1200 display has specs that in some ways are equivalent to a computer you could buy today and has hardware capable of running the latest browsers, the latest version of Office has enough RAM, has wired Ethernet that is still capable of completely taking advantage of my gigabit Ethernet and has wireless N.
The Core 2 Duo is so old they don't even test it against the modern benchmark suites, but the Pentium Dual Core is the same chip with a different amount of L2 cache:
But the Core 2 Duo is still useful for many of the things it could do at introduction. As is the original iPhone.
> A 2007 iPhone has a crappy display, not enough memory or processing power to run a modern web browser
"Modern web browsers" are more efficient than old ones. It's modern web pages that are resource hogs, but that depends on the page.
> What are children going go do with it if it can’t even use the modern web?
I hear the kids are into texting.
> They would be much better off getting one of the many $40 unsubsidized unlocked phones you can buy on Amazon.
The ones that aren't actually unsubsidized because they're full of crapware?
> And from working with different educational institutions, I know for a fact that they think old computers are more trouble than they are worth and would much rather have a bunch of low cost ChromeBooks.
Google designed ChromeBooks as a mechanism to get people into their ecosystem. They allow the administrators to externalize the cost of that onto the kids, and they're under enough resource constraints that they're willing to do it, but that doesn't make it in the best interest of the kids.
Given the choice between Chromebooks and "Core 2 Duo laptops" running some Debian derivative, the kids would get more out of the latter, even if they're slower. And have higher administrative costs because the kids can mess with them -- that's how they learn about computers.
> The first gen iPhone couldn’t support hotspot functionality nor could it do wifi calling.
You don't use the phone as a hotspot, you use a hotspot to connect the phone to the internet via WiFi as a workaround for its obsolete cell modem that Apple chose not to make replaceable. And WiFi calling is an app, not a characteristic of the hardware.
> Again, why try to keep an old half functioning phone when you could buy a much more capable $30 Android phone.
Less crapware, less e-waste, save $30 (recurring, since the crap Android phone will probably be out of support again in a year).
> Even in developing countries the average phone user has a much better phone than the original phone. The phone penetration rate even in the poorest countries is 80-90%
But many of those devices don't have significantly better hardware than the original iPhone...
> And on top of that, Apple only sold around 10 million first gen iPhones. How many do you think are still in the wild?
Not as many as there would have been.
But even if they don't want to support it themselves, what's their excuse for not publishing their hardware documentation so someone else can do it?
> The difference between these and modern CPUs is stark
And that doesn’t obviate the fact that I know from personal experience that it could run Chrome, Windows 10, the latest version of Office365 and it could be used as a Plex server to serve standard definition and low complexity high def video.
> Modern web browsers" are more efficient than old ones. It's modern web pages that are resource hogs, but that depends on the page.
Modern web browsers are much less memory and resource efficient than old ones.
The first gen iPad from 2010 - 4 years newer can’t handle modern web pages except for HN. It had 256MB RAM. The original iPhone had 128MB of RAM.
> Given the choice between Chromebooks and "Core 2 Duo laptops" running some Debian derivative, the kids would get more out of the latter, even if they're slower. And have higher administrative costs because the kids can mess with them -- that's how they learn about computers
Yes because the ROI of old Linux devices that aren’t centrally managed without standardize hardware or any MDM solution is going to be much easier to manage.
> You don't use the phone as a hotspot, you use a hotspot to connect the phone to the internet via WiFi as a workaround for its obsolete cell modem that Apple chose not to make replaceable
So yes. There is nothing else that you need to do with an iPhone with a 400Mhz processor, a really slow bus, 128MB of RAM and a total of 4GB - 8GB of storage except make the modem upgradeable.
> Less crapware, less e-waste, save $30 (recurring, since the crap Android phone will probably be out of support again in a year).
So instead, Apple should keep supporting the original iPhone that sold around 10 million in the first year…
> But many of those devices don't have significantly better hardware than the original iPhone...
Are you really going to say it’s not any better than an iPhone from 2007, with a 30 pin iPod connector, 128MB RAM, a low resolution camera that couldn’t do video, 4-8GB storage, and a 400Mhz processor?
> And that doesn’t obviate the fact that I know from personal experience that it could run Chrome, Windows 10, the latest version of Office365 and it could be used as a Plex server to serve standard definition and low complexity high def video.
And an original iPhone could do texting and stream music and doff around on HN.
> Modern web browsers are much less memory and resource efficient than old ones.
Modern web browsers have more efficient javascript engines and do things like unloading background tabs to deal with people opening hundreds of tabs of porky websites that could otherwise take down even desktop computers. But the same improvements allow you to e.g. open multiple Wikipedia tabs on an older device.
> Yes because the ROI of old Linux devices that aren’t centrally managed without standardize hardware or any MDM solution is going to be much easier to manage.
You're telling me why Google was smart to make their "get 'em while they're young" tech appeal to administrators, not why this is better for the kids.
> So yes. There is nothing else that you need to do with an iPhone with a 400Mhz processor, a really slow bus, 128MB of RAM and a total of 4GB - 8GB of storage except make the modem upgradeable.
Nothing else you need to make phone calls.
> So instead, Apple should keep supporting the original iPhone that sold around 10 million in the first year…
Why not? Their OS is portable. 10 million is not a small number of devices. The effort is negligible for a company that size. They would get more PR value by claiming the longer support lifetime than it would cost them to release the updates.
And the only reason they're the only ones who can support it is that they don't publish sufficient documentation for anyone else to make drivers for it. They could do that once at the end official support and no one would have any complaints.
> Are you really going to say it’s not any better than an iPhone from 2007, with a 30 pin iPod connector, 128MB RAM, a low resolution camera that couldn’t do video, 4-8GB storage, and a 400Mhz processor?
You can get a Core i5-4590 PC for less than $50. Are you really going to say it's not any better than a Core 2 Duo with no AVX, a max of 8GB of RAM and USB2?
> And an original iPhone could do texting and stream music and doff around on HN.
I dusted off my old iPad from 2010 - a device that was four years newer a couple of years ago. It couldn’t handle many web pages.
I also dusted off my old 1st gen iPod Touch a couple of years ago it had the same hardware - except for the cellular modem - as the first gen iPhone. Do you remember that with the first gen iPhone, it didn’t have enough memory and processing power to hold an entire page in memory? If you scrolled too fast, you would get a checkerboard pattern while the rendering caught up. The iPhone couldn’t even handle what was the modern web then.
It definitely couldn’t handle inline video. It didn’t even have enough memory to allow you to have a background image on the Home Screen.
> And an original iPhone could do texting and stream music and doff around on HN.
Texting and SMS always goes over the carriers network. The carriers don’t support their 2G network anymore.
> Nothing else you need to make phone calls.
You remember that whole problem that the 2G original iPhone works on a network that is not supported anymore?
> Why not? Their OS is portable.
The “modern” version of iOS is not “portable” to a phone that only has a 400Mhz processor and 128GB of RAM. iOS 5 could barely run on the first generation iPad that was 4 years newer. The original iPhone struggled with iOS 3.
> 10 million is not a small number of devices. The effort is negligible for a company that size. They would get more PR value by claiming the longer support lifetime than it would cost them to release the updates.
> Modern web browsers have more efficient javascript engines
They are “more efficient” because they have multistage just in time compilers that cache the pre compiled code. Caching takes memory - modern iPhones have 3GB - 6GB RAM. The original iPhone had 128MB of RAM.
A modern iPhone also has multiple cores. Some of those cores can be used to do JIT on the JavaScript code while other cores are used to make sure that the UI is responsive. The original iPhone had one slow 400Mhz slow core compared to the 4-6 multi GHz cores.
> and do things like unloading background tabs to deal with people opening hundreds of tabs of porky websites that could otherwise take down even desktop computers.
Desktop operating systems have swap where they can swap memory to disk and they also have a larger 64 bit memory space. The original iPhone didn’t have swap and it only has a 32 bit processing space.
Even today, Safari will unload pages when it runs out of memory and refresh it losing context. But do you remember that whole issue that the original iPhone couldn’t keep the graphic context of one entire page in memory?
> But the same improvements allow you to e.g. open multiple Wikipedia tabs on an older device.
That’s not true on mobile even today.
> Why not? Their OS is portable. 10 million is not a small number of devices.
Back when the iPhone was introduced, Jobs said he wanted to capture 1% of the cellular market by selling 10 million devices. The iPhone only made up 1% of the cell phone market as it existed in 2007. How many users do you think were still using an original iPhone in 2010 let alone 2023?
> That doesn't make the Core 2 Duo useless.
The Core2Duo is not useless precisely because it can do what a modern computer user wants to do - run the latest OS, run the latest browser, use a decent wireless network standard (802.11n), mine had gigabit Ethernet which is still the highest speed commercially available to most consumers, run the latest version of Office365. It has a front facing camera and a nice screen. Low end computers today still come with 8GB of RAM. The average low end computer today still comes with less than 500GB of hard drive space.
The original iPhone can’t function as a phone. It has 40-60x less memory than a modern iPhone, 8-16x less storage, an outdated wifi technology (802.11g)
By comparison to the Samsung Galaxy A series this is unimpressive. Everything in that line is either 2 OS upgrades/4 years of security updates or 4 OS upgrades/5 years of security updates. That's all the way down to the A03s which is <US$100.
Those are from the release date of the phone, but I think they're doing roughly annual releases on that line.
Edit: Samsung also planned for longer device life - there's an option to turn on a battery saver feature that caps charge at 85%, which should significantly increase the years of service from the battery.
I was recently looking for support cycles for Android phones but failed to find anything concrete. Can you point me to where Samsung have documented their support cycle?
"... And select devices launched in 2019 or later will be supported with firmware security updates for a minimum of four (4) years following their global launch, while select newer devices will receive up to five (5) years of security updates."
It's a good start I'd say, considering that Samsung is a major player in the android phone space.
My father in his 70s has stuck with one of these old phones. I keep on expecting them to end security updates - no go. The idea that apple makes unrepairable throwaway phones makes me laugh. Easier to resell and easy to get fixed (I use applecare with no complaints)
The problem with that "3 years of update" promise is afaik it only counts if you buy it on launch day. One would expect that kind of guarantee to start on the last day they sell the device, not the first one.
Yes with phones. It is honestly disgusting because it generates so much unnecessary waste.
I have a PC that I build myself over 9 years ago and run linux on. I upgrade hardware as needed but I will never have to worry about security update nonsense.
The irony is that repairable devices are implied to be maintainable as well, e.g. you can generally keep them in good working order as long as you please. Reasonable or not, a security update sunset contradicts this possibility.
Repairable phone implies level of technical competency. You're not the target audience. Target audience will have no problem installing alternative ROM
Custom roms are a half-solution unless Unisoc have solid mainline support in the kernel, so that it can be updated past the support period without hacking in blobs. Custom ROMs can also be less secure (and less useful as many applications annoyingly check for verity) if the manufacturer doesn't allow access to low level hardware security features.
Is that really the market they are going for? I’ve dissected, rooted, etc but that hardly seems like a business play or a market of any significant size.
That would increase the cost of the phone, since they would have to support and test the phone long past the expected lifetime. But, this is marketed as a budget phone, so they aren't going to do that.
Unless the price of the upgrades cover the support. Yes, of course, it would be a gamble, because nobody can predict what the demand would be in 3-4-5 years. But I wonder whether they could reduce the cost with smart software engineering (i.e whether they could compel themselves to do smarter software engineering by promising paid upgrades) or whether they could make a promise to make paid upgrades OR open sourcing the code for the components that will be different from the newer versions. (I.e. mainly the hardware drivers.) Yes, I know licensing issues may indeed pose problems for third party components.
This is a budget phone, so there are very few people who would purchase extended security support after three years. There certainly won't be enough to cover the business costs for keeping the support and testing of an old crufty phone used by few people.
It's unsustainable to put the costs on the backend, so phone's price would have to be raised to cover those extended security updates. But, that won't happen for a budget phone. There just won't be enough people willing to pay after three years.
That's the problem with purchasing a budget phone. You get what you pay for, a phone that will go away soon.
For how much? This is something that might make sense for flagship phones: getting two more years out of a $1000 phone is something people might pay for. For a $200 phone not so much.
The long term practicality of this depends on mainline kernel support. LineageOS is cool, but the thing no one talks about is that while the Android stack might get updated, the kernel often isn't, which means any kernel level exploits remain unpatched after the support period ends.
Which is why this reads as kind of a stunt. A repairable phone is great, but if it becomes unsafe to use then what's the point? The software needs to be "repairable" too.
> Nokia probably have done research on this pricing segment to know that the averaging budget android device lifecycle is about 2.x years
I don't think that's remotely true. People who buy budget phones are not typically the tech enthusiasts who buy new phones every two years. Instead the market analysis has likely shown that people are way more impressed by "repairability" than by "long security updates". Otherwise we would long have Android phones with security update durations similar to iOS.
> even Apple iPhone as the gold standard only provide security updates up to 6-7 years but Apple charges at least 2 times of the price.
And it's not a fair comparison either, an iPhone which isn't updated is a big security issue due to everything being so coupled to the OS, on Android it depends of the security flaw affected itself.
I'm not defending the poor upgradability to Android but they worked around that a lot.
Seems this new phone costs about 150 EUR, which for three years, would be 50 EUR per year, if you keep for as long as it gets security updates.
A iPhone 14 costs ~1000 EUR where I am. If you expect to get 7 years of security updates out of it (I think that's what Apple says? Not sure, someone please correct me), then it'll be 142 EUR per year.
Three times the price, if you calculate it per year.
After three years of having this Nokia phone, you can buy the new model, have it for three years again, and repeat this in a total of 6 times (900 EURs, for security updates during 18 years), and you still didn't pay as much as you paid for the iPhone.
So with all of this in mind, seems to be a pretty OK guarantee, timeline and price, at least compared to the "flagship" smartphone that Apple makes.
People will note that there are worse problems in the world, but tossing a sophisticated piece of electronics every three years by design sounds really wasteful, especially when practical capabilities change so much more slowly now.
I was comparing repairability to longer security updates, not cheap Android phones to expensive iPhones. For that matter, iPhones aren't especially repairable either: So if a cheap Nokia can be better than an iPhone in this regard, why couldn't it be at least as good in terms of updates?
The most expensive flagship from Apple costs around 2000 EUR (more than 10 times cheaper), I meant "flagship" of smartphones in general, but one of the cheaper ones recently released from Apple.
You still get the same amount of years of security updates though, if you buy the cheapest model from Apple or not.
That's a fair point, but indeed a lot of people will kill their phone in less than 3 years. Either breaking the screen (which, IIUC, will be also replaceable/self servicable) or killing the battery. Most sources say that the battery will keep an acceptable capacity for around 500 cycles, i.e. 1.5 years if fully charged daily. (Now I don't know, because I'm very cautious not to fully charge and to discharge below 25-30%, so mine is pretty good after 1.5 years and the previous phone that I've used for 5+ years started draining the battery after a software update when it was less than 6 mo old...)
Speaking about batteries, what would be nice if they added a setting that allows defining charging limits, e.g. like what we have on Lenovo Thinkpads. (You can specify both the upper threshold and also the lower one, so that charging doesn't start if the battery is above that level even if you connect the device. Which you may do to a phone even without wanting to charge, e.g. if you use it as a modem.)
> Most sources say that the battery will keep an acceptable capacity for around 500 cycles, i.e. 1.5 years if fully charged daily.
This is what I see online, but this hasn't been my experience for any of my devices. My current phone is on year 5 with the same battery, and it's still very decent. I charge it every day to 100% and often plug it back in while it's still at 50%, so it's not like I'm being more careful than usual.
There's a cynical part of me that thinks that these kinds of numbers are put forward by the industry to feed the narrative that these gadgets need to be replaced regularly.
Yeah; and batteries can be replaced when they start losing their charge. New batteries are pretty cheap.
I had an iPhone 6s that I used for about 5-6 years before upgrading and giving it to a friend to use. I replaced its battery at about the 4 year mark, and as far as I know it’s still going strong. I wanted to upgrade it earlier than that, and I could afford to - but why bother when my phone already did everything I needed it to do?
3 years of security updates is a joke. The hardware easily lasts over a decade if you want it to.
My Nokia 8 (bought April 2019) doesn't last a day anymore. Not even half a day. The battery is so done, I must basically always have my powerbank in my backpack. :)
When it's cold outside (let's say around 4 °C) it's not uncommon for the phone to suddenly shut down while using certain apps, even when it thinks the battery is at 50%, it just can't provide enough power in those situations anymore.
When I bought the phone the battery was one downside I thought about but thought "it will probably be OK". I was wrong ^^
And due to its aluminum unibody construction you must remove the display to replace the battery, nothing I would want to risk on my daily driver device.
There was a site posted here on HN that was something like: "All you wanted to know about batteries" or something like that. About Li-Ion they wrote, that they age faster if the charge falls under 20% (don't remember why) or gets charged over 80% (more voltage needed to push electrons in, battery heats up). GigaSet limits the charging to 90%. I use BatteryBot Pro from F-Droid (installed via Foxy Droid) to ring an alarm at 30%, 75% and 80%. [add] Depleting them completely is very bad for them.
Yep, some people seem to have a proclivity towards thinking that whatever is (or seems) disadvantageous to them (or a group they identify with) is somehow done on purpose by someone/a group that will profit from the said thing.
But if you think about it, it doesn't even work here. First of all, no one can tell you that your battery has a poor capacity, because you test it daily. And people are pretty sensitive to this issue, because we have tricked the manufacturers to create phones that have just enough capacity. (By requiring faster phones, larger, better screens and thinner phones. And not requiring a battery that lasts much more than a day.)
Actually that 'narrative' has the opposite effect: there are a lot of articles online that tell you how to enhance the life of the batteries. (Whether it's really needed or not doesn't make a difference.)
Regarding charging it from 50%: this is not something that hurts Li batteries. Actually it's better than allowing it to drain (or go into some unspecified low percentages, probably below 20 or 10). Charging to 100% is said to have a negative effect. I mean it probably wears faster than if you charge to just 85%.
> Speaking about batteries, what would be nice if they added a setting that allows defining charging limits
Like Samsung Battery Protection? It limits charging to 85%. I would personally have used the 80% threshold, but after 2+ years of heavy use, the battery has held up quite well on this Note 20.
My Galaxy S22+ has a battery protection mode that stops charging at 85%. I imagine other builds of Android have this, but it's the first I've directly come across.
Swapping out the battery is a great improvement only if the device's lifetime is longer than the battery's, and my batteries tend to last more than three years.
(Writing this on my 5 year old phone that still has the original battery.)
I think this varies a lot, especially for heavy commercial users who talk on their phone a lot. Only last week my sister was complaining that iphones need charging twice a day after 2 years. It doesn't affect me with my current phone, but I am a light user.
Is that risky have an unsupported Android version?
My Nexus 5 still working ok, some problems started when apps started to drop support of the Android version, and that happens several years before it stopped receiving OS updates.
Don't want to downplay that will be great that OS updates should be longer that the current standard, but sometimes tech minded people here in HN thinks that a day after stopped receiving updates the phone is a useless brick ais not the case.
When the security updates stop, the phone should be wiped of personal data and isolated from both cellular and wireless networks. There should be no compromise on this, a phone has access to far too much personal information and local wifi networks to ever consider using it beyond is support lifetime. Additionally, we should all be more diligent ensuring our personal devices install security updates as soon as they are available especially before going to large events (conventions, sports games, F1, etc...) or areas which are high traffic (airports, etc..).
Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture saying that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, any parody of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied.
I want updates mostly for security reasons. If your phone hasn't received a security update in a year, I can just go check security issues that were published online, pick one that I like, and write an app that will exploit it.
I guess it’s not like Windows where if my hardware is supported I can install the latest supported version?
I suppose it’s somewhat interesting in the industry difference between supporting hardware with updates as if it’s firmware, and supporting software with updates like an OS. (Not advocating for windows for anything at all BTW)
Homebrew ROMs often don't have Google's holywater blessing of being certified, so some things like banking apps might not run on them.
So, say your phone has old Android version x. You're fine until a security hole shows up, or your banking app says "Our app needs Android version x+1. Please update your phone.". Oops, not offered by phone. Install a custom ROM. Banking app says "This device is not certified and for your own security, we refuse to run on this phone."...
To test this out I installed apps from 3 of the largest banks on a Nexus 5 running Lineage OS 20 (Android 13 - yes a 9 year old phone with 2GB of RAM running Android 13 very well) with a minimum install of Google Play Services. 1 app said I was running a modified version of Android, but let me proceed to log in. The other 2 let me log in immediately with no warning message.
I've been running custom Android ROMs for years on multiple phones. It has brought me modern features and better performance than the vendor's ROM.
It's complicated with Android due to closed-source drivers, someone needs to create an installer for the specific phone model. The installation process is also more complicated than installing a new OS on a PC, but it's perfectly doable if you can follow written instructions. I recommend checking your phone's forum on XDA, you'll see what the community made.
To be fair the mobile device iteration of the repairability movement has always been laden with irony. It's a user empowerment movement solving a problem users didn't care about or want to deal with, championed mainly by middle and upper income individuals in tandem with politicians looking for easy karma (bonus points if they're European because it makes them look tough against the big corporate Americans plus Samsung), all under the guise of helping users who want to save money (poor people) even though this category lacks the skills and the interest to repair their devices anyway outside of a rare few exceptions. At this point a model being easily repairable is like "GMO Free" labels on food, a thing you advertise because it'll bring in money from the activists while every other consumer ignores it and focuses on a combination of performamce and price. In short, as long as the device can be advertised based on its repairability I don't think the company cares much since the objective is already complete.
> even though this category lacks the skills and the interest to repair their devices anyway outside of a rare few exceptions
Most poor people do have the skills to take their device into a repair shop to have it repaired?
It makes a big difference to the price of the repair if the device is designed to be repairable. Even better if it’s something a user can do themselves, such as replace the battery in a Nokia 3310.
> all under the guise of helping users who want to save money (poor people) even though this category lacks the skills and the interest to repair their devices anyway outside of a rare few exceptions
This is simply not true. At least in my country, poor people generally have interest and the skills to repair their devices (or to pay someone to do so, as it's cheaper than buying a new one)
No, it's an ecological movement. The goal is not to help the poor but to fight climate change.
I agree with the second part tho. This phone is still pretty complicated to repair. It's much easier than for the average smartphone but still simple things like changing the battery involve tricky steps like disconnecting the fingerprint reader and motherboard cache.
And yeah the real obsolescence issue is on the software side.
Indeed. Some things (GMO free, renewable, partly recycled back cover, repairable) sound good to customers, while being at best of marginal importance compared to other factors.
Custom rom support would be helpful for a very niche audience, but it's not something that's going to make a dent in e-waste at all. I'm a pretty tech savvy user who runs Linux on my desktop and I'm too intimidated to try a custom ROM on my phone. The average Nokia customer isn't going to even know it's an option, much less be willing to take the plunge.
If Nokia is serious about fighting e-waste they need to provide a longer lifecycle of updates.
People willing to repair their own device is a niche audience as well. If you’re willing to go through the effort of fixing your device, there’s a decent chance you’re willing to flash a custom rom.
Or at least changing batteries used to be mainstream. Anyone born before the year 2000 should not be at all intimidated by changing a battery. I can't speak for Gen Z, it's possible they've lost that skill.
Replacing the battery used to be just popping off the back cover, sliding out the battery then sliding in a new one.
These days it’s a perilous task that requires multiple spudgers and picks, a screen heater, finger acrobatics to make sure you don’t slash or rip any fragile cables, and then you have to wrestle the battery from its adhesive coffin.
I remember my Old Samsung's and HTC thunderbolt all have replaceable batteries, as well as the Motorola Droid which was super cool..
Not going to these were the early ones. I think starting with the S8 or so they stopped letting you replace the battery. I'm on pixels now. And my Pixel 6 doesn't have a replaceable battery...
If the average user can't handle flashing a custom ROM (which is probably true), they can take it to one of the million phone repair shops and give them $10.
It's not just a question of flashing it, it's a question of living with it. By all accounts I've read the custom ROM experience is far from seamless: it sounds worse than the Linux desktop currently is, and I wouldn't recommend running Linux to just anyone.
It's really not uncommon to see ROMs with known bugs like "camera doesn't work" "3.5mm port doesn't work". When I was looking for a phone in 2018 I was looking at the Pixel series and that was the bug list for most of the ROMs at the time - and pixel was basically the best-case scenario that everyone was pointing me at as far as support.
It was still in official support at that time but I got burned by my first android phone going EOL within 6 months of when I bought it and I wasn't going to leap again without knowing there were actually ROMs that worked without major feature loss.
It probably would have worked out, being a pixel and all, but I specifically ran into bumps on my previous phone (Moto G Falcon) with features being lost on custom ROMs. Eventually I found one that worked OK but that's just not acceptable to lose official support 6 months after purchase and deal with custom ROMs where random shit is broken.
That's right, and that's why you should choose your phone based on the ROM you want. Of course if you choose a phone that is not supported, it probably won't work well.
Try running the Samsung S23 ROM on a Nokia 7 plus and tell me how it goes: that's the same problem.
I have been using /e/ OS on a Fairphone for 2 years, and it is absolutely great. I just use it like a normal Android, no need to fiddle with it _at all_. Some apps don't work because I'm de-Googled (no Play Services), but you don't need that (or you can accept that some apps don't work).
This wasn’t my experience with de-googled (edit) grapheneos.
One week, apps started throwing an uncaught null pointer exception on startup because their network permission was revoked.
Even without that, random apps (especially for charging EVs and parking, and especially if it was raining) would just plain break for a few weeks, then start working again.
It would be nice if there was a commonly-used android compatibility suite for developers (of apps and of roms), but there isn’t, so everything is flaky once you are slightly off the beaten path.
That wasn't my experience with GrapheneOS: it's been rock-solid (and the battery savings from not having apps constantly polling for updates means I get 2.5 days per charge on both my Pixel 4a and Pixel 6a.
They work excellent for what they are, and are a testament to the ingenuity of the android community, but as an end user product they're just not there yet. I would never flash a custom ROM for someone who isn't capable of flashing something else on it to fix a bug or restore back to factory.
Phone makers make it hard, but it doesn't really have to be. You can flash GrapheneOS on a Pixel using a USB cable, Chrome and a few pokes at the developer settings menu on the phone. The only actual friction comes from the Pixel's default OS and that UX flow was a choice.
iunno, setting up a custom ROM is the first thing I do on any wifi router I buy. Haven't really touched the concept on my phone, but it's totally something I've done for security reasons.
I can totally see doing it on a router, but I'm scared to do it on a phone because I've heard too many horror stories about banking apps and similar refusing to run if they detect they're running on a rooted phone.
I only have a smartphone in order to use all of the apps that people assume you'll be able to install. If a significant percentage of those won't work on a custom ROM, I may as well not have the device at all.
(It's entirely possible that my fears are overblown, but that I have them is suggestive of how far from mainstream custom roms are.)
That's great, and something that I may eventually consider doing, but that doesn't help the average user who just wants to keep using their perfectly decent phone. Rooting their device and installing a custom rom is complicated enough without having to go through the process of installing extra modules.
> but that I have them is suggestive of how far from mainstream custom roms are.
Totally. I think ROMs like /e/ OS and CalyxOS are actually getting close to giving the same experience as stock ROMs, though (if you choose a phone that is supported, that it).
Let's hope it keeps moving forward! Repairable phones + long term support with custom ROM sounds great IMO!
I have been using /e/ OS on a Fairphone for 2 years now. I love it. I would say that the experience is not very far from a stock Android.
Most of the issues I have (which is not a lot) are because I'm completely de-Googled, but you don't need that.
I really think that there are alternative ROMs today that are great, if your phone is supported. Hopefully repairable phones will be supported (at least Fairphone is great for community support, I find).
Having to use a custom ROM is the same annoying amount of work as having to upgrade to a new phone every 2-3 years.
Because custom ROMs usually update to the latest Android version ASAP, which moves tons of things around all over the OS, and breaks a lot of stuff.
It's super annoying to update custom ROMs.
And frankly some people just want their phone to work most of the time, not to have the responsibility to install and maintain some pocket-sized server. That's also a reason against using custom ROMs.
Android manufacturers pick a LTS kernel when developing their phone. By the time it is on the market, that kernel version only has 3-4 years left of security updates. Custom roms never upgrade the kernel so you are still vulnerable to bugs that were never backported to your kernel
Depends on the manufacturer, there are plenty of phones with community updated kernels. Some manufacturers choose to implement hardware support by poorly forking the Linux kernel in ways that make porting those changes to recent kernels hard.
PostmarketOS is the mainline Linux kernel and doesn't have all the features that are needed for a proper Android phone. There are a lot of Android userspace drivers that may break with another kernel.
Custom kernels are not upgraded kernels. They usually just back port a few fixes. No custom kernel running Android has a full kernel upgrade because it breaks the KMI and kernel drivers aren't usually updated.
while offering just three years of security updates, after which you basically have to throw the thing away?
"security" is just used as an excuse, in practice there's very little in the way of remotely exploitable vulnerabilities. In fact the "security" of newer devices seems to be squarely aimed against the user, so make of that what you will...
Your phone has like 5 different radios in it. Of course there's remotely exploitable issues all over the place. You should be very worried if you're not hearing about them; that just means you're not being told.
Remotely exploitable does not require it can be hacked without user action (although there have been many exploits which have achieved that too, e.g. Pegasus) but typically involves visiting a web page, opening an attachment, or installing an app with a vulnerability. Chrome updates and app scanning will protect against some problems, but advances are often tied to platform security features.
So really, you've made an absurd comment. If the phone is to be usable past 3-4 years it must have security patches. Otherwise there will be a pool of devices which are still in use and easily targetted.
Otherwise there will be a pool of devices which are still in use and easily targetted.
There already are, and the world hasn't ended yet...
It's your paranoia that's absurd (and what these companies are relying on to keep the masses under their control, so keep drinking the kool-aid...)
The fact that so many here are going on about updates and support, when in fact there's plenty of people who don't give a shit and the world works fine for them, just shows what a corporate-authoritarian shitshow this cursed industry has become.
I disagree that security is impossible, because that is using 'secure' to mean absolutely proof against compromise, which is fundamentally impossible because of complexity (even formally verified systems like seL4 run on real processors/RAM which have side channels).
Practically a fully patched iPhone or Pixel without sketchy apps is a very hard target and exploits have a limited lifetime. There is a vast gulf between that and a phone running a 5 year old release without patches.
Why are governments so bad at mandating security? Paralysis in Congress and the EU?
Re Huawei, they were sure there were exploits that could be used against it, and they could never be sure it was exploit-free. (We know that major vendors like Cisco have bugs constantly, so it only requires early access to the code to discover them to produce a ready stream of exploits.) Which is totally what we would expect.
> Practically a fully patched iPhone or Pixel without sketchy apps is a very hard target and exploits have a limited lifetime.
Yes, those are two well-known quantities, and possibly best in the world.
Now try to tell security of something random - if I take a random Linix server, or a wifi-connected bosh dishwasher, ir smart TV, and I ask 100 IT proffeshionals, which one is insecure, how many of them can tell?
> Why are governments so bad at mandating security? Paralysis in Congress and the EU
Why are corporations so bad at securiry?
My internet provider ships a router so obsolete, first google search explains how to PWN it, eith instructions any 12 year old can follow
The problem is the whoke industry is engaged in deception, "we are taking security seriously".
If they were selling garage locks, there would be lawsuits seeking conpensation for stolen car due to negligence in design and lying to the customer
I have, but it was ultimately due to being phished or similar social engineering tactics, which I'd say is far more likely than being hacked remotely by some obscure exploit.
Just goes to show, you can lead a horse to security patches (or vaccination, or the effects of climate change) but you can't make him apply them.
Many of us would rather continue fighting for our freedom instead of advocating for and cheering on the rise of dystopia.
If they wanted to make a truly repairable phone, they'd release the source code for all the binary blobs to enable the folks at LineageOS to continue to release fixes past the manufacturer's notional end of support period (which does not correlate with the possible lifespan of the device).
Ideally, they would release the source code for the drivers, and the manuals for each IP block in the SoC, etc.
For some reason, hardware manufacturers have decided that their manuals are secret.
Of course, if you ban distribution of your product manuals, then only criminals that pirate your IP will be able to properly implement drivers for your product…
Oh, cmon now. The N900 was the sweetest piece of pocketech since the palm 3! That has to be worth something.
Man, if they put out a more modern piece of hardware that was designed on the same principle, I'd bye 5. (one backup and the others as gifts for skeptics.)
And I'd promise to say at least one sycophanticlly positive thing about Nokia for a year!
(sigh)
PS
I do realize that this in no way am actual response to the previous. I thought someone who might have an unbidden spasm of hope at the thought might have a better day if reminded of that one brief moment when an engineer's device made a brief appearance on the market's mass :)
I would love for them to announce them to be Graphene OS ready out of the box by contributing a Graphene distro from the get-go. I know this is a vendor lock in nightmare but it would open up a huge market for the security conscious and those young ones interested in getting phones that are just for photos and texts.
In practice I've been cycling phones about every two years.
I just checked and all resources I've seen puts the typical lifespan around this. I don't know what the distribution looks like though.
I bet the distribution curves change if you bucket the pricing points.
3 years is ok. After you buy it, they've made 100% of the money they're going to make in the transaction. They need money to come in to support such an effort
There's no reason outside of software updates why a 3-year-old phone can't continue to be used—mine is now 5 years old and works fine, and I only upgraded from my now 7-year-old phone because my brother had one that he thought he'd bricked that I resurrected. Neither phone is fast, but they're perfectly serviceable.
What I don't understand is why these updates aren't a solved problem. Desktop hardware manufacturers sell equipment that continue to be supported for 10+ years by Windows, and they manage to stay in business just fine. Why is it that a 3-year support window is considered normal in the mobile world?
Google sunsetting my Chromebox and Chromebook models has ensured I will never buy hardware from them again.
By not updating Chrome past a certain expiration date they make them worthless doorstops that suddenly can’t even stream from sites like HBO Max because the version number isn’t high enough.
I hear you about support being a big deal. I'm still happily using my S10+, and am pissed that it just received its last update. It's working absolutely fine, and I have less than zero desire to 'upgrade' to a phone that doesn't have an audio jack, SD card support, and the ability to use swipe-style card readers to pay, three features I use on a daily basis. And yet before the year is up, I'll need to move on for security reasons alone.
It’s true. They’re one of the best values if you can afford them all things considered. Store network, long term software. Quality of SOC, all components.
If you can't afford one at new prices, you can always pick them up for a fraction of that 2-3yrs after release, and still get a solid few years of supported use out of them at that point.
Our goal is to deliver the best experience for customers, which includes overall performance and prolonging the life of their devices. Lithium-ion batteries become less capable of supplying peak current demands when in cold conditions, have a low battery charge or as they age over time, which can result in the device unexpectedly shutting down to protect its electronic components.
Last year we released a feature for iPhone 6, iPhone 6s and iPhone SE to smooth out the instantaneous peaks only when needed to prevent the device from unexpectedly shutting down during these conditions. We’ve now extended that feature to iPhone 7 with iOS 11.2, and plan to add support for other products in the future.
There is great research being done by Marina Proske on why and when smartphone are being replaced. Recommend this talk (unfortunately in German) https://youtu.be/Hen7by8oo7g
The two or whatever year cycle certainly shouldn't be forced by design.
I'm personally comfortable with it because I'm sold on newer and better features and my current phone is starting to get dog eared by then.
Probably the "right" thing to do would be to have a new "durable" tier for those who value lifespan and do not feel tempted by increases in hardware capabilities.
I also buy mid range. I can imagine being sour if I'm buying the high end over $1000 devices and see the same cycle
Yeah this is why linux phones would be great, we have manjaro with rolling updates, a fully upgradable linux phone would go a really long way in getting control over the ewaste issues.
The Jolla phone got 7 years of updates before being sorted out. You can buy plenty of "real Linux" phones just now and also LineageOS preinstalled phones which will probably be supported for a very long time.
To make things worse the 3 years seem to be counted from the release of the phone, not from when you buy it. So if you buy it a year after it came out, you get only 2 years.
I am so sick of the whole smartphone crap. Google monopoly (well, there is Apple, but it's worse), unhandy sizes, electronic waste years too early.
That's not exclusive to this Nokia; all manufacturers do the "from release" vs "from purchase" thing. This is one area I really wish more manufacturers would follow Apple's lead on.
Stupid question, but what are security updates in a smartphone context? Surely Android updates are the security updates? Wouldn't keeping this thing up to date with the latest version of Android be enough to be secure? Or am I running a horribly insecure life right now?
The phone costs $150 and you expect more than 3 years of updates? Here's a hack to get 12 years of updates - buy a new Nokia every 3 years x 4 and get 12 years of security updates for less than the cost of an iPhone 13.
It's why I've looked to LineageOS and which brands tend to get the longest support. There are apparently devotees to the Google Pixel line, with the Pixel 2 (2017) being one of the longest currently supported, receiving the latest Android 13. Granted, it probably wouldn't have hardware patches for say Qualcomm's 2020 vulnerability but I'm glad there are users who put in the effort to patch older devices.
Support seems to vary even between models though, so there's no guarantee support for continue as long for any others.
I am currently typing this on a 4 years old shitty Xiaomi budget mobile phone. I don't recall if I've ever updated mobile software (or if there was an update available) but my phone is working as good as it should. So far I haven't seen any problem in installing any app. I don't see myself replacing this phone in next 6 month at least.
I guess tech people are way too much worried about security/software updates.
> very irrelevant compared to the limited software updates
That's the funny thing. Security? I don't want updates and my phone is over 6 years old.
But the app developers usually threatens and holds my data ransom until I update. Some have the audacity to update upon any internet connection in direct contravention of my "no background data usage" policy on any connection.
That's a wrong look at security, I think. Everything is "pwnable", if you put enough resources into it. The question is how much resources do you need to put into it?
If you have a 5 years-old never-patched Android, probably a student can go read disclosed security issues, pick one that they understand (or for which they found a tutorial online), and hack you. It's not the same thing as saying that your patched iPhone can be hacked by NSO, though.
No shit. It's important but I'm wondering if it's overrated. It's a phone. I've passed on lots of devices because they aren't supported for long. It makes me wonder if the security updates are a mere sales pitch that doesn't actually benefit the user a whole lot. Great, it's harder to hack me. Would I have been hacked if I stuck with my Pixel 3? Hard to say. Overrated
> security updates are a mere sales pitch that doesn't actually benefit the user a whole lot
Whose sales pitch would that be? I haven't noticed that, I believe security is mostly seen a source of cost.
Also we tend to change phone frequently, which is the same as a security update. But if you keep it for 5 years, it starts to matter more.
> Would I have been hacked if I stuck with my Pixel 3? Hard to say.
Everyone should fasten their seat belt when driving a car, but it does not mean at all that if you don't, then you will have an accident. But if you did, it is an established fact that the seat belt would probably help.
People do get hurt by security issues. Remember NSO Pegasus? Would you want that to be out in the wild, such that a kid in your daughter's school could get access to her phone/social media/camera/pictures?
I am pretty sure you do want some level of security.
I like the analogy but there is already a level of safety after a phone reaches EOL. It seems more akin to selling a 5-point harness to somebody who already has a seatbelt.
A seatbelt does not lose its ability with time (I have never heard about "changing the seatbelts"). So they don't need updates. However, software that connects to the internet "loses" security with time (as time passes, more vulnerabilities are found). That's why we need updates: to maintain our non-zero security level. Then you could argue that we could have smaller updates with fewer patches, because what we have right now is overkill. And maybe some of those updates don't really matter much, indeed. But some do.
Well it's not like desktop OSes are much better, your average LTS Linux distro gets like what, four or five years of updates before they pull the plug?
You continue to get software updates on those devices forever or until the distro ceases to exist.
The lifecycle of a distro release is about how long you can get security updates without feature updates. But when a release goes EOL, you just... have another update, but this time it will include new feature releases of applications and operating system components as well as the usual security fixes.
You also don't really need an LTS for this. In the past I've run installations of Linux for much longer than 5 years on distros that don't do any kind of LTS releases at all.
When I get to year 4 I install the next major version of my distro. My hardware doesn't go to the junkyard.
Meanwhile, my mom was just reminding everyone in my family that Android security updates stopping means they have to replace their phone more often than they would otherwise like to.
So what's the actual technical hurdle of doing this on mobile devices too? I mean in practice it's because the manufacturer blocks it, but I don't really understand why (outside maliciously wanting you to buy their new stuff ofc).
The architecture has been arm64 forever, memory and storage slowly increases but not in any way that really matters for an OS. There are specifically optimized apps to get the most out of the camera hardware and such, but if OpenCamera can handle all phone cameras on the market decently there's some level of API standardization and not that much to it. Some kernel drivers or wifi chipsets or something they can't be arsed to keep supporting? I really don't get why one couldn't theoretically just keep updating to the latest Android into perpetuity or why it's even an option not to do so.
> Some kernel drivers or wifi chipsets or something they can't be arsed to keep supporting?
Yup, there is no documentation for these chips, you probably gets some SDK with an old version of heavily modified linux kernel in a big ZIP file (so no version control history, no diffs), sometimes you only got some random binary blob. Because every chip manufacturer thinks (maybe right?) that with a good mainline driver or at least with good documentation all their competition advantage would disappear. (Some gigabit Ethernet phy chip manufacturers do the same even if 1 GbE is more than 20 years old...)
Imagine the same issue as the GPU card support as it was a few years ago, just multiply it by ten and apply for every insignificant peripheral device. (And nobody will start to reverse-engineer it, because you will not be able to buy the chip half a year later.)
I do not think this will change without an open chip (do no think it is possible, it would have too much NRE cost, maybe if some government use it to spin up local semiconductor manufacturing?) or some heavy regulation (eg. force compatibility between vendors).
> Yup, there is no documentation for these chips, you probably gets some SDK with an old version of heavily modified linux kernel in a big ZIP file (so no version control history, no diffs),
We need to legislate that the user has a legal right to precise documentation of any hardware they bought.
Including any spying activity it might be enabling.
As other have noted, the lack of updates and locked boot loader make this a no go, but the state of fully open-source, non-Android phones OSs is likewise abysmal. As such, leaving the iPhone isn’t going to happen for me. I’m still using my iPhone 11, and it’s still nice and speedy, the battery is fine, it gets updates quickly, and generally doesn’t annoy me too much. If the PinePhone or PinePhone Pro had a solid, fully functional, open source, non-Android operating system that was also good with power management… I would switch without hesitation. That’s just a super high bar, and I don’t expect anyone to actually pull it off any time soon.
What do you think about fairphone 4?
According to web, it supports:
Fairphone OS
CalyxOS
DivestOS
/e/OS (Murena)
iodéOS
LeOS
LineageOS
postmarketOS
Ubuntu Touch
Previous versions of the Fairphone also weren't available in the US due to as I understand it hurdles posed by FCC approval (and I would assume the Canadian equivalent).
Not just that, but the pinephone camera is complete garbage. It's basically a deal killer for many since we've grown to rely on our phone producing quality digital images and video. If they fix that and battery life you will draw enough developers to help make a reasonably decent mobile experience. But as it is now, there are few devices which have both adequate capabilities and driver support for it to work.
Reducing cost and making it more repairable is a step in the right direction, but there is no reason why shouldn't get 5-6+ years of life out of a mobile phone.
The boot loader will probably be unlocked sooner or later. It should be open, but I think it's reasonable to expect either update support or unlocked booting, not necessarily both.
In a gook device, that is. You have to remember that most consumers do not want to know how their phone works or to become expert in its configuration. They just want it to work.
A compromise here would be to have an option to unlock everything, but with the understanding that by doing so you opt out of warranty service.
In fact there are versions of Android that run on the PinePhone like GloDroid, but it's really not the goal.
The goal behind efforts like the Librem 5 or PinePhone is not to create yet another Android phone, which Open Source or not will strengthen the Duopoly of Google and Apple in the Mobile Phone Operating System market. The goal is to create hardware that can jump-start the development of a true GNU/Linux Mobile Operating System.
With its real world use case, it has brought great advances to Mobile "Desktop" Environments like Plasma Mobile or Phosh by motivating developers who could finally use their creations and improvements on a real phone.
Why is GNU important? toybox's coreutils is a good enough replacement. If you really wanted you could install GNU's core utils. 99% of users don't want to be messing with command line tools anyways.
Android already brought Linux as a mobile operating system to the mainstream.
Having the same OS on my laptop and phone is amazing. Android turns a general-purpose device into a restricted one, without a possibility to run desktop apps.
> Android turns a general-purpose device into a restricted one, without a possibility to run desktop apps.
You should not run desktop apps on a phone, because smartphone have much less power. This is an important design feature. This is why smartphones OS are built differently.
And even then, I don't see how android "restricts" things. It's software. Android does not "restrict". It's an OS.
> You should not run desktop apps on a phone, because smartphone have much less power.
You imply that having large power consumption is fine as long as the app is designed for desktop. I disagree: All apps should be as lightweight as possible to fight with the climate change and slow UI. I am using desktop Firefox on my Librem 5 just fine. All desktop plugins work, too.
> Android does not "restrict". It's an OS.
Android is designed in such a way that you cannot run desktop apps, despite the original Linux kernel.
> Android is designed in such a way that you cannot run desktop apps, despite the original Linux kernel.
What exactly do you mean by "desktop apps"? Of course it's not going to support KDE or GTK or QT or win32 or some other windowing API. But it's an OS, it can run software. And since it's open source, I don't see any reason why it would not run something.
Of course you would need to use the android API to do something, but it makes sense because it's a different OS.
It doesn't behave like a desktop OS, but as opposed to what, exactly? Desktop apps are a subset of software in general, desktop apps are not everything there is about software.
If you mean "I cannot run desktop apps because I need to redesign them so they can work on a phone", then yes, indeed, but a phone is not just "a small desktop".
Why not? It's a general-purpose computer, isn't it? Why intentionally design an OS in such a way that you must rewrite all software for it from scratch?
Yes, the UI is very different, but changing the UI is much easier than rewriting the program from scratch. Why is there no full Firefox on Android? It was already adapted for GNU/Linux phones and runs fine there, but not on Android. Same for LibreOffice AFAIK. Isn't it due to the design on this OS?
You don't have to rewrite everything from scratch, you can already use C++ or other languages, only the front end of software must be rewritten. And it's also possible to use other ways, like a graphics renderer or wrapper.
> Why not?
As I said, much less energy thus less processor cycles, much less L2 cache memory, no x86. The main reason it's entirely different is to force developers to make an app that doesn't drain battery, which is why it's very much different: it can do a single thing at a time, the software must be pause-able at any time, it can only run when the OS is okay with it, it can only animate in certain way, only use a very small subset of opengl capabilities, etc
The ways smartphones' OS work is a fundamental part of how it can save battery. It is painful for developers so that in the end, batteries last longer. Desktop software is millions years away from being energy-efficient, most of desktop or server software is generally ruled by the law of Wirth: "software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster."
Of course it's a big constraint of how developers can make their software work, but they don't need to rewrite "everything", they just have to adapt.
> Android turns a general-purpose device into a restricted one
Android still runs the Linux kernel and the only reason you can't have shell access on it is user-hostile restrictions, which an open-source build wouldn't have.
I think it would be a lot easier to add desktop apps capability to Android for the minority that actually wants to run Linux apps on their phone than building a touch-optimized userspace from scratch.
If your desire is to run Linux desktop apps on Android I bet you can already do it if you find an X Server APK and got your Linux app to use it as your X display - that would've been a quick, pragmatic solution to satisfy the "Linux desktop" requirement while taking advantage of Android's mature & battle-tested touch-optimised userspace.
It's the minority, because people didn't realize yet how convenient and logical it is. There should be no difference between a phone and a desktop, except for the screen size. You don't need to develop independent apps. You don't need to learn independent tools.
That's kind of irrelevant because they are currently developing a lot of apps to replace the functionality they'd get in Android for free. They'd save an insane amount of time and actually deliver a product competitive with mainstream phones right now, which would give them funding & marketshare to continue refining it down the line (potentially replacing it with non-Android components one at a time).
> There should be no difference between a phone and a desktop, except for the screen size
And the input method, which is a massive difference - touch and mouse are completely different, and so are the contexts in which phone vs desktop apps are used. If you try to merge the two, you'd look like the idiots who gave us Windows 8. So there's still effort in making specific UIs for different mediums.
> I can connect a screen and keyboard to my phone and use it as desktop
I'm not sure there's an actual need for it? This has even been tried by large companies such as Samsung and Microsoft and didn't go anywhere - in practice this isn't a problem the vast majority of people has and seems like an absurd thing to start with for a resource-constrained company in a very competitive market.
> That's kind of irrelevant because they are currently developing a lot of apps to replace the functionality they'd get in Android for free.
This is not true. They are stuck with hardware-specific things like power management, camera, and LTE calls. "Calls" application itself was developed very quickly, for example.
I think my point still stands if you replace "apps" with "functionality" - they're still reimplementing from scratch and without much resources nor expertise something that Android has a (correct me if I'm wrong) permissively-licensed, mature & battle-tested implementation of they could just use.
I don't think using permissively-licensed Android components wouldn't compromise user freedom and would actually increase it because it would put a non-user-hostile, freedom-respecting, usable phone in the market right now. You can just patch out or choose to not include the user-hostile bits (though most of those wouldn't be part of the open-source release in the first place).
Of course, this only applies if the objective is to deliver a usable, competitive product rather than practice effectively useless ideological bikeshedding similar to the war on systemd and refuse the admit that the typical GNU/Linux userspace is at this point prehistoric and significantly lacking compared to other alternatives (whether proprietary or open-source such as Android).
strange comment, comparing apples and oranges, and concluding your much more expensive orange is better for you... yeah I am not switch my Samsung s22 ultra for this neither, I find it very important to state this to the whole world because my own currently-utterly-unrealistic-to-beat set of reasons
Is the argument that no open-source phone actually works ?
On parent’s point, the Nokia g22 is 180 euros, the iPhone 11 at same capacity was 700 euros at launch. You can’t expect Nokia to contractually promise 8 years of OS updates at that price point.
To note, iPhone also don’t have 5+years of OS support promises, we’re just looking at the trend and assume that it will continue. I’d also expect this Nokia to have a bit more than 3 years of support time, we just don’t know how much.
But then thickness and aesthetic "cheapness" is a secondary one.
A removeable cover and battery is always going to introduce a little bit of thickness, which on a thin phone is noticeable even if not major.
And then whether you have screws or the ridges for removing the cover, it just always feels a little "cheap". You can't get the same kind of rounded smooth glass or aluminum backing that wraps seamlessly around the edges.
And when people are comparing two phones in their hands, the one that feels more "premium" is often the one they'll go with if they feel they're already paying a premium price. This is an object they hold in their hand all day long. And if you live in a major city, it's really not a big deal to get your battery replaced after 2 years at an Apple Store.
It's a thin, twisty rubber gasket held in place by a flimsy plastic back.
And in my experience with anything involving thin rubber gaskets, they degrade and just flat-out break incredibly easily.
E.g. with wristwatches, it's common knowledge that as soon as you replace the battery in a water-resistant watch, you shouldn't consider it water-resistant anymore. You might get lucky once or twice in recreating the same seal it had at the factory, but you should probably assume you didn't.
Huh, guess I am just that gullible to buy the marketing to the point where I now wonder: how the heck can you have a removable battery and also survive being held under water? (It has an IP67 rating.) I guess waterproof everything except the battery contacts and trust that the salinity is low enough that the 5V doesn't jump between the poles, plus it not being wet for long enough to start rusting (IP67 afaik doesn't require it to work a week later still)?
Older devices I used had gaskets around the battery contacts and a tight fastener. That seems to work well until the gasket eventually degrades over time.
The tradeoff is "back cover that comes off in an instant, whenever you want it to" versus "back cover that comes off in an instant, even when you don't want it to."
Moreover, the battery coming out seemed to act as a shock absorber. If you do throw it hard enough for it to come out, and that was rare for me, at least something gives instead of breaks.
Ah, the memories of classmates playing soccer with phones in high school... phones could run MSN, browse websites (without JS! The .mobi site owners were just forced to make sites lightweight), play Java-based games, had replaceable screen covers, honestly what more should we want? That it's now open source Android instead of proprietary Symbian is great, but slap a touchscreen on it for web browsing and upgrade it from GPRS to 4G or so, and theoretically we could just have nice things.
The way you could buy cases that replaced the back cover meant for a much thinner profile phone than the typical metal case wrapped in silicone.
Replaceable batteries are glorious. I never plugged-in my phone, just flipped the battery with one from the charger when I left the house. Instant 100% battery. Travelling? Just take a few charged batteries at a fraction of the weight of a power-bank and much more convenient.
I had a dumb phone back in the days that ran on 4 conventional AA batteries. Opening the lid and swapping 4 batteries is less convenient than swapping a single flat cell but its so much better than being wired to the wall or using a clumsy power bank with a cable that is always to short and to long at the same time. The whole charging ritual is far more absurd than it seems. The screen needs to power down, there has to be a power savings mode. With intense use (normal?) and erratic charging patterns batteries degrade much faster than advertised. I mean, I read "lifespan is 2 – 3 years, which is about 300 – 500 charge cycles" when actually used you get about 5 hours out of a charge. real use say 3 months, running from socket to socket. LOL
Cant stop laughing thinking about it, luxurious homes with all the trimmings then have the whole family gather around the extension cord. Like on a construction site. Imagine guns worked like this. We can glue in the cartridge and you'd be able to shoot people for many years? 6 shots should be enough for 3 years when the software expires.
Nowadays? Never, obviously. The odds of me breaking the phone are so large, and the tools I need specialized enough, that I need a new phone on stand-by anyway. No point replacing the battery if I already bought a new one just in case I break the old one by trying to do something as weird as replacing a wear-heavy part.
So it has fallen out of style. There is no market for spare batteries and using them as range extenders is not common use. It seems like an outlandish thing to do now.
I think I went through three batteries on my Galaxy Note 2 (first Android phone) before upgrading. Apps dropping support became a problem... nothing wrong with the hardware at the time where I felt forced to trash it. Anyway, carrying an extra battery for long travel days was not a weird thing to do. I also remember non-tech people having spare batteries for Nokias (when they became more capable; not when the only use was calling your mom to say you were going to a friend's after school).
Could be wrong (please correct me) but i recall hearing that allowing a customer to change a battery (e.g, 3rd party) on a chargable device can change the safety of the product/UL rating or whatever, so it could simply be a certification thing.
Not exactly the same thing, but I have a Garmin heartrate chest strap with a replaceable battery (no charging) -- in the US the cover swivels open to change, but in Australia it requries a screw, for child safety rules. I Thought that was interesting
There's a specific issue with young children eating button-cell lithium batteries, which I'm guessing is what your Garmin device uses. Australia appears to have a law requiring the battery compartments of such devices to be child-resistant.
I'm not sure if any countries have similar regulations related to larger Li-ion rechargeable batteries.
>Why is it so hard to add a removeable back cover to have swappable battery?
This is one of the delights of the Moto z series phones because they have magnetic batteries that can be swapped on and off with your bare hands without even having to open up a battery cover or power off the phone.
> Can anyone explain why they think that this is wrong?
I suspect it is this: > Only forced obsoleting by the company. No other reasons exist.
While companies do want you to buy the newest version every year or two, it is more likely that cost-benefit analysis tells them to build the way they build; they know they must release newer better phones periodically because the competition will do this also. But to support older phones has a cost, and at some point those old phones don't generate enough revenue to justify the cost of supporting them.
Close, but no cigar. After 3 years or 2 major Android versions it still becomes an unsupported doorstop doomed to rot in a drawer until the owner throws it into a landfill. I totally understand not wanting to put resources into supporting old products, so the punchline should have been "...and after support is ceased, we unlock the bootloader". Now that would have made it interesting.
I have a G20, and it's pretty vanilla Android stock.
I'm actually excited for this. My family tends to shop in this price range, and you've got a lot of fairly interchangeable phones out there. It ends up being sort of frustrating because there's no obvious right choice.
Now you have a simple argument. You don't have to deep dive explain to Mom the difference between CPUs or manufacturer update policies, just "If this one breaks, it can be fixed without a huge production number."
There was a time when one of the (admittedly secondary) arguments for buying an iPhone or Galaxy S (as opposed to a cheaper alternative) was that the local fix shops had a lot of dead scrap units and could arrange for a cheap quick fix, while if you bought a Nokia or Umidigi, you were waiting weeks for them to get parts and it was probably twice the cost because they didn't want to work on a phone they weren't wildly familiar with.
If you have a G20, your phone is probably already as repairable as this Nokia. I've personally pulled apart a G30 and it was basically identical to the phone they showed in the article.
Do they seriously lock the bootloader of a "repairable" phone? That's the most important feature for me, which has prolonged the life of all my Android devices by several years.
From my experience with some of their models - they had been "unlockable". After some quick googling it seems it might have changed for some of their phones. Can someone with up to date knowledge correct me?
I think you’re misunderstanding the Android bootloader model. All the Android phones I saw when researching one to buy came with locked bootloaders, even the easily-unlocked Google Pixel series. So it’s not even a question whether the bootloader will arrive unlocked. What differentiates models is whether “there’s a way to unlock it” – plenty of models don’t support any such way. (I didn’t consider some classes of Android phones in my research of which to buy, so this could be a faulty generalization.)
The parent comments weren’t specific about whether this phone’s bootloader can be unlocked, but when they talk about this phone’s locked bootloader, I think unlockability is the issue they are really talking about.
This seems like a Savvy move from Nokia. At least in my country, Nokia phones are remembered for the following:
- nearly indestructible
- well priced
- back pops out
Nokia is doing the most sensible thing to reuse these as its differentiator.
I understand people taking about the OS. But Nokia has little control over the software and it has also never been its selling point for me with Symbian, and later Windows Phone.
I sure miss their wonky phones with weirdly arranged buttons and their random quirks.
I applaud this initiative by Nokia, and can't wait to lay my hands on one of those phones when mine dies, but let's be real: it won't be as tough as the 3310.
TCL produced Blackberry-branded devices for a few years, but they stopped a few years ago. Blackberry is still an independent company doing other things (mostly in the enterprise security space I think)
I live waaaaay behind the curve, phone wise. I buy phones from about 5 years ago and I don't spend more than about 150 at a time. Every now and then a phone comes along that makes me want to break that trend and buy something new, and this is definitely a strong contender.
Out of curiosity, that means you deliberately buy phones when they are pretty much guaranteed to not receive any updates anymore, including security updates? Or do you install custom ROMs?
the first one. I don't really care about updates. as long as it has a browser and takes photos, its pretty much all I use it for. I actually was a Windows Phone user until very recently (and WP8, not even WP10! how's that for behind the times) but the IE based browser is unusable on the modern web now, and you can't install apps anymore
This is the reason. All those people who need to be on the absolute bleeding edge, sell perfectly good phones for a quarter of what they cost new, to people like me. Everyone I know buys new phones for anywhere up to 800 for the latest Samsungs (and don't even get me started on the Apple stuff) and I just can't fathom it. It's like buying a brand new car and then selling it three years later to buy another brand new one because there's a slightly better entertainment system.
And yes, I know some of you probably also do that.
Well, most used phones are sold rather than destroyed, and get well past their last update. So maybe a quarter the phone-time in the world is post-end-of-update. Plus, many manufacturers offer brand-new phones which cost under 100 USD (look for Doogee X95 for example - 80 bucks or so).
There are loads of premium refurbishment outfits like refurbed.at (Austrian) who will sell you a second hand device in mint condition.
There are also high-street tech repair shops that usually sell second hand devices, and one chain here (webuy) that work a little like Gamestop but also buy back electronics. They underpay and overcharge just like Gamestop, but it still works out way cheaper than new, and they provide a warranty.
I've bought from all three sources for myself and my family. I only had an issue with a device from webuy one time, and since it's local I was able to go back in and get a refund the following week.
I'll be shopping for a new phone soon and am interested in this model. But wow, they've missed a huge opportunity to capture that interest and let me know when I can buy!
5 years for parts is better than nothing but its still a lot of e-waste. Ideally given screens and ports and batteries are something that have been around for decades and will be around for decades more in similar ways it would be nice to extend this out longer. With progress on CPUs/GPUs slowing we do need to start to consider much longer usable life times for computer products and having obsolence built in at 5 years when a consumable like the battery fails isn't OK.
OS updates also very short so this phone is quickly going to end up on LineageOS.
I'm not sure if the physical volume of the phone in a landfill is the only issue to consider. What about all the energy and resources used to manufacture it?
